I managed to get another beer going last night. Again I’m drawing on a recipe from Graham Wheeler’s Brew Your Own British Real Ale; this time it is Batemans Dark Mild. I’ve got a couple of twists from the recipe as given (apart from scaling down to start with 10l of water rather than about 25l). Firstly I’m using a mixture of pale and mild ale malts; the recipe just has pale malt but I know from the past that mild ale malt can be substituted in part or in whole and the main effect is to give a slightly darker colour. The other was to replace the whole crystal malt component with biscuit malt; a wiser brewer would probably have used a blend but we’ll see how it turns out. The name is therefore just a combination of those two tweaks – Dark Biscuit.

I’ve got a while to go before I can see how ‘edible’ it is but I’ve now got it in the fermentor with the brew belt set to come on for a few 15 minute intervals throughout the day. My Raspberry Pi is on monitoring duty again so I’ll check how it is doing this evening. I reached an original gravity of 1.032, just a smidge below the target of 1.033 and, all things being equal, the yeast will have started to get stuck in to turning wort into beer by the time I check.