Today was pleasantly sunny and warm but autumn is seeing average temperatures drop back and so it is time to start brewing again. I’m taking a stab at Graham Wheeler’s recipe for a Jennings Cocker Hoop clone, which I’m calling Septale partly down to the time of year and partly because the original brew was originally called September Ale when Jennnings released it in 1995.

All things being equal, it should be ready to bottle next weekend so just within the right month although I won’t be drinking it until sometime in October. To be fair, I actually started it a week ago, when I cooked up the wort. However, I wanted to add juice from my harvest of crab apples and I only got round to picking those today. Juice was extracted by cutting the washed apples into quarters and heating them to just over 72°C for about 30 seconds (so a little over the threshold for pastuerisation) and then cooling the resulting extract back down. I’d hit 1.044 as my original gravity so used dextrose (‘brewing sugar’) to bring the crab apple juice to about the same level (1.042).

All off the wort and apple juice is now in the fermentor along with some Mangrove Jack’s Dark Ale yeast. It should be bubbling away by tomorrow and hopefully I’ll have it bottled next weekend. Time to start thinking about what bottles to use and how to design the label.