I decided to to cook up another brew this weekend and selected Graham Wheeler’s take on Belhaven 80/-, a classic Scottish beer. I don’t know how much his recipe matches Belhaven’s current version of the beer because their traditional ales web page describes it as using pale and black malts with Challenger, Goldings and Fuggles hops while Wheeler’s also adds crystal malt but only has Goldings hops. It’s a moot point though because, as usual, I’m tweaking from the get-go. My version uses Weyermann CaraRed instead of crystal malt, which should make the final brew a deeper red colour and put the malt flavour even more to the fore.

This morning I’ve set it fermenting with some rehydrated Safale S-04 yeast. Initial gravity is 1.042 and ETA (for bottling) is next weekend.