Many moons ago (September 2014), I brewed up a version of Graham Wheeler’s recipe for Exmoor Gold, a pale bitter created entirely with pale malt. I christened that Autumn Gold and, a couple of months later, I made another batch with the addition of some crab apple juice which I called Golden Crab. This year, we’ve already had all the crab apples off our ‘John Downie’ tree but I decided that I fancied making another golden beer, not least because the 5kg bag of pale malt I recently bought was a bit large to comfortably fit in my brewing cupboard.

The 2019 edition is called Autumn Tinge. On top of the pale malt, I added the last 90g in my bag of Melanoidin malt, so the beer should come out a little towards the orange side of gold. I also made a couple of hop substitutions – Magnum (a new one to me) instead of Challenger at the start of the boil and Fuggles rather than Styrian Goldings post boil (original Goldings though, as per the recipe, at ten minutes before the end of the boil).

Today it went in the fermentor with trusty Safale S-04 yeast and an original gravity of 1.045 – spot on to the original recipe whereas my earlier brews both ran a little over. For the first time this year, the brew belt is actually coming into use to raise the temperature to 17°C although it won’t be long before it turns off and, hopefully, the activity of the yeast will maintain it for a few days (although this time round we might stay a bit closer to the nominal 17°C target).