On Tuesday this week, I started another batch of beer. As you might remember, that was 5th of November so I’ve christened this one Fawkes Bitter as a suitable name for an F-B brew on that date. The recipe is based on Graham Wheeler’s Burton Bridge XL Bitter and isn’t one I’ve tried before although I’ve done enough with similar ingredients to be hopeful it will turn out well. I hit an initial gravity of about 1.040 (compared to the 1.039 target) which I’m pretty pleased about, especially given that I’m continuing with my 30 minute mash and 45 minute boil regime rather the 90 minutes suggested for each in the original recipe. It still takes somewhat more than 75 minutes from start to finish but a lot less than 180 minutes plus time for weighing ingredients and getting the liquid to the target heat points.

I also tried a sample of the Loco Beer I brewed last month. This one is tasting good and is one of the clearest brews I have knocked up recently. The bottling method (transferring to a container to measure while filtering out most of the trub and then back into the cleaned fermenter to bottle) seems to have worked well and I’ll probably try that again with this one.