Mild Bee is my latest homebrew, based on Graham Wheeler’s recipe for Boddingtons Mild. The brewery has a long association with Manchester and, as was impressed on me on a visit there a couple of years ago, the city has adopted the symbol of the bee as an indicator of its industriousness, so Mild Bee wasn’t too big a jump to make in the naming.

Normally I start my brewing process by getting the main volume of water (the ‘mash liquor’) up to 70°C before adding the bag of grain. This cools it down a few degrees but a little application of stovetop heat brings it back to my regular 66°C mash temperature. For this batch I decided to try something different which could be called progressive hydration. I have a variable temperature electric kettle so I heated a litre of water at a time and poured it on the grain. My thought was that, by progressively hydrating the ‘porridge’ of grain, it might improve the efficiency of the mashing process and cover the fact I was only planning to keep it going for 30 minutes once all the initial water was in.

There might be something in that theory as I hit an initial gravity of 1.034 rather than the 1.032 target. The numbers don’t mean much on their own but if, in two or three months, the brew turns out to be a good one, it could be a useful technique for helping make brew days as quick and efficient as possible.