2015 RCE - LouieMacGoo/The_Professor

[LouieMacGoo]

Those are the same comments I got when I took this to my HBC meeting last week. The one guy there is a BJCP judge and said it was more of an Blonde IPA. It may not fit a proper category but it tastes pretty damn good.

[The_Professor]

Those are the same comments I got when I took this to my HBC meeting last week. The one guy there is a BJCP judge and said it was more of an Blonde IPA. It may not fit a proper category but it tastes pretty damn good.

From a May 2015 article called Bottled Scotch Ale in the 1950's...

Scotch Ale – now there’s a topic to set my blood raging. At least when style Nazis are talking about it. Because it’s always drivel, totally unrelated to the real style...

So really Scottish Strong Ale, usually called Scotch Ale outside Scotland, is just a beefed up Pale Ale. “How come it’s often dark then?” I hear you say. Because they’d colour it up with caramel to whatever shade they happened to fancy.

And remember, the color correction is in an article about 1950's Scotch Ale.

[The_Professor]

Dry hop added today. I plan to bottle this weekend.

[mashani]

Those are the same comments I got when I took this to my HBC meeting last week. The one guy there is a BJCP judge and said it was more of an Blonde IPA. It may not fit a proper category but it tastes pretty damn good.

From a May 2015 article called Bottled Scotch Ale in the 1950's...

Scotch Ale – now there’s a topic to set my blood raging. At least when style Nazis are talking about it. Because it’s always drivel, totally unrelated to the real style...

So really Scottish Strong Ale, usually called Scotch Ale outside Scotland, is just a beefed up Pale Ale. “How come it’s often dark then?” I hear you say. Because they’d colour it up with caramel to whatever shade they happened to fancy.

And remember, the color correction is in an article about 1950's Scotch Ale.

That's just like Belgian ales. The style "buckets" the BJCP uses for them are basically overzealously defined "buckets" that have little or nothing at all to do with how the actual people who brewed such beers historically considered them as a "style". But it's hard to "judge" something more open ended IE to be able to assign points ding points for nit picky things, you have to create a tighter definition to compare things against then the reality of the matter. The BJCP did expand a little bit upon the definitions this revision, but they are still to narrow compared to "reality" of both the beers out there and historic beers.

EDIT: BTW, not just this recipe - if you look at a bunch of the other recipes on Shut up about Barclay Perkins, you can see just how far into whack territory (compared to the modern definition of style) some of those British brewers took their beers back in the day.

[The_Professor]

I finally got this bottled today.
So instead of a 5 day dry hop it got a 4 week dry hop.
A very small taste sample seems to still be really good.
The final brix was 13.4 for a calculated FG of 1.022 and ABV of 11.2
So now 4 weeks to carb in the bottle before anything further.

[D_Rabbit]

hum..... that may have some grassy after tastes to it once everything settles out. Be interested to see how that is carbed and aged a bit. That long of a dry hop typically doesn't work out too well.

[The_Professor]

...So instead of a 5 day dry hop it got a 4 week dry hop.
A very small taste sample seems to still be really good...

hum..... that may have some grassy after tastes to it once everything settles out. Be interested to see how that is carbed and aged a bit. That long of a dry hop typically doesn't work out too well.

Yeah, I'll see how it shakes out as it ages.

[Kealia]

I think we've all heard that anecdote but does anybody here have any practical hands-on experience with it?

I would think that if grassy flavors were going to be present they would be there now, wouldn't they?

[mashani]

@Kealia and anyone:

I've only gotten a grassy taste with certain types of hops, IE Saaz is a good one if you want to see what folks mean by this. And that's in my view only because Saaz already has that flavor that it imparts in beer. Some people bitch about Saaz used in the boil. They are "super tasters" of that flavor I think.

I don't do extended dry hops, but I do throw many ounces of hops into my fermenter commando all the time - Anything I add at around T-20 or > ends up in my fermenter. I only hop sack bittering hops. And I don't get any weird unexpected flavors due to it. I do get a bit more flavor then if I pulled them out and sometimes different flavors then if pulled out, depending on the type of hops. This is because the types of compounds extracted are not only temperature dependent but PH dependent, and PH changes over time during fermentation, and contrary to "common knowledge" there are plenty of flavoring compounds still left in hops after a 20 or > boil. So to emulate a recipe you would want to do it the same way (pull 'em or commando 'em).

I think the PH difference is what makes folks think of their dry hops throwing out off flavors or aromas, because different types of compounds can be extracted that were not before. It is also what makes dry hops add a "complexity" to the nose. It's not just more quantity, it's more diversity. What compounds and how much gets extracted is all based on Time, Temperature, and PH. Somewhere on the old Mr. Beer forum, and maybe here I posted a chart that shows what types of compounds are extracted based on those things. I found it on the intrawebz, but it came out of some $10,000 brewing science book. So yes, a longer Time at a certain Temperature and PH will extract more of some compounds.

So I guess what I'm saying is that in theory yes, an extended dry hop could bring out an unexpected flavor or aroma above someone's taste threshold. But the compounds have to be there in the first place. And they are only an "off" flavor if you want to call them that. It just depends on what you consider "off". IE if I get some hints of anise from a late or dry hop of streisselspalt, I do not consider it "off", I consider it a bonus.

[Beer-lord]

Only somewhat related but this morning I was listening to a podcast with Vinnie from Russian River and he talked about just how much the hop character changes depending on when in harvesting they are harvested. He gave a few examples and talked about how much of a difference there was from first harvest, mid harvest and late harvest. He wasn't just talking about alpha and beta percentages but mostly flavor and aroma. He cited Simcoe and said early harvesting it's all grapefruit but by late harvesting, it's dank and he even brews his beers around when the hops are harvested. Sadly he said most homebrewers don't have a choice.

He also said hop prices were going to go up soon and may never come back down. I guess I'll have to get a safe for all of mine.

[The_Professor]

I ran across another nice write up about about ingredients in Scottish beers on the Barclay Perkins site.
It's all on a post about an 1868 Scottish IPA.

You may recall the tale of how I discovered XP was marketed as IPA. I'd seen the beer plenty of times in Younger's records, but it was only after stumbling on a presentation by Mitch Steele I realised what the beer was. You can't imagine how happy I was. You really can't. Younger's brewhouse names are so weird I needed help to decipher them.

The traces of Empire are all over this beer. Other than a certain amount of Scottish malt, all the ingredients are imported. Mostly from outside the UK, except for some of the hops. This is a point I've made before but I'm going to ram it down your throats once more. From the middle of the 19th century, British brewing depended on foreign raw materials. It just wasn't possible to grow sufficient quantities in the UK to meet demand.

Yet the style nazi way to define something as "English" or "British" is by the use of UK malt and hops. Even though beers actually brewed in Britain over the last 150 have almost always contained some non-British ingredients.

Breweries like Younger's would have struggled to achieve the size they did without the connection to the British Empire. Both as a market for their products and as a source of raw materials. That's why the hops-don't-grow-in-Scotland-so-Scottish-beer-couldn't-have-been-hoppy argument totally misses the point. Not just Scottish brewers, but the whole of the British brewing industry depended on imported hops.

The internationalisation of brewing in Britain was surprisingly early. Beer went out and barley and hops came back. It was only possible because of Britain's massive trading fleet and ever-improving ship technology which reduced freight costs. These made it practical to ship grain from as far away as California or Chile.

Younger's brewed a lot of XP. A shitload. It's one of the commonest beers in their logs of 1868.

[mashani]

That XP recipe sounds great to me. But I'm sure it would be described a "vegetal" or "grassy" if you entered it into a modern IPA competition. Stupid "Style Nazis" as they say in your article.

[The_Professor]

That XP recipe sounds great to me. But I'm sure it would be described a "vegetal" or "grassy" if you entered it into a modern IPA competition. Stupid "Style Nazis" as they say in your article.

I ran across and read that article while pulling up the 1868 William Younger 120 that I will be brewing next weekend. They are actually very similar. And since, I believe, the Barklay Perkins guy is working with brewing logs that say English and Polish hops one might say almost identical. Adding the figures for only the 1868 XP and the 1868 120 accounts for almost 1/3 of the beers they made that year, without investigating how many others are also similar (English/Polish hoped IPAish).

[mashani]

Where did you find Lubelski hops? The Polish DNA in me is all tingly with the idea.

I love that blog. Everyone should just browse it. It's fun.

[The_Professor]

Where did you find Lubelski hops?...

Louie/Leigh found them and pointed me to here.