This is the third in a series of posts about the design of our Easter seasonal, Bad Egg.
One cool thing about making homebrew in a commercial brewery is that you have pretty much anything you need right to hand in large volumes. If you need hops, grab a handful. Sanitiser - use the 20-litre jugs. Grain - we make a very small dent in a 25-kg bag. Clean out the fermenter? Power wash!
For the second round of the beer, we decided to focus on the colour, since we would know fairly quickly (about six hours later) how we were doing. Since the first candidate was rather amber in colour despite having 5.5% colouring malts in it, we decided to up the level of all of the malts, adding an extra percent each of the caramalt and crystal malt and another half percent of the chocolate malt. We left the hopping alone - 100% Goldings. Same amount as before.
Another twist sees us working to adapt our brewing procedure to the new water supply. Anglian Water has recently changed the supply of our water from pure well water to a combination of well and treated river water. The effect is to reduce the hardness by about 25%, and in our neck of the woods, where the water is very hard, that is a welcome thing. But this in turn required us to reduce the addition of brewing salts to the mash water, which we have done generally both in the pilot brewery and in the commercial operation. This means that we have some additional variability between this batch and the last, but there's not a lot we can do about this.
We kept the mash temperature the same, and were aiming for a bit more water recovery from the mash/sparge part of the process to get the final gravity on target without just adding diluent liquor (water) at the end.
We had a first look (and taste) of the result last weekend. It's still fermenting a little (present gravity was about 1.020), but the colour is spot on. A thing of beauty. The hop character is right there, too. We reckon when the fermentation is complete - maybe this weekend - we'll be able to tell where we want the hopping to go from here. The beer was a little sweet and the hopping a bit aggressive, so by the time we lose the sweetness it might be over the top on bitterness. To work on that, we'll probably reduce the hopping a little bit.
