Brews 99 and 100 !!

You heard the internet; next week will be our 100th large-scale brew since opening back in June 2013.  It's been an eventful 17 months, and continues to be so, but I'm confident that we're heading in the right direction with beers which are consistent, well-made and flavoursome and, above all, beers which our customers want to drink which is, after all, the important bit of brewing; anyone can brew beer (actually, that's a whole different conversation...) but getting people to buy and drink it is another thing entirely.

Anyhow, what to expect from next week?  Brews 99 and 100, that's what!  Gyle 99 will be a slightly unusual one in that it's a Belgian-style abbey single or "Patersbier".  This is based on the beer that monks drink themselves rather than the beers they are famous for selling, and is a modest 4.5% or so with simple malt, yeast and noble hop flavours.

But why a Belgianesque beer, you may ask, when I love hops so much and Belgian beer isn't known for it's liberal use of lupulins?  Well, I felt like doing something a bit different and I've been toying with the recipe for a good 8 months now so felt it was a good a time as any to rip into this one.  The beer contains specially sourced Belgian Abbey malt and yeast along with the new Czech Vittal hops (which may well be the oiliest substance known to man) and I'm quite looking forwards to brewing and - more importantly - tasting the finished beer.

Brew 100 itself is going to be a very simple one.  We've just taken delivery of a ton of Munton's Super pale malt which is a mere 1.8 EBC in colour (our usual extra-pale malt is about 3 EBC) so we'll be using just this and 5% wheat malt along with the classic combo of Warrior, Cascade and loads of lovely Simcoe.  It doesn't have a name as yet but I'll think of one... 

I'm a touch apprehensive about this malt after reading (and being told) some stories of it's power to stick a mash, low extract and high protein, but everything on the spec sheet seems fine (apart from a high moisture content) so we'll see next week!  Our mash tun has a large area of plate so should be fine but, just to be sure, we had the underback pipe off today and gave it a good clean in readiness... good job really, as we found what had been reducing the flow for the past month or so, a piece of blue plastic which has obviously fallen into the mash tun and then got stuck in the valve!  Bring it on....