This article was originally posted in 2014.
Just a quick update from the weekend this time around, first up – bottling the Bramling Cross.
Bramling Cross
Despite what looked like a bit of activity the gravity didn’t drop any further so I ended up with an FG of 1.020. This puts the final ABV at about 4.6%. There was some residual sweetness which I know is down to the yeast not fully fermenting all the sugars, but the hops still came through. There’s a definite blackcurrant flavour, although it’s more subtle than I was expecting, as well as a slight spicy citrus flavour.
I was running out of 330ml bottles so I ended up with 1 x 330ml bottle and 6 x 500ml bottles, Okell’s bottles are very nice for bottling except the labels don’t come off easily so I opted for the marker-pen-on-the-cap approach, and a cheeky Apple Orphanage bottle snuck in there too.
Boadicea
I also dry hopped the Boadicea. My scales were playing up so I ended up adding 7g instead of 5g of hops to secondary, but that’s not much of an issue.
This beer’s OG was 1.063. I probably should have topped it up to dilute and bring the gravity down to the more expected 1.053 but I didn’t, so we’ll see how it goes. Thankfully for this brew I dropped the temperature enough after the boil that the yeast performed much better than the previous brews. After getting it down to 19°C and the yeast went to work for a lot longer resulting in an SG of 1.020 by the time I needed to dry hop. If I had hit my intended OG this would have been perfect. At this level the ABV is around 5.6%.
In my haste I forgot to sample the beer (what an idiot), however there was a drop left in the conical flask and it tasted delicious! This is the hoppiest of all the beers I’ve made and in that drop I could taste them coming through. Lost of light, florally notes with a bit of a spicy kick. I’m hoping this one turns out well, and if it does I reckon these hops could be a suitable condender for an IPA style beer in the future. I’ll sample it at the end of the week when I’m due to bottle it for a better taste.
This week I am hoping to brew up a batch of Pilgrim, which apparently has a flavour profile of spicy, citrus and pears. So that should be interesting.
