A British Style Beer for a Change

So far this year I've been brewing mainly German-style beers with a quick stop in Belgium, so today it is something British inspired. I've still got a half keg of Belgian Wit, most of a keg of a German Dunkles that has been lager for a good 5 weeks already, and 4 kegs of Koelsch-eh, 2 in the fridge already and 2 not. So time to change things up a bit.

Normally I stick with very simple grain bills, but had a bunch of odds and ends to use up so this is what I came up with. I don't expect much character from the small amount of Smoked malt that I used - used it mainly because I needed more base malt and did not want to use up any of my 2 Row because I have other plans for it next weekend. Note to self - buy more base malt.

• 4.6 kg pale ale
• 2.3 kg Weyermann Dark Munich
• 400g Fawcett Malted Oats
• 400g unknown base malt :-)
• 500g Caramunich III
• 1.7 kg Weyermann Rauch/Smoked

For a total of 10kg

I mashed in a bit low and even after adding 3 qts of hot water only got up to 151.5. I did not want to add any more water for fear of making the mash too thin, so I did a quick decoction of 3 litres. Boiled that up and added it back to the mash inside of 10 minutes, to get it up to just shy of 153F. Mashed 90 minutes, and am just running off the first batch (sparge) now.

For hops I went with

• 99g of East Kent Golding @60m (5.2% Alpha Acids)
• 30g more of the same EKG at knockout

O.G is 1.050 which is a bit high for me. I wonder if the decoction mash had anything to do with it. I did not decoct much of the total volume so I'm not sure.