O-Street Festive Tonic Ale

I currently plan to have 7 different beers on at this year winter ales fest, most of them will be malt accented beers for winter with a best bitter and a pale ale thrown in. I really wanted to do a special festive recipe and was trying to find some inspiration when I came across a section in my copy of the Durden Park Beer Circle “Old British Beers and How To Make Them” entitled ‘Bitter, Tonic Pale Ale, Old Ale’. The book went on to read:

“Tonic Pale Ales can only be described as a Victorian fad. These were light beer heavily hopped and drunk young. Drinkers were assured that the bitter flavour was doing them good.”

This sounded like a concept that could mix things up a little and also use up some bits and pieces that have been lying around. So I decided to brew a very contemporary version.
So today I am mashing a mix of weyerman pils and Golden Promise pale ale malt to produce a beer that will be in the vicinity of 1050 and am then going to aggressively hop it with NZ Nelson Sauvin and American Willamette hops. It should keep the hop heads happy!