Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Golden Ale Challenge

Through the years the topic of house characters has often come up for conversation around the bar. Each homebrewer who provides beer for the taps here has a unique profile that most of their beers conform to, we often said it would be interesting to brew the same beer in each brewery and see what happened.
The Golden Ale Challenge is my attempt at a highly unscientific experiment into the differences between each brewer. With a mind to serving the beers at next February’s Valley Summer Ales Festival I have contacted a range of homebrewers who will each brew a 1045 golden ale with Maris Otter Pale Malt and New Zealand Styrian Goldings and Nelson Sauvin hops.

The rules are as follows:

- Each brewer will formulate a 100% Maris Otter Grist that would normally result in a 1045 beer.

- They will then mash in what ever way they normally mash.

- Each brewer will be provided with 80g of Nelson Sauvin and 80g of NZ Styrians be added in what ever quantity and regime they want

- The brewer will ferment the beer with their house yeast (or if they don’t have a house yeast what ever they feel is right)

It should be a bit of fun.

4 comments:

Tandleman said...

interesting experiment. Nelson sauvin! Mmmm.

Boak said...

"Each brewer will formulate a 100% Maris Otter Grist that would normally result in a 1045 beer."

I've been wondering whether brewers with different efficiences produce different beers, i.e. if we produced a beer with 1045 at our crap 70% efficiency, and someone else got the same with 90% efficiency, would the end product taste different?

Kieran Haslett-Moore said...

Boak , I have thought about this before as well, I suspect there would be a difference.

JK said...

Nice experiment, destructive testing will be applied i assume
;0)