A friend has been wanting to brew a particular mead recipe for a while; problem is, it uses ale barm.
Last year, a bunch of us gathered to make the mead over an open fire, etc. but using commercial yeast because of timing. We all wanted to try again with actual ale barm, but that meant scheduling the ale fermentation to line up with the mead brew day…
This week, then, I planned two batches of a 1503 Tudor Ale to coincide (hopefully) with the weekend mead brew day.
Why two? Well…I couldn’t time the krausen’s rise, necessarily, so I figured stagger a couple of brews and we should be able to hit the 8-24+ hour krausen window sufficiently.
These Tudor Ale recipes are shortcuts; I modified an all-grain recipe I’ve brewed before to be a partial mash instead, because of timing. There was no way I was going to knock out two all-grain batches on weekdays, what with work and all.
…and even in modifying them for partial mash, I screwed up and forgot an ingredient, but it just means they’ll be lower ABV than intended.
So each brew was 2 cans of pale ale liquid malt extract (LME) as the base, 1.5lbs flaked oats, 1.5lbs flaked wheat, 1lb crushed pilsner malt, 2oz of Fuggles hops. One batch would get London Ale yeast, the other would get English Ale yeast, just for a bit of difference.
They were therefore the same, save for the yeast.
…and for some reason, I steeped the grains in a bag for the first batch, then let them steep freely for the second batch, before straining them. First batch remained contained in the bag which was simply removed.
Which resulted in ~10 points difference on the original gravity…
We’ll see how it goes.
Batch #1 was 1.045 OG Batch #2 was 1.054 OG
I might hit Batch #2 with a heating belt if I don’t see krausen first thing in the morning; Batch #1 already has krausen which might collapse before we use it, but we’ll see…