We’re doing a Twitter-sourced beer, where the tweeting public get to vote on the recipe.

The first round was for the malt base where the percentage votes for each malt gives us the percentage of that malt to use. Two polls were used for this, the first for the base malts and the second for secondary malts. The base malts make up 80% of the entire malt bill, and the secondary malts make up 20%.

The results from the first polls gave us these:

  • Maris: 44%
  • Wheat: 27.2%
  • Lager: 8.8%
  • Crystal: 7.6%
  • Amber: 5.8%
  • Chocolate: 4%
  • Black: 2.6%

The second poll was for strength, and gave us these results:

  • Session: 11%
  • Mid range (4-5%): 37%
  • Strong (5-6%): 35%
  • Impy: 17%

Given the nearness of the results between mid-range and strong, we’re going to aim towards the higher end of mid-range and try for a 4.8% beer.

So now we know the malts, and the strength, we can put together the grain bill for our 45 litre pilot batch:

  • Maris Otter: 4,200g
  • Wheat: 2,600g
  • Lager: 850g
  • Crystal: 720g
  • Amber: 550g
  • Chocolate: 390g
  • Black: 250g

Which is quite a strange grain bill! But hey, that’s what this experiment is about. This should give us quite a dark beer (6.7% dark grains) that’s also quite sweet (13.26% between the Crystal and Amber), and quite thick (over a quater of the grist is wheat). So I think a long(ish) mash at a slightly lower temperature to get out as many simple sugars as we can to try and get a cleaner base.

The next part of this crowd-sourced recipe was hops! These were done in the same way as the malts, with polls for bittering (60 minute addition), flavour (30 minute addition) and aroma (10 minute addition), again from the hops I’ve got in stock.

The results were for Bitter:

  • 31% Challenger
  • 27% Fuggle
  • 30% Cascade
  • 12% Goldings

For Flavour:

  • 28% Challenger
  • 26% Mittlefruh
  • 24% Goldings
  • 22% Saaz

And for Aroma:

  • 68% Cascade
  • 16% Goldings
  • 12% Mittlefruh
  • 4% Challenger

The next poll was to decide, How Hoppy? And unsurprisingly the winner was All The Hops

  • 10% Below 20 IBU
  • 16% 21 to 30 IBU
  • 33% 31 to 40 IBU
  • 41% ALL THE HOPS!!!

Because it was actually pretty close between high hopped and all the hops, we’re aiming at the mid-50’s IBU rather than closer to the 70s or 80s. Which gives us these hop additions:

60mins:

  • Challenger: 13g
  • Fuggle: 11g
  • Cascade: 12g
  • Goldings: 5g

30mins:

  • Challenger: 14g
  • Mittelfruh: 13g
  • Goldings: 12g
  • Saaz: 11g

10mins:

  • Cascade: 204g
  • Goldings: 48g
  • Mittlefruh: 36g
  • Challenger: 12g

This is quite a complex set of hop additions, but it looks like we could get a nice dry/spicy bitterness with a gentle spice/citrus aroma. How that will pair with the malt bill is anyone’s guess until we brew it

The two things left to decide now are the yeast, and any adjunts/flavours we want to add which will likely take two polls. So get voting and we’ll get this brewed on our pilot kit next week in time for one of the August Brewery Taps!