Mild Mannered

Probably didn't need to mill those flaked oats...

I'm almost out of dark beer. I recently cleaned my beer lines at home and all I have on tap now (aside from the stouts) are lagers, one of which is a schwarzbier. Consulting the great homebrew calendar, it's about time to make a low-gravity, dark English ale. It's mild time! The last time I brewed a mild, it was an extract batch, and it came out really well. I think I probably drank about two or three pints of it. Most of it wound up on tap at a friend's house, and I think he drank most of it. So I'm going to brew 10 more gallons of it and probably give him five again, since he seemed to like it so much last time.


The recipe is a bit of a modification of Jamil Zainasheff's "Through A Mild Darkly". I added some biscuit malt because I had some lying around, and I added flaked oats on the recommendation of a pro brewer friend, who also got me the pitch of 1968. Here's the recipe.

Clark Kent

Batch size: 12 gallons
Expected efficiency: 75%
Target OG: 1.036 (actual 1.041)
Target FG: 1.011 (actual ???)
Color: 19 SRM 

Grist:

• 11# Maris Otter
• 2# Crystal 80
• 1# Biscuit malt
• 1# Flaked oats
• 8 oz. Pale chocolate malt
• 6 oz. Black patent malt

Mash:

• Saccharification - 154°F for 60'
• Mash out - 170°F for 10'

Boil: 60 minutes total

• 2 oz. East Kent Golding (pellet, 5.7% aa) at 60' to 19 IBU

Fermentation:

• Chill to 65°F, pitch Wyeast 1968 London ESB
• After fermentation slows, free rise to 72°F to encourage attenuation and reduce diacetyl 
• After hitting FG, rack and keg

The trick with mild is that it is a low-gravity beer, but you still want it to be full-bodied and full-flavored. While I was mashing this one, I had this fear that it was going to be too roasty, too burnt, too dark. One recommendation I got was to underbook the efficiency and then end the sparge early. I sort of did that inadvertently by overshooting the original gravity by quite a bit (5 points). I guess my system is substantially more efficient on lower gravity beers. I did everything I could to encourage that full-body: mashed high, low water-to-grist ratio, yeast known for underattenuation.

I love the rich color.

One new thing I did differently, since it's been pretty warm lately is to convert my old immersion chiller into a pre-chiller by adding a male garden hose fitting to the water output. I set it in a bucket of water, and then as my wort chilled and the temperature differential (and thus heat transfer) between the cold water and the wort started to drop, I added ice to the bucket. This helped me get down a few more degrees at the end.

This would be spot-on if it weren't the pre-boil gravity.

Airlock activity slowed after about a week, so I took a gravity reading and got a pretty solid 1.017. Too high. Even though I overshot the OG by 5 points, I still expected 1.011 or 1.012 for the FG. After consulting some friends, I realized that the ester-forming phase of fermentation was definitely over, so an increase in temperature probably wouldn't really alter the flavor profile of the beer, but just speed along the last bit of fermentation, so I moved the fermentors (the new ported Big Mouth Bubblers) upstairs where it was a few degrees warmer. That seemed to push things along.

Pre-chiller in the bucket.

Adding ice.

I tasted the hydrometer sample, and my worries about the beer being overly roasty were completely unfounded. It tastes great. I'm hoping it will attenuate a bit more and then I will keg it up and see how it performs. It won't be quite as sessionable as originally intended, but should still be pretty easy-drinkin'.