An important part of WIB since its inception has been our homebrewing community. We never cease to be amazed by the creativity, talent and sometimes utterly bizarre creations they come up with, using the ingredients from our shelves. We've often said we wish we could share the brews that make it to our monthly homebrew club with the rest of the world, so now we are!
The challenge for our homebrew club in July was SMaSH (single malt and single hop beer). Below we have what the club considered the best SMaSH of the day, plus two more of our favourite beers we tried.
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Daniel Young has been brewing for two years. He started with a BIAB set up but quickly moved to purchasing a Grainfather and hasn’t looked back since. The beers he likes to brew are sours, saisons and funky beers but for July’s challenge he brewed an all wheat SMaSH.
Wheat and Ekuanot SMaSH
Volumes:
15 litre boil, 10 litres in the fermenter
Fermentables:
2.15kg Wheat Malt
Mash:
60 mins at 65c, 10 mins at 75c
Boil:
60 min – 5g Ekuanot
Whirpool – 20g Ekuanot
Dry Hop (3 days) – 20g Ekuanot
Irish Moss for clearing
Fermented at 33-35c with Voss Kviek
OG: 1.052
FG: 1.006
ABV: 6.1%
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When Tim Quinlan (of April’s Recipe Blog fame) meets with his auntie Brenda and uncle Mark they will often hand over some freshly cut rhubarb from their garden.
The best thing he can do with this is to make some beer! Obviously.
This recipe is in its third generation now, it has previously worked well with hefeweizen yeast but in this recipe Tim uses a more neutral flavoured yeast to let the zingy rhubarb shine. The rhubarb is added uncooked and chopped.
Rhubarb & Vanilla Beer
16 litre volume
OG 1.044
FG 1.006
Abv 5%
IBU 24.6
Grains:
Golden promise 2.2kg
Pale wheat malt 1.13kg
Mash @ 65c for 1 hour.
Boil for 1 hour.
Kettle additions.
Magnum 14g @ 60mins
Rhubarb 150g @ 5mins
Yeast:
Fermentis US-05
Additions after fermentation has finished and to then leave for 7 days.
Rhubarb 800g
Vanilla pod x2
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Esther Arwert first brewed a beer whilst at university in the Netherlands as part of her microbiology course but has been home brewing seriously for around seven years. We’ll leave it to her to go into more depth… “I started when I was living in the US (New York) inspired by the all the crazy craft beers around and microbreweries that were popping up. Initially small batches (1 gallon) doing whole grain kits, then went on to use partial mash for the 5 gallon volumes,I started experimenting with recipes and got into kegging my beer (definitely don't particularly enjoy bottling, but with the smaller volumes and a couple of beers it's ok).
When I moved to the UK (London) I got introduced to BIAB, which I now pretty much exclusively use for both small (1 gallon) and bigger (up to 5 gallon) batches.
I enjoy brewing together with other people and most of my brews are collaborative (or with friends who are interested in brewing but might need a little push to get started), but when I have the time I do the occasional small-batch solo-brew to experiment with flavours. Depending on with who I brew and the volume, we either keg or bottle. I also quite like the mini keg/pressured growler options for BBQ and house parties :-)”
This beer was a collaborative brew with another member of our homebrew club, Steve as well as other colleagues.
Strong Belgian Tripel - BIAB
volumes:
25L boil, around 20L fermenter
Fermentables:
5.8kg lager malt
120g aromatic
120g biscuit
-> mash 68C, 1h
Boil:
60min - 60g Saaz
15min - 1kg sugar
5min - 10g Chinook
Irish moss for clearing
Pitch yeast at RT:
2x packet of Safbrew BE-256 Abbaye
OG 1.072
FG 1.007
Bottled around 6 weeks after brew day.
ABV 9%
