Diary of a Brewer: BrewMogs Black Puss*

Not long after starting my most recent job at 'Luvians Bottle Shop' in St. Andrews I became the one member of staff that was consulted on all matters pertaining to beer production. This is probably because I am the only member of staff that has ever taken part in the production of beer (as far as I know), and while other staff know more about the taste of certain beers they often turn to me for explanations as to why and how the brewing process imparts these tastes. 

The manager of Luvians, Peter Wood, was particularly interested in my brewing experience. Peter is running an event he has titled 'Forage a Feast' in which he gives himself one year to learn all the relevant skills, and barters for all the necessary items, in order to prepare a Christmas dinner for as little money as possible. As to date the one missing item from his Christmas menu was a beer and so he asked me if I could teach him how to brew. It had been a while since I had brewed a batch of beer at home and I was delighted to help. So one evening after work Peter came round for dinner and the brewing evening commenced.

Firstly, we had no recipe laid out beforehand. We did have at our disposable 2kg of pale malt extract, 1kg of dark extract, 2kg of pale malt, 500 grams roasted barley, 500 grams chocolate malt, HOPS, a bag of free coffee grounds, and ale yeast capable of fermenting to around 5-6% abv. Based on these ingredients we decided to make a coffee stout and started planning the recipe. To design the recipe we used ‘Brewmate’, a program that stores the colour ratings and fermentable sugar contents of many different malts and allows the user to change ratios of ingredients, thereby calculating the original gravity (OG) and final gravity (FG) measurements as well as the bitterness rating in international bittering units (IBU). Once we played around with grain ratios for about 20 minutes we decided on the following recipe:

1kg pale malt

500 grams roasted barley

300 grams chocolate malt

1kg pale extract

1kg dark extract

2 tablespoons coffee grounds

30 grams East Kent golding hops

We brewed following the basic instructions laid out in my previous post 'Example of Homebrew Instructions' with the addition of 2 tablespoons of coffee grounds during the boil, we were careful not to overdo the coffee and so collected a sample of the wort during the coffee addition and cooled it for tasting. After 9 days in the fermenter I bottled 46 x 500ml bottles. To top it all off Peter had a friend of his make labels for our beer mocking a company whose name is very similar to BrewMog..... controversial? I sure hope so.