I've been away from the forum here for a long time at this point, during the intervening time I've gone pro and opened my own brewery in Valdese, North Carolina, and of course we make our own Tribute Tribute lovingly, and often serve it on cask with a beer engine in the pub. I was extremely happy to see that this thread still have some life in it, and so to close the loop fully, here's the recipe we use:
Brew length: 3.5bbl, brewhouse efficiency 85%
Malt:
110lbs Maris Otter, prefer Crisp or Thomas Fawcett
27.5lbs Munich Malt. If you can get it, Epiphany Craft Malt out of Durham, NC makes the best hands down, and is what we use
Mash with 48 gallons of water, mash temp target is 153F. Add 250g gypsum and 25g table salt to the mash. Acidify to ph 5.3 if needed with your water (we have mountain water, so it has no mineral content).
Sparge with 100 gallons of 180F+ liquor.
FWH addition of hops to ~20IBU. We use a high alpha hop to minimize vegetal matter in the kettle and to increase yield. Shoot for perhaps 15IBU calculated if you're using a high cohumulone hop like Simcoe, shoot for 20IBU even if you're using a low CH hop. We boil for 60 minutes, with the low OG there's no need to boil for 90.
10 minute addition: 1/2lb each Willamette and Styrian Goldings, whirlfloc
Flameout addition: 1/2lb each Willamette and Styrian Goldings.
Whirlpool under power for 10 minutes, then allow to stand for 10 minutes for trub to settle. Knock out at 63F, target OG 1.042, ferment with an English Ale Yeast (pick your favourite, we use the dried Whitbread strain). Hold at 65 for two days, then allow it to free rise to finish to an FG of 1.010
You can crunch this back down to a 5 gallons batch easily enough. Key factors are keeping the Maris Otter:Munich ratio at 4:1, use a good high quality munich malt, don't skip the table salt addition in the mash. Watch the bittering addition, whilst you will get some additional bitterness from the late and whirlpool hops, the bulk of it comes from the FWH, so measure accurately, and also don't forget to adjust for the nature of the hop you're using.
To adjust the hop character for your particular system, push the 10 minute addition around. We've tried moving it to both 15m and to 5m, 5m came out too lemongrass heavy, 15 lost too much of the delicate hop character. For us, 10 minutes gets the perfect balance of lemongrass and blackberry, and the whirlpool additions bring out the aromas in the finished pint.
For yeast stick with an English strain, whatever is your favourite. We use the Whitbread stuff because its easily available and we use it in a few of our beers, but you can also make a decent pass with the Fullers yeast. We have also used 1318 with good results. Don't forget that most English yeast strains will drop 2-5IBU from the final beer, this is accounted for in the recipe above, but if you ferment with something like US-05 or equivalent, then you may need to adjust the bitterness down a touch to suit.
Happy brewing!
