BJCP and Graham Wheeler's book

[SteveH aka shetc]

Does anyone know if the recipes in Wheeler's book "Brew Your Own British Real Ale" have ever been cross referenced with the current BJCP guidelines? I see that a number of the commercial examples from the various styles have recipes in the book but a lot of them don't. Thanks!

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

Ok, I'll do it

 

[Franktalk]

Thanks! I'll look forward to your analysis. I use many recipes from that book.

 

[madscientist451]

Thanks for posting, I never heard of that book, so now I'll look for it.

 

[EnglishAndy]

Thanks for posting, I never heard of that book, so now I'll look for it.

It's definitely worth getting if you're interested in brewing British styles. If nothing else you'll be surprised at:

1. How few hops go into a bitter compared to what we homebrewers chuck in these days.
2. How similar British bitter recipes are to each other.

The last point perhaps hints at how important water and yeast are in influencing beer flavour.

 

[aamcle]

There is also his European Beers book, the recipes are mainly simple and meant to be enjoyed.

Aamcle

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

Thanks! I'll look forward to your analysis. I use many recipes from that book.

You're welcome. I've had good results with these recipes. Don't be afraid of the sugar - that's standard in UK brewing.

 

[Franktalk]

You're welcome. I've had good results with these recipes. Don't be afraid of the sugar - that's standard in UK brewing.

Yes, I'm totally on board with British brewing methods. Dave Line, Ronald Pattinson, and Graham Wheeler have been my inspiration for years.

 

[Franktalk]

Coincidentally, I'm drinking Wheeler's Fullers London Porter as I type.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Whilst Graham's books have been hugely influential in British homebrewing, it's worth emphasising that they shouldn't be taken as gospel either. In particular the early ones made a lot of compromises to reflect the lack of availability of specialist homebrew ingredients, which is why you'll often see eg a lot of table sugar in there. But numbers like ABV and IBU should be right.

Yes, water and yeast are vital ingredients in British brewing, it's all about getting that balance between water, yeast, sweet/dryness, malt, bitterness, hop flavour and CO2 absolutely right. Get one of them wrong and you wreck the drinkability that is so important to British brewers.

 

[EnglishAndy]

Coincidentally, I'm drinking Wheeler's Fullers London Porter as I type.

That's one of the really good ones. Did you use Fullers' yeast?

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

Are there modern, updated recipes for the ones in Wheeler's book?

 

[EnglishAndy]

Are there modern, updated recipes for the ones in Wheeler's book?

Not sure I fully understand your question. I have the third edition (blue/yellow/grey cover) and I would say that nearly all the recipes in it are for ales that are still brewed today and can be found in a pub on cask. Where sugar is required, it will be listed as white sugar, and where colour adjustment is required he will list black malt. These are deviations from the brewery ingredients, and if I may quote from the book itself:

The ingredients specified are usually those that have been specified by the brewer. Some of the recipes have been reformulated to use more readily available ingredients. The most common change is to substitute ordinary white cane sugar where invert sugar is used by the brewery. In many cases a small amount of black malt has been added to adjust for colour when the brewery obviously uses added caramel or dark invert sugar. You can safely omit small quantities of black malt if you are not too fussy about matching colour. It is a very woolly approximation anyway.

It goes on. A lot. There's a wealth of background information in the book that makes it worth buying even without the recipes. Sadly Graham passed away recently so there will be no further editions of the book.

 

[Still Brewn]

First off..... BJCP is for American made versions of all the beers listed so authenticity may be lacking. I don't think I have had an authentic British beer so suggestions are invited. Secondly modern yeasts are far different than what was available in years past just look at the Kveik yeasts that as coming on the market now and how many still need to be studied. http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/farmhouse/kveik.html

I'm sure at one time British brewers had something close where each brewer had their own yeast or yeast blend that was unique to a particular brewery. It is much like apples, now days you can get a half a dozen kinds of apples at any given time in your market. There are hundreds of kinds of apples! Ones that have a cinnamon flavor naturally or ones that have the flavor of other fruits but unfortunately those don't last for months in a refrigerator so they are not grown by farmers. Same with the yeast, there may be hundreds of varieties of yeast that may be lost to the ages.

Now to get back on topic.... suggestions for my first British beer as a beverage and suggestions for brewing my first British beer.....

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Are there modern, updated recipes for the ones in Wheeler's book?

The thing is that it's always a moving target when you're trying to clone a specific commercial recipe, as Ron Pattinson's work on Boddington's demonstrates. It's gone from a near-SMaSH to having half a dozen ingredients and back again in the course of the 20th century, whilst the attenuation varying from ~70% to ~90% suggests the yeast has not been the same throughout that period either.

And while homebrewers' ability to faithfully clone a target has improved dramatically since the 1990s, thanks to the better availability of more ingredients and improved hardware, you'll still only get 80% of the way to a perfect clone if you haven't got the exact house yeast and the ability to ferment it at 300bbl scale or whatever, as the yeast will behave differently in different pressure environments.

So to some extent it's a question of defining what is your target, and how close you want to try to get, in the knowledge that a homebrewer will never achieve a "perfect" clone. But I would say that in general, British homebrewers are probably more interested in cloning commercial beers than US homebrewers, so if you search the internet for a recipe for most of the major British beers you should turn up something, often an updated version of one of Graham's recipes. But you will find people asking questions of breweries direct, or eg Fuller's and St Austell have tweeted actual recipe sheets. Even armed with those brewsheets you won't make a perfect clone as a homebrewer, but obviously it helps.

suggestions for my first British beer as a beverage and suggestions for brewing my first British beer.....

It's got to be a best bitter as perhaps the purest expression of British brewing, ideally from Yorkshire. Personally I'd avoid a Fuggles-heavy one for your first one, it's a bit of a culture shock if you're not used to it, whereas something heavy in Goldings or the Wye varieties like Challenger, First Gold etc are perhaps easier to get into.

 

[Franktalk]

That's one of the really good ones. Did you use Fullers' yeast?

Yes, I used Imperial Pub Ale A09, which is supposed to be Fullers.

 

[Franktalk]

Now to get back on topic.... suggestions for my first British beer as a beverage and suggestions for brewing my first British beer.....

The Timothy Taylor Landlord is an easy but delicious place to start. To make it more authentic, you must use the Wyeast 1469, which is purported to be Taylor's yeast. Supposedly, Taylor's also uses Simpson's Golden Promise malt.

Also the Fullers London Pride is pretty close to the actual recipe from the brewery's brew logs published on this forum, and you can check it against the real thing which is widely available almost everywhere.

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

Lots going on here, and I like it

To Northern_Brewer's comments: Thanks for the clear explanation! I like Wheeler's book because each recipe has enough details to fit into my preferred brewing calculator. So assuming that the 2009 edition's recipes were somewhat accurate at the time of writing then my targets are to 1) make a good example of a given recipe and 2) be judged well in the recipe's BJCP style category. I live in South Florida so I doubt most of the local judges would know if the recipe was a good clone. I did live in the UK for 20 years during the 80s and 90s so enjoyed a lot of the beers that are presented in the book (my favorite English beers were from Marston's).

To Franktalk: Funnily enough, I was thinking about making the Timothy Taylor Landlord since it is give as a commercial example of the 11B/Best Bitter category. Also I drank quite a lot of it in my past UK life. Thanks for the tips on the Wyeast 1469 and Golden Promise!

 

[Northern_Brewer]

The Timothy Taylor Landlord is an easy but delicious place to start. To make it more authentic, you must use the Wyeast 1469, which is purported to be Taylor's yeast. Supposedly, Taylor's also uses Simpson's Golden Promise malt.

There's no "supposedly" that TT use Golden Promise - they are famous for being one of its biggest proponents.

But the identification of Wyeast 1469 as their yeast is more problematic. For one thing the commercial homebrew yeasts are almost always single strains whereas most of the British regional breweries use a yeast that is at least two strains, typically one for flavour and one for performance (think Windsor + Nottingham) so this idea that a homebrew strain is equivalent is always going to be difficult. Plus strains mutate once they have been separated - there's been quite a bit of mutation among the commercial versions of Ringwood for instance. But in this case the identification looks particularly problematic as DNA analysis shows that 1469 seems to be a Wyeast version of WLP022 Essex. That also means that it doesn't fit the history, as the TT yeast supposedly came from John Smith via Oldham, and the Harvey's yeast which also came from John Smith are nothing like WLP022, the Harvey's isolate that's been sequenced is completely unrelated to 1469, in fact it's a POF+ member of the saison family. It's possible that the TT multistrain contains both a WLP022-like strain and a saison type, but an easier explanation is that something got mixed up somewhere along the way. Unfortunately there's not a lot of proper square yeasts that are readily commercially available, certainly not Stateside, so there's nothing wrong with 1469, but just don't think that it is necessarily "authentic" for a TT beer.

You may also enjoy this tour report, and there's a good video on Youtube.

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

There's no "supposedly" that TT use Golden Promise - they are famous for being one of its biggest proponents.

But the identification of Wyeast 1469 as their yeast is more problematic. For one thing the commercial homebrew yeasts are almost always single strains whereas most of the British regional breweries use a yeast that is at least two strains, typically one for flavour and one for performance (think Windsor + Nottingham) so this idea that a homebrew strain is equivalent is always going to be difficult. Plus strains mutate once they have been separated - there's been quite a bit of mutation among the commercial versions of Ringwood for instance. But in this case the identification looks particularly problematic as DNA analysis shows that 1469 seems to be a Wyeast version of WLP022 Essex. That also means that it doesn't fit the history, as the TT yeast supposedly came from John Smith via Oldham, and the Harvey's yeast which also came from John Smith are nothing like WLP022, the Harvey's isolate that's been sequenced is completely unrelated to 1469, in fact it's a POF+ member of the saison family. It's possible that the TT multistrain contains both a WLP022-like strain and a saison type, but an easier explanation is that something got mixed up somewhere along the way. Unfortunately there's not a lot of proper square yeasts that are readily commercially available, certainly not Stateside, so there's nothing wrong with 1469, but just don't think that it is necessarily "authentic" for a TT beer.

You may also enjoy this tour report, and there's a good video on Youtube.

Enjoyed the tour. How about WLP037 Yorkshire Square?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I've got some WL037 from when it came out as a seasonal recently, so you've probably got a wait til it comes again. But reports suggest that it's a pretty full-on saison thing - in fact some commercial breweries here are using it to make saisons - unless you put a lot of effort into simulating the aeration it gets in a square in order to suppress the phenolics. Maybe WLP038 Manchester, which is similar genetically, may be a bit more moderate but at current rate of ordering it won't be leaving the Vault until 2025 or so.

So there isn't really a good option. Brewlab have some great Yorkshire yeasts tucked away in their bank but with their recent reorganisation they didn't put any into their new core range. A real missed opportunity IMO. Maybe Brown Ale/Borders-1?

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

Saisons? This gets better and better [emoji16] So what would you use for an attempt at a Wheeler clone of Landlord? (At least Scotland finally scored...)

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Me personally? I'd scavenge yeast from a TT cask from a pub... Second choice would be to ask my contact at Brewlab for something, but I'm not had to ask them since there was a change in policy about homebrew sales. Third choice would be either harvesting yeast from Sam Smith Stingo or a Harvey's bottle-conditioned beer. Otherwise I guess something like 1469, perhaps with just a pinch of T-58 or something.

But to be honest, with the real things easily available I've never really felt the itch to clone commercial beers, I prefer to plough my own furrow.

Mad game - and the perfect result for someone who's officially neutral for the Calcutta Cup, as an English/Scottish mongrel...

 

[ESBrewer]

How does it look like, the recipe of Landlord by Wheeler? I think his Fuller's ESB was quite far from the modern truth, lots of crystal and all too few late/dry hops in his version. The hop varieties...those were definitely British, but not quite the same that they use at the brewery.

 

[Franktalk]

How does it look like, the recipe of Landlord by Wheeler? I think his Fuller's ESB was quite far from the modern truth, lots of crystal and all too few late/dry hops in his version. The hop varieties...those were definitely British, but not quite the same that they use at the brewery.

The TTL recipe is all pale ale malt with a pinch of black to color. Hops are EKG and Styrian Goldings with Styrian at the end.

 

[Franktalk]

There's no "supposedly" that TT use Golden Promise - they are famous for being one of its biggest proponents.

But the identification of Wyeast 1469 as their yeast is more problematic. For one thing the commercial homebrew yeasts are almost always single strains whereas most of the British regional breweries use a yeast that is at least two strains, typically one for flavour and one for performance (think Windsor + Nottingham) so this idea that a homebrew strain is equivalent is always going to be difficult. Plus strains mutate once they have been separated - there's been quite a bit of mutation among the commercial versions of Ringwood for instance. But in this case the identification looks particularly problematic as DNA analysis shows that 1469 seems to be a Wyeast version of WLP022 Essex. That also means that it doesn't fit the history, as the TT yeast supposedly came from John Smith via Oldham, and the Harvey's yeast which also came from John Smith are nothing like WLP022, the Harvey's isolate that's been sequenced is completely unrelated to 1469, in fact it's a POF+ member of the saison family. It's possible that the TT multistrain contains both a WLP022-like strain and a saison type, but an easier explanation is that something got mixed up somewhere along the way. Unfortunately there's not a lot of proper square yeasts that are readily commercially available, certainly not Stateside, so there's nothing wrong with 1469, but just don't think that it is necessarily "authentic" for a TT beer.

You may also enjoy this tour report, and there's a good video on Youtube.

Yes, I get a hint of saison from the 1469, but it seemed to age out after a few weeks. Wouldn't that suggest that it's part of the TT blend?

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

Well crap, looks like my local giganto liquor store sometimes has bottles of Stingo but not in Florida right now. My Scottish wife is not best pleased with the outcome

 

[Derp]

Well crap, looks like my local giganto liquor store sometimes has bottles of Stingo but not in Florida right now.

Are you in Florida? What part? I lived in SW Florida (Port Charlotte) for 30 years.

I ordered Tim Taylor's yeast from Brewlab in December and I'd be happy to send you a slant if you could grow it up from that. No idea if it's a multi-strain, but it's made a couple of tasty bitters so far. They're not carbed up yet, but I recently brewed a Landlord recipe and split half with TT yeast and half with Cullercoats. They're not ready yet, but in the samples I've tasted I've preferred TT.

 

[SteveH aka shetc]

Are you in Florida? What part? I lived in SW Florida (Port Charlotte) for 30 years.

I ordered Tim Taylor's yeast from Brewlab in December and I'd be happy to send you a slant if you could grow it up from that. No idea if it's a multi-strain, but it's made a couple of tasty bitters so far. They're not carbed up yet, but I recently brewed a Landlord recipe and split half with TT yeast and half with Cullercoats. They're not ready yet, but in the samples I've tasted I've preferred TT.

Yeah, I'm in Pembroke Pines, way west of Hollywood, out by US 27. I actually contacted Brewlab when I first started brewing but I didn't have the skills to deal with the slants at the time. Looks like they don't sell slants anymore, is that right? Wouldn't want you to lose a slant if that is the case.

 

[Derp]

They now sell them through a UK homebrew supply store. They seem to be offering a much smaller range than before.

The beauty of slants/slopes is that you can grow as many as you’d like, so it wouldn’t impact my yeast collection.