Creating a great Scottish Ale

[bondra76]

I'm going to start running some experimental batches on Scottish Ale and wanted to get folk's inputs.

I am going to start off with Golden Promise of course, but curious on the rest of the ingredients.

After brewing everyone else's fantastic brews around here, I have decided it's time for me to venture away from the internet/book/magazine recipes and try to create my own for once.

I anticipate I will be making several small 1 gallon batches to try and nail down my perfect Scottish Ale (it's my favorite type of beer). Will keep you guys posted.

 

[passedpawn]

I've only brewed one, but it was one of my best beers. Likely, it was from brewing classic styles. I pulled some of the wort and boiled it down to a thick syrup on my kitchen stove, then added it back. I (perhaps wrongly) attribute this one step to the great flavor of my strong scottish ale.

 

[Qhrumphf]

Several schools of thought:

1. Use only base malt, mash as normal, and then boil the crap out of for many many hours. As far as I'm aware, this is the traditional method.

2. Do the same as above, but instead of boiling the whole wort forever, take a bit (maybe half a gallon to a gallon) your first mash runnings, boil down to a syrup, and then add back to the rest of the runnings. Different process to achieve similar result faster. A lot of folks swear by this method.

3. Skip the long boil or the caramelization, and just use a bunch of crystal malts. According to Jamil Zainasheff, if you want a competition winning one, this is actually the best route.

4. Some combination of the three. I've tried all three, and I've settled on using a fairly high percentage of crystal malts, and then boiling for about 2.5 hours.

 

[GABrewer1426]

I've brewed a couple Scottish ales. The key is that Scottish yeast (from either White Labs or Wyeast).

Not sure what flavors you are looking for. I like a little peat smoked malt in mine. Sure it's not "traditional" (whatever that means), but I brew what I like. You should do the same.

Keep the fermentation temps low. And another key thing that has worked for me is appropriate aging. The longer the better.

This of course is if you are talking about the 60/70/80 type Scottish ales.
If you look at modern Scottish breweries, these styles barely exist. Maybe as a throwback. But today you'll see a variety like in the US (Porters, IPAs, Golden Ales, etc).