With a week in the keg, here's my stab at the Invert #3 in a Dark Mild thing that we're doing (among other awesome things. I love this thread!)
This is the second pour, so it's not brilliant, but you're mostly seeing condensation on the glass. I opted to photograph the ale in a pils glass to better demonstrate the color. A photo of a standard UK pint glass didn't yield much information aside from brown-ness. While I'll concede that this ale is certainly on the light end of what AHA thinks a dark mild should be, I like the color and think it honestly represents how the ale drinks. I wouldn't argue if you said it's more of a brown ale. Having had a sip, I'm confident you would say, "Yeah, that's a mild."
As for how it drinks, the Invert #3 is a revelation! Dark mild has always been a tricky target for me. Between Bitter, Southern Brown, Northern Brown, and Brown Porter, it has a lot of neighbors. Making an unambiguously Dark Mild version of Dark Mild can be a bit tricky. A bit too much dark grain and you're in brown porter territory, a bit too sweet and you're in S. Brown territory, a bit too much hops and you can spill into either Bitter or Northern Brown's yards. It's a balancing act, for sure, and a fun challenge. I wonder what our UK-based brothers think of all that AHA balderdash?
Back to the Invert #3 as a revelation thing, based on a pint and half of a small pilsner glass, I'm a full-on convert to the idea that Invert #3 is core to the success of a Dark Mild recipe. The Invert #3 coupled with the Imperial Pub brings all of the dark and light fruit and deeper dark sugar flavors that I previously utilized darker crystal malts to provide. However, and this is where the revelation lives, the Invert #3 has none of the heavy, cloying, plodding attributes that crystal ruins a beer with. This ale is substantial on the tongue (it feels like a 1.055 beer), but it's light on its toes, it's not at all plodding, heavy, and one-dimensional like crystal malt. It finishes dry, but there's lots of stuff still going on after the swallow. Best of all, it's a pint that wants you to drink more. There's a lot of subtle flavors in there, if you keep looking.
I like this beer.
Design for this recipe was simple, I used the Invert #3 as the variable and simply subbed it for the crystal malt additions in a long-established Dark Mild recipe.
OG: 1.041
IBU: 19
est. SRM 15
DC Water w/ 3g Calcium Chloride in the mash, 2g Calcium Chloride pre-boil, 1g Gypsum pre-boil. Mash pH 5.5, after pre-boil mineral additions, pre-boil pH adjusted down to pH 5.2 w/ phosphoric.
76% Otter (Warminster)
11% Corn
1.5%
Pale Chocolate (ie 2oz as colorant, but does provide some dark toast if you look for it)
.5% Midnight wheat (ie one once as colorant, in lieu of caramel coloring)
11% Becker's Invert #3 (added at run off, boiled the full duration)
90min boil
13 IBU Fuggles @60 (.75oz for 6gal)
2 IBU EKG and 2IBU Fuggles @20 (.25oz each for 6gal)
1.5 IBU of EKG @10 (.25oz for 6gal)
Imperial Pub, 4th generation pitched at 66F, raised to 68F as soon as the yeast became active, raised to 72F at 1/2 gravity, held for two weeks at 72, kegged, cold-crashed, then fined 24hrs later.
