Nice recipes. West Yorkie is a wonderful yeast that is hard to go wrong with. I want to winnow down by English yeast bank, and W Yorkie is one of my keepers (not to be confused with Yorkshire Squares, which is too much yeast for me).
This was the first one I tried, only because it had a IBU = 56 and it remains in my regular rotation nearly a decade later.
1930 Whitbread AK (the page has 3 AK recipes so scroll down for the whitbread recipe.
These are my learnings after brewing up half a dozen recipes and looking at a whole flock of Ron's AK recipes. Full disclosure: off-the-cuff rather than the result of painstaking research. My kidlet also gifted me one of Ron's birthday beer recipes and specified a low ABV beer. Ron found one brewed on my birthdate but had to go back about 4 decades to find a low ABV recipe. Wonderful partigyled Fullers that had an PA (10.54), XK (10.40) and an AK (10.32). I thanked Ron for finding that, and got a nice email back. Shameless plug: if you like the Shut Up blog, least you can do is buy a book or gift a recipe.
AK guidelines:
- English pale (50-75%)
- 6 row (10-50%) for the graininess
- Corn flaked (3-10%) for sweetness to balance the hopping rate
- Invert or crystal (10-15%)
- Do a dry hop
- Mash lower 148-152F (BUT I personally prefer to mash high at 158F)
- IBU 40-60 (owing to the corn, AK's can take high hopping without being overpowered. ordinary bitter is more like 20-35 as less sweet. I tried a side by side comparison with all things equal except for the corn. The one with corn was nicely balanced @IBU=57, the one without corn was way too hoppy and unbalanced)
- OG no more than 1040 ish
- Tend to finish dry at 1010 or lower
- Any of these English yeasts: Notty, w yorkie, Fullers, Whitbread (S-04 & WLP017 combined or seperately), London Ale, etc. I would avoid the fruitier yeasts like Windsor for this style.
My learnings or personal preferences
- Corn sweetens the AK vs non-corn, therefore can support much hoppier IBU. BU:GU 1.0 - 1.5. The brew off was 1.25 and certainly not too hoppy
- Ordinary bitters more like BU:GU 0.7 - 0.9
- I prefer to keep the corn at the low end of the range around 5% (Maybe even 3%)
- When compared with an ordinary bitter, the ordinary bitter without corn has a lot more hop taste and bitterness on the back end. Pale malt only (no corn or 6 row) probably should be BU:GU of .8 or .9 max
@Miraculix While there are AK recipes without 6 row, I humbly submit that 6-row is an essential ingredient for the style. 6-row imbibes a graininess that works well. Some recipes have continental malt instead, and I believe that was more true of the older recipes rather than those found in the 1920's and 1930's, which have 6-row.
Happy Brewing