About as unfunky as it gets - Broughcliffe Best Bitter

So having just fairly recently got back into All Grain brewing I thought I'd better make up a batch of my "house beer", this is a recipe of my own devising that has been tweaked a few time after I threw some ingredients together four years ago.

The aim then as it is now was to create a tasty, medium strength balanced beer, not sweet and and not IPA hoppy, but with nice body and drinkability that English Beers are famous for.

Some of the colour and mouthfeel comes from adding a mixture of malts to the base of Maris Otter pale malt, some Crystal of course, but also a good measure of Wheat Malt and a small amount of roasted malts. Originally I used Chocolate Malt, but this time rather than buy a kilo of grains that I'll never use, I decided to use Black Malt instead (that I bought for the Dogbolter brew I made a few weeks ago), only time (and my memory) will tell if there is a significant impact on flavour.

The hops were also modified, I'd got some Target hops in for a brew I'm doing with some friends in a month or so, and rather than buy a bag of Fuggles for bittering I substituted the Target. The consequence of using the much higher alpha % Target (2x at least) is that I needed less hops, therefore I lost less wort. Plus the run off was a lot quicker.

Some of my brewdays are really smooth, the first two I have done since restarting have gone great, but I didn't hit my efficiency or volume targets, this time I was all over the place organisationally, but this time I hit almost all my numbers, apart from a slightly higher efficiency.

I also got to use my "acme" wort-aerator for the first time in anger, and that proved very successful.

All in all I got 23ltrs at 1.042 OG, up a little from the predicted 1.039, which meant my efficiency was 72% rather than the 66% I had assumed, I'm sure this is in part due to the Crisp Maris Otter that I was using for the first time, but also maybe the Target Hops helped here too.

So, the recipe:

Batch 28 Broughcliffe Best Bitter Type: All Grain	Date: 20/09/2014
Batch Size: 23.00 L	Boil Time: 90 Mins

Amount	Item	Type	% or IBU
3600.00 gm	Pale Malt, Maris Otter (4.9 EBC)	Grain	83.62 %
470.00 gm	Wheat Malt, UK (3.5 EBC)	Grain	10.92 %
200.00 gm	Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (150.0 EBC)	Grain	4.65 %
35.00 gm	Black (Patent) Malt (1300 EBC) (1300.0 EBC)	Grain	0.81 %
28.00 gm	Target (Leaf) [9.70 %] (90 min)	Hops	30.7 IBU
17.40 gm	Goldings, East Kent 4.6 [4.60 %] (15 min)	Hops	4.2 IBU
0.50 items	Protofloc (Boil 15.0 min)	Misc
7.00 gm	Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash 60.0 min)	Misc
1 Pkgs	Windsor Yeast (Lallemand #-)	Yeast-Ale

Est Original Gravity: 1.039 SG	Measured Original Gravity: 1.042 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.009 SG	Measured Final Gravity: 1.012 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 3.82 %	Actual Alcohol by Vol: 3.90 %
Bitterness: 34.8 IBU	Calories: 392 cal/l
Est Color: 20.9 EBC	Color: Color

Mash was at 67C for 60 minutes, the temp in my mash tun was 65 after the hour.
I used Windsor because it doesn't strip out flavours like many more flocculant strains to, certainly seemed to work well last few times, but it does mean the beer takes a good while to clear.

Update 25/09/14: Gravity is down to 1.012, so this is a 3.9% beer as planned. Still very cloudy, but then again Windsor doesn't like flocculating so that is to be expected, taste wise its very good, lovely tangy bitterness that is then followed by a nice malt finish. Now, need to be patient for a couple more days just to make sure the yeast finishes off before chilling for a few days to encourage the yeast to drop out. I've never had to fine any of my beers so don't expect to with this one. 

Update 03/10/14: Gravity remains at 1.012, still very cloudy but that's Windsor for you. Tastes great, really clean and fresh. Dropped temperature down to 5 deg c, will keg most of this over the weekend, although as I have 23ltrs some will have to go into bottles.