Southern English Brown Update
October 1, 2007 10:22 am HomebrewingI was hoping to have some pictures from Growler’s Oktoberfest and Alandale’s Fall Harvest Festival, but life came up and I wasn’t able to make it out to either event, sorry about that. But in the meantime this weekend I was able to do some homebrewing work. I’ll be updating the blog on occasion to kind of detail my homebrewing progress and will provide detailed pictures and information along the way. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about what I’m doing.
I finally got around to buying a new dip tube for my keg so I was able to move my Pumpkin Spiced beer from my bright tank to a serving keg. Getting that done allowed me to finally get my Southern English out of the carboy and into my bright tank.
Looking at the picture above, you’ll see that I’m using CO2 to move my beer from glass carboy into my keg. The benefits of this are that almost no oxygen touches my beer, I don’t have to worry about starting a syphon and it gets moved directly into my keg with minimal splashing. If you’re interested in doing this yourself check out this link at the BrewBoards or this one at the Maltose Falcons.
This week I’m planning on not only attending the Augusta Bottoms Beer Festival, the St. Louis Brew meeting but I also plan on brewing a Belgian Dark Strong (which is one of my all-time favorite beer styles.) Should make for a beer filled week.
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Stonch :
Date: October 1, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
I spotted your post title on the RBSS site. I want to point you to the discussion at the end of this blogpost: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2007/09/guinness-1896-1982.html
Here’s the bit that’s relevant here:
“As far as I can tell the “Northern Brown Ale” style has only ever consisted of a handful of beers - Newcastle Brown, Double Maxim, Sam Smith’s and a couple of others. All from the North East except for the Sam’s. The “Southern” style was brewed everywhere else, including most of the North of England. I’m quite interested in Brown Ale.”
Also see this post on the same blog, talking about made up beer styles:
http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2007/09/biting-carpet.html
Now, it’s up to you what you brew - and that’s the point of what I’d like to say. You say you want to brew a “Belgian Dark Strong” now. But what is that? Not something any Belgian brewer would recognise as a “style”. Forget styles!
mike :
Date: October 1, 2007 @ 4:25 pm
I guess it’s all a matter of what or how you’re looking to brew. Styles help to provide guidelines to what a specific beer should taste/smell/feel like. If you’re looking to improve your beer those style guidelines help to make sure that you’re within the guidelines for that specific style.
Sure if you’re just brewing for fun or for your friends there is no real need to stay within style guidelines. Brew what you like and what tastes good. But if you’re brewing for competition, well, you kind of need to pay attention to those styles and their guidelines.
I fall into the improvement camp, I’m still a relatively new brewer and I need these guidelines to help improve my brewing process.
If we forget styles, what are we left with?