Me & two friends of mine recently brewed a
Best Bitter, an English Style pub ale described on BJCP as
"A flavorful, yet refreshing, session beer. Some examples can be more malt balanced, but this should not override the overall bitter impression. Drinkability is a critical component of the style; emphasis is still on the bittering hop addition as opposed to the aggressive middle and late hopping seen in American ales."
We used
Single Hop Best Bitter kit from
Northern Brewer. Here's a link to the "Kit Inventory Sheet" (ingredients & recipe)[
pdf][
QuickView]. We also bought their
Basic Starter Kit + a brew kettle from Walmart + a thermometer. Only thing we had with ourselves, in plenty, were pry-off beer bottles :)
Since the recipe included specialty malts (0.5 lbs Simpsons Dark Crystal, 0.125 lbs Fawcett Pale Chocolate), first step was crushing the malts
...and steeping them
followed by addition of included Munton's light and Amber dried malt extract (DME) to prepare the wort (below)
and then addition of Fugle hops. Half the hops were added 60 minutes before the end of boil, a quarter 15 minutes before, and another quarter 5 minutes before the end of the boil.
At this point, the kitchen smelled of hops and hops, nice! Some priming sugar was added at the end of the boil, and then the wort was chilled in an ice bath in my kitchen sink.
We added more water to bring the volume to 5 gallons, rocked the fermenter to aerate the wort, and took the specific gravity (OG, at this point) which was ~1.040. Pitched the yeast and sealed the thing!
About a week later, we started recording the specific gravity which eventually stabilized at ~1.010. However, the beer tasted quite un-beerly which prompted me to make a few posts on
BeerAdvocate. Folks there suggested to let it ferment a little more, and also assured that the beer would get a lot cleaner in taste during bottle conditioning. Overall, we let it ferment for 3 weeks, as opposed to the 2 weeks period suggested in the recipe kit. During the last week, the gravity was stable, and so we finally siphoned the beer from the fermenter into the bottling bucket, added more priming sugar (for carbonation in the sealed bottles), and started bottling.
and capping...
and putting the bottles in cool, dark, and quiet ;) place for bottle conditioning
We started tasting the beer after about a week of conditioning and it did get cleaner up to the point that we were quite happy about it, and confident enough to share it! Some pictures of our beer, which we call Bhairav (भैरव) bitter :)
