As it is not very summery at the moment I thought I’d inject a bit of summer into a beer. Having decided to do a light summer ale I was persuaded to do a honey ale. Rather than just a honey ale I decided to make a mash up and ferment out, split and add honey to the secondary ferment of one half. Really not sure how it will turn out but that is what experimenting is about.
The mash was over 60 minutes and recirculated for 45 minutes in a 2 batch sparge.
The fermentables:
| Fermentable | Colour (EBC) | Weight (g) |
| Pale Malt | 5 | 4871 |
| Munich Malt | 20 | 500 |
| Lager Malt | 3 | 137 |
| Torrified Wheat | 4 | 100 |
| Golden Syrup | 600 | 100 |
The hops:
| Variety | Alpha (%) | Weight (g) | Time |
| Bobek | 4.5 | 20 | 20 |
| Challenger | 7.6 | 20 | 60 |
| Willamette | 4.7 | 10 | 0 |
| Bobek | 4.5 | 15 | 0 |
The golden syrup and a spoon of protofloc were added at 10 minutes to go. The wort was recirculated and cooled for 45 minutes and left to settle for an hour.
The target gravity was 1.056 for 23L which I hit but due to using my older backup boiler (main sprung a leak) the tap was slightly higher and around 2L of wort was left in the boiler. Shame.
From doing the calculations:
Mash volume = 30.6L
Mash gravity = 1.050
Efficiency = 90.9%
Boiled volume = 21L
OG = 1.056
Efficiency = 76%
The photos:
The final gravity is expected to be 1.012 making this 5.7%ABV. Let’s see if the S04 yeast does the job.
