Mild Session
Session 3 is about mild ales. Finally, a real session beer topic! It’s a type of beer I love, and next to a low gravity stout, might be my favorite. I see it as a malty, not too bitter, red-brown beer that I can drink an Imperial pint with lunch and still function at work. And maybe that’s the real key- I live close to work and usually walk home for lunch. While I don’t drink at every lunch (or every day for that matter), it sure is nice to have the option.
I’ve never had a “real” mild, i.e. one brewed in Britain to a traditional recipe. I wonder if many Brits have either. Mild seems to have followed most British beers and gone through rather drastic drops in gravity over the years. My one night in London a few years ago was primarily in the hopes of finding a mild or anything “weak and dark” as a bartender put it, but to no avail. So I continue to make my own at home, and that’s what I describe below. The Cheshire Cat brewpub in Arvada sometimes (usually?) has a mild available, but I don’t fight the traffic or long bus rides to get there very often. Especially when I have good homebrew here.
When I was brewing on the stovetop, milds and low gravity stouts and porters became my mainstays. I could make an all-grain beer up to OG1.040 with 8 pounds of grain in my 4 gallon pot, adding water to the fermenter. The first runnings and a small batch sparge made for nice, full, malty beers. Inefficient, but on that scale only $2-3 more expensive than fully sparging less grain. I still batch sparge, but with a full wort boil I usually do a bigger batch and less grain.
The Mild Ale book by David Sutula is a good introduction (from beertown.org, no direct link avail), and my favorite mild is based off his Alibi Red recipe. Durden Park’s book Old British Beers and How to Make Them is also top-notch, with some really interesting historical recipes. Ron Pattinson has some interesting information about older English brewing culled from historical brewing archives.
Mild Red
5# Gambrinus organic pale malt
0.5# Weyermann organic munich malt
11 oz Weyermann organic caramunich
5 oz Briess organic crystal 120L
6 oz Briess organic chocolate malt
6 oz organic flaked barley
1 oz Belgian Goldings pellet hops 5.96% (60min)
0.5 oz Belgian Goldings (4 min)
Avery yeast slurry (Wyeast 1028)
OG 1.038 in 5.25 US gallons
~6 HBU <= 24 IBU
The taste is malty-sweet with a bit of a chocolate-nutty character and a touch of roastiness in the dry finish. Medium-full bodied and creamy, with a good head if there’s enough CO2 to support it. In the glass, it’s a bit lighter/more red than the picture shows. I have used the handpump in the background but don’t have a permanent place for it (yet) and this version was force-carbonated in the keg. Goes well with a simple salad, oatmeal, toast & honey, peanut or almond butter with jam or honey sandwiches, chocolate, cotswold cheeses, vegan pizza, etc. Yum!
May 4th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
[...] at Sine Qua Non made his own homebrew for the ocassion and muses wistfully that, although milds may be one of his [...]