Black Sheep Interview

I stumbled across this podcast by the Brewing Network today. It takes a while to get going but at about 15mins 40 secs into it there's an interview with the head brewer from the Black Sheep Brewery.

There's some history of the brewery and a description of the Riggwelter Ale before they get into a discussion around brewing technique including mash and hop schedules and the grain bill.

This is what I managed to gleam from the interview:

OG = 1.056 (ABV ~5.7-5.9%)
EBC = 60
IBU=35

Base hops in all Black Sheep beers appear to be a mix of Challenger, Progress and Fuggles, with a large (upto 70%) late hop addition of EKG hops. When they say late hops these are hops that are scalded in the hop back at the end of the boil and are mostly for aroma and flavour and not for bittering.

It was suggested that the grain bill was something like Pale Malt - Marris Otter (80%), Standard Crystal (6%), Pale Chocolate Malt (I'm sure he said 5EBC but the lowest chocolate malt I could find was still around 500EBC) (5%?), and the remainder was Torrefied Wheat. No syrups or caramel is used.

Mash temperature is 66 oC but interestingly (due to the slow speed of mash run off) it's only held there for 45 mins.

I had a play with this but couldn't quite get the numbers to add up but I came up with something that might be a close representation.

Fermentable Colour lb: oz Grams Ratio Pale Malt 5 EBC 9 lbs. 0.5 oz 4100 grams 85.5% Torrefied Wheat 4 EBC 0 lbs. 8.4 oz 235 grams 5% Crystal Malt 130 EBC 0 lbs. 10.1 oz 285 grams 6% Pale Chocolate Malt 550 EBC 0 lbs. 5.9 oz 165 grams 3.5% Hop Variety Type Alpha Time lb: oz grams Ratio Challenger Whole 7.6 % 90 mins 0 lbs. 1.3 oz 37 grams 30% Golding Whole 5.7 % 0 mins 0 lbs. 3.1 oz 87 grams 70%   Final Volume: 19 Litres Original Gravity: 1.056 Final Gravity: 1.014 Alcohol Content: 5.5% ABV Total Liquor: 28.7 Litres Mash Liquor: 12 Litres Mash Efficiency: 75 % Bitterness: 35 EBU Colour: 60 EBC
It's in the right sort of region. Looking at it Graham Wheeler has a recipe for this in his book, although it's missing the big aroma hop hit at the end and includes some sugar (maybe to fill the gap that I had problems filling.

I might have to give this a try some time. When I do i'll be sure to report the results.