Some times brew days don't work out as planned. Usually drunkenness is the culprit, after that it's usually carelessness, forgetfulness or plain stupidity. I'm guilty of the latter on this particular brew day.
The brew in question was a recipe for Macasons Milk Stout circa 1936 curtesy of Ron Pattison on the shutupaboutbarclayperkins blog. Mackasons milk stout is one of the first beer's I can remember drinking, I couldn't resist and had to make this beer.
so here is how I shit the bed on this one,
Should be
68% Pale
.5 % oats
5.7% brown malt
5.5% choc malt
8% #2 sugar
3.5% cane sugar
8.5% Lactose
OG 1.051
In my scaling of the recipe I forgot to give the sugar (which I added together as Lyles golden syrup) an actual ferment able average, so my base grain made up for it in formulation.
As a result of this miscalculation my wort was much richer in the pre boil gravity. By the time that I had noticed this mistake I needed to make the decision whether to leave the sugar out and water the wort down to get close to the recipes' intended gravity, or carry on and end up with a much higher gravity and very different product. I decided to go ahead and add the sugar because I felt that the caramel notes from the light treacle would be a key part of this beer's overall taste. I also ended up bumping the bitterness a tad to balance the higher original gravity. Unless this beer ferments out to a magically low gravity I will most likely not be adding the Lactose to the fermenter.
Usually when I screw something up like this I get pretty down on myself, but this is an exception, mistakes happen and I think this beer should be right up my alley the way it is.
the recipe ended up being:
1.070 OG
36 IBU
90 minute boil
149 mash temp
6 gallons post boil
12# Golden Promise
.75# Brown Malt
.75# English Chocolate
1.2 oz. Flaked Oats
1.25# Lyles Golden Syrup
all fuggle pellets at 4.75 Alpha Acid
1.4 oz @ 90 minutes
.55 oz @ 30 minutes
The yeast used was a large starter of Wyeast 1469 "West Yorkshire Ale Yeast" and single packet of Wyeast 1028
68 degree ferment for 4 days and then roused and raised to 70 to finish out for a few more days.
