As mentioned in my previous article about my results at the Berlin Homebrewing competition 2015, I’m publishing the recipe to my best-performing beer, the English Brown Ale that I submitted to the Brown Ale, Porter, Stout category.

This beer was the first one that I designed for that competition, and since it was announced early that the overall winner would be brewed by Berlin microbrewery, I actually designed the beer to be not contain any too exotic malts or other ingredients, as this could theoretically have been a show-stopper for realizing the recipe at a larger recipe that doesn’t have a malt storage as well-sorted as a homebrewing store. So, that’s what it looks like:

Grist:

• 67 % Pale Ale Malt
• 21 % Munich Malt (dark)
• 11 % CaraAroma
• 1 % Chocolate Malt

Hops:

• 1.5 g/l East Kent Goldings (5.8 % AA) @ 60 min
• 0.75 g/l East Kent Goldings (5.8 % AA) @ 15 min

60 minute mash at 69 °C, then a 60 minute boil. S-04 yeast. OG was 12 °P, FG was 3 °P. 4.8 % ABV. 26 IBU.

The recipe actually went through some refining. The previous version contained only half the amount of Munich malt, only 8.5 % CaraAroma, and a tiny bit more Chocolate Malt. And even the first version is based off another recipe that I had brewed in early 2014, an English Dark Mild, which consisted of 87% Mild Ale malt, 11.5 % CaraAroma and 1.5 % Black Malt. The mix of Pale Ale and Munich Malt is something that I conceived to get a nuttier character into the base malt instead of just plain German-produced Pale Ale Malt. But I think in total, the idea of the dark mild showed through in the brown ale, which in some ways make the latter mostly a bigger version of the former. And I think the end result was definitely pleasant.