Beer Plans for June

This is something people blog about, right?
Well, I've got three planned for the next week or two:

• An imitation of the White House Honey Ale
• A cobbled together IPA
• An even more cobbled together braggot.

This is mainly me keeping a track of things.

Basically, I ordered more than was strictly necessary for a one gallon batch of the honey ale (scaling down due to inability to boil 5 gallons in one go) and plan to use what's left for some experiments. The braggot's one I've been meaning to try for a while after tasting a friend's mead and realising I could brew something similar with a bit of malt added.

I'm using the same yeast strain for all three, Safale S-04 English Ale Yeast. This should be fine for the ales, but might be a bit of a stretch on the braggot.

Hopefully I can encourage the braggot yeast to keep working up to it's alcohol tolerance by feeding it a little more honey and malt extract partway through, along with a sacrifice of baker's yeast I'm going to boil to death in the wort.

Suitably Celtic I think, blood magic, for an ancient Welsh brew.

Recipes for all three, one gallon batches along with their sources. I've made do with what I could get my hands on cheaply for the most part. I'm already paying around 20% extra for shipping. In future I'm buying
in bulk. Or venturing to Ye Olde Locale Brewe Shoppe.

White House Honey Ale (source)

• 1.32 lbs light malt extract (liquid) (I'm using Cooper's)
• 0.2 lbs light dry malt extract (Munton's spray malt)
• 2.4 oz amber malt
• 1.6 oz biscuit malt
• 0.2 lbs honey
• 0.3 oz Kent Goldings hop pellets
• 0.3 oz Fuggles hop pellets
• Windsor Dry Ale Yeast Safale S-04 English Ale Yeast

IPA (source)

• 1.6 lbs pale malt extract
• 0.2 lbs crystal amber malt
• 0.15 oz Northern Brew Fuggles Hops (~ 9.8 alpha)
• 0.2 oz Cascade East Kent Goldings hops (~ 4.6 alpha)
• 0.3 oz Cascade East Kent Goldings hops (for dry hopping)
• Wyeast American Ale Yeast Safale S-04 English Ale Yeast

Braggot (source)

• 0.88 lbs honey
• 0.66 lbs dry malt extract (I plan to use what's left of the Cooper's and top up with Munton's)
• 0.2 oz Fuggles hops
• lemon juice (juice of 2/5 of a lemon)
• few drops of citric acid

Keeping things simple by omitting and substituting some bits here and there based on what I had and what I could get my hands on, shouldn't have too much of an effect on the finished product. Like I said, this is mainly experimentation. My hydrometer arrived this morning so I should be able to keep a better eye on the fermentation than I did with my first batch which was very much a case of "Oh, the bubbles have stopped, time to bottle".

Unfortunately, both the White House and braggot recipes fail to specify alpha acid percentages for the hops so I'm going to be winging the amount based on the average value for those varieties and the value for the hops I have. And some nonsense with bittering units? It's like A-level chemistry all over again.

More as I crack on with the honey ale.