Today was chilly and rainy.  Such perfectly British weather to make an Extra Special Bitter.  I tend to brew outside, so I experienced the perfectly snotty weather under a canopy.  I should rather say “attempt to brew,” because I tried my hardest to fail at making this batch work.  Named in honor of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the process of “getting there” took a more twists and turns through unexpected places than I felt was strictl necessary.   Dear old DA would have approved,.

My first mistake of the day was with the grain bill, where I had too little grain for my target volume.  The recipe is a combination of two similar ones I’ve made in the past, so I decided to combine them.  Unfortunately, I ended up buying my grains before I had a chance to double-check my numbers in BeerSmith.  I have some extra DME laying around from my extract days, so I figured on adding 6 oz to my recipe.  I double-checked my math, weighed out the DME and moved on with my prep work.

I made a stupid mistake in calculating the strike water volume for the mash. The recipe called for 13.2 quarts of strike water, which for some reason I converted to 4 gallons and a bit.  I caught it after I added the grains to the water, and realized the mash was running a little thin.  Realizing my mistake, and in a panic, I decided to just add the 7.4 quarts of mash out water to the mash, and let it steep a little longer.  In effect, I mashed at a water to grist ratio of 2.1 qt/lb instead of the usual 1.5 qt/lb.  This is not unheard of, but is usually unnecessary.  I decided to run the sparge hot, so 3.3 gallons of 180°F water went through the grains.  My rationale was that if my pH was too high with a cool mash, then I could lower it with a hot sparge, and maybe even get a little extra sugar out of it.  My pre-boil OG was 1.039– not far off from the 1.042 calculated for my light grain bill.  I decided to add a little extra DME to bring it up a few points, and weighed out an additional two ounces for a total of 8.

Having tried to hard to ruin this batch and, judging by the numbers managing to at least halfway recover, I decoded to throw all caution to the wind and try a different hopping schedule.  The recipe called for 1 oz of Fuggles and 2 oz of Golding on a 60-10-flame out schedule. I reserved ½ oz of the Golding for flame out, and combined the remainder of the hops.  I made 1/8 oz hop additions every 5 minutes through the boil, and added the last half oz at flame out.

After all the foul-ups and experimentation, I was almost afraid to check the post-boil gravity.  Imagine my surprise to see 1.054 at 60°F.  Right on the nose.  At long last, with the wort chilled and in the fermenter, I pitched the yeast and started cleaning up very much looking forward to trying this one out.  It’s going to be a long month.