The Cascade Brewer’s Guild is having a club internal competition at the November meeting. Tony suggested that we go with a style that we don’t typically be in order to push ourselves to learn more about brewing.

The club voted to go with best bitter as the style for the competition. Matt and I have made a bitter before, inspired by a visit to Machine House last year. We got a bag of Maris Otter with the goal of exploring British styles. While we enjoyed the beers we made, including the bitter, a pale ale, English IPA, and barley wine, we didn’t change anything in our brew process aside from use English ingredients.

As we’ve interacted with other brewers, we’ve found that water chemistry is a rather important part of brewing that we have almost completely ignored. I say “almost” because we do make a point to get our brew water from the kitchen faucet instead of the backyard hose. So, you know, there’s that.

Field Trip

With Machine House having recently relocated just down the street from me, I decided to do some field research on the best bitter style. This style is one of the standard offerings at MH along with a dark mild.

It has a light to medium brown color. It smells very malty with a slight aroma that is almost smells like menthol along with flowers. The first thing that hits my tongue is some bitterness on the sides of my tongue. Then there’s a tart/sour flavor that washes over the middle part of my tongue before bitterness returns to the back part of my tongue. Carbonation is very light. There’s no visible bubbles, but there’s a sharp feeling of carbonation at the front of my tongue as I take a drink.

The malt flavors include some caramel sweetness, but not much. I’m trying to find more malt flavor, but the flavor fades pretty quickly with each drink, giving way to bitterness.

Recipe Research

I got Designing Great Beers a few months ago. I haven’t really used it for making beers because the styles we’ve made the last few months aren’t really covered in the book, like hazy IPAs. But this is the perfect book for learning about English styles since the author founded the Real Ale Festival.

A few things that make an English bitter unique compared to an American pale ale are the water chemistry, hops, and grain selection.

The target water chemistry is the profile of Burton, which has hard water. With a sulfate content of 801 ppm, Burton has substantially harder water than the Everett municipal water with a sulfate content of 250 ppm. DGB tells me that 5g of gypsum added to 5 gal of water results in an addition of 148 ppm of sulfate, so we need 18.5g of gypsum to make up the 550 ppm deficit in Everett.

Hops, I didn’t much bother with. Goldings seems to be the standard. For an American style of bitter, I’d try Willamette which is derived from fuggle hops. Otherwise, could be interesting to try some of the more citrusy hops in the dry hop. English bitters do often have hops added to the cask before serving, so dry hoping is definitely an option.

Grains start with Maris Otter. Then there is the matter of getting some maltiness and a bit of color. Crystal 40 seemed like the default addition. Maltiness can be added with Munich, biscuit and their cousins Vienna, aromatic, and victory. Using only those wouldn’t really give the color I expect out of an English ale, so toasted malt or Special B could work. I saw some recipes using chocolate malt, and since we usually have that laying around, that’s my first thought to bump up the color, but need to be very conservative with the amounts. Like, 1–2 oz only.

So, there’s my research. I’m excited to try this one out.