Rack Sheep

One of your statutory obligations when you start using bike panniers is to post up pictures of the things you have carried. Yesterday I went to the homebrew shop and came back with a full grain load on the rack

That's around 6kg of grain and malt extract.

I decided to make a Black Sheep clone as it's one of my favourite beers and I haven't seen any on the shelves for a while. Although I'm not very good at following clone recipes as I don't like keeping grain in the garage, so I tend to use the entire bag of everything I buy in each recipe.

The bill for the (partial mash) Black Sheep was

• 1kg Maris Otter malt grain
• 1/2 kg Traditional malt grain
• 1/2kg Crystal malt grain
• 70g black / roast malt grain
• 2kg Pale Malt extract
• 1kg wheat malt extract
• 50g Fuggles (60 mins)
• 15g Goldings (20 mins)
• 15g Fuggles (20 mins)
• 15g Goldings (5 mins)
• 15g Fuggles (5 mins) 

Mash the grains for an hour at 66 degrees, then add to the main boil and mix in the malt extract. As the wort comes close to the boil throw in the first batch of hop pellets and start the clock.

The wort looks pretty cool as it comes to the boil, although at this point I needed to pull the pan off the stove to prevent it boiling over.

I was a bit slack when converting the recipe to a partial mash and I overdid the malt extract, so this should be around 8%, hoppy and very dark when it's done. Ironically it'll probably turn out similar to a lot of the beers at Archive we were tasting the other day!