X-Shilling Scottish Ale

Any reasonable beer drinker certainly enjoys a fine Scottish Ale every now and again. The style boasts a restrained malty sweetness, a touch of roasted/biscuity/crackers-like grain flavor, and little-to-no perceivable hops flavor and aroma. Lincoln's very own Empyrean Ales makes Burning Skye, a rather decent Scottish that's on the toastier side of the toastiness spectrum.

A mere three days ago I tapped my own first attempt at a Scottish.
This was only my third attempt at all grain brewing, and it's tasty. Definitely a beer for someone who (inexplicably) does not enjoy hops. I formulated the recipe using style guidelines from Ray Daniels' most excellent book "Designing Great Beers," and Hbd.org's Beer Recipator.

You know how lots of Scottish Ales like to be called "60 Shilling" or "80 Shilling?" It's because way back in the era of Scotland so historically portrayed in "Highlander," Scots had to pay tax on barley. Thus, the more barley in the beer, the higher the alcohol content and body of the beer. A 60 Shilling ale would be weaker(let's say, oh, 3%abv) than a 90 shilling(6% abv). Also, because importing hops all the way from England was really expesive, the Scots compensated by brewing with barely any hops at all.

What's the Shilling of my Scottish? I have no idea because I don't remember where I wrote down the final gravity (the weight of the beer after fermentation is complete), which is part of why I started this BeerLog. But it's stronger than I intended, because when I brewed this beer I witnessed a crazy leap in my extract efficiency of about 10%. For anybody who doesn't know what that means, it means I basically extracted 10% more fermentable sugars from the malt than I was anticipating. This reset my extraction efficiency to about 75% for this beer.

Here's the recipe:

Unknown Shilling Scottish Ale (All Grain)
10 lbs U.S. Pale 2-row
1.5 lbs Crystal 40L
2 oz roasted barley

1.25 oz Fuggle pellets (bittering)
Scottish Yeast (in the white labs pitchable vial)

Process:
Brewed on March 3rd.
I heated 17.25 quarts of water to 170F and mashed into my rectangular cooler Mash/Lauter Tun (more on what this thing is later). I hit my target mash temp of 154F.

After 80 minutes I added a gallon of boiling water, stirred, and recirculated until it cleared up a bit. I drained a little over 3 gallons into my boil kettle and immediately started the boil.

Meanwhile, I added 4 gallons of water at 185F back to the Mash/Lauter Tun for the sparge. I batch sparge, because it's easier, cheaper, faster, and practically every bit as effective as other sparging methods. If you're thinking "what the hell is sparging?" don't worry, that'll be a whole other post.

After about 20 minutes, I stirred the grain, recirculated, and drained into the boil kettle, collected about 3.5 gallons.

Brought the sweet wort to a boil and added the Fuggles. Boiled for 60 minutes then chilled with my immersion chiller, siphoned into my plastic fermenter, and pitched the yeast. The starting gravity was about 1.058.

If my memory serves me it probably spent a week in the plastic, 2 or 3 weeks in a glass carboy, and maybe 2 months in a keg under the stairs at my parents' house. Took it back to my house Saturday, force carbonated at 30 PSI for two days, then set it down to about 8 PSI for one day. Pulled the first pint on Tuesday.

The Verdict:
The roasted barley hits you first, but it's gentle and gives way to the caramelly sweetness of the Crystal malt, which might be borderline to much for this brew. There's an extremely slight plum like fruit component to the sweetness. The head is a creamy white brown. There is no hop aroma, but the malt is quite smellable. Patience really paid off on this one, it taste very clean from weeks and weeks of hiding patiently in a dark cool place so yeast and other crap can drop out.

This is definitely one I'll make again, but maybe with a half pound less Crystal 40.