No pictures yet since I’m not planning on starting this brew until the weekend, but I’m going to be brewing a dark ale style thing. I will post updates if I remember.

I’m Australian, and despite decades of making fun of macro lagers and the people who drink them, I have a soft spot for “Tooheys Old” and other’s like it a simple macro dark ale, theirs is fairly light in body and abv being a cost cut mass produced thing, but it has a nice roasty bready biscuity thing going on with a mild bitterness and a light malt sweetness but with a dry finish. similar (but better) beers aussies will recognise are white Rabbit Dark, Coopers Dark, and maybe Monteith’s Black for our NZ friends.

So my recipe that started as a straightforward clone but has morphed into a darker, bigger, richer brew, but still with some sugar added to keep the finish dry and stop it from getting too heavy. looks something like this:

21L batch, Brewzilla 35L, ~6.0% ABV , 1054 to 1008 expected.

• 3.5 kg (74.5%) — Barrett Burston Extra Pale Malt — Grain — 3.4 EBC
• 250 g (5.3%) — Voyager Craft Malt CHOCOLATE — Grain — 1150 EBC
• 250 g (5.3%) — Weyermann Caraamber — Grain — 71 EBC
• 250 g (5.3%) — Weyermann Caraaroma — Grain — 350 EBC
• 200 g (4.3%) — Simpsons Golden Naked Oats — Grain — 18 EBC
• 250 g (5.3%) — Brown Sugar, Light — Sugar — 15.8 EBC — Boil

lightly hopped just for bitterness and a tiny bit of all round hop character by using Pride of Ringwood, a classic aussie hop, a little bit spicy, herbal, but with balanced fruity characteristics , popular in our macro lagers and plenty of pale ales, and then Chinook for a bit of pine and resin.

• 5 g (6 IBU) — Pride of Ringwood 9.75% — Boil — 60 min
• 5 g (4 IBU) — Pride of Ringwood 9.75% — Boil — 30 min
• 20 g (11 IBU) — Chinook 13% — Boil — 10 min
• 15 g (6 IBU) — Pride of Ringwood 9.75% — Boil — 10 min
• 5 g — Chinook 13% — Boil — 0 min

I usually just lump all boil additions into one that matches the target IBU, since I generally brew a lot of IPAs and NEIPAs where most of the hops are post boil. I guess this is just to give me something to do during the boil.

Lutra to keep things quick since i’m almost out of my last brew, a slightly more old school WCIPA, before we turned them into bitter pine monsters.

Hoping for a 1 week ferment and keg, I used to use Kvieks like Voss a lot before I invested in a full temperature control setup, especially in Aussie summers where my fermenter would be in a room that could be 27-30c during the day. I’m quite fond of Voss but it’s orange peel flavours would be out of place in a dark ale, so I’m trying Lutra for the first time for something more neutral. If I were brewing this again in less of a rush i’d try something like London Fog or a similar English ale style.

Planning a WC-TIPA / Barleywine thing next after this, will be doing two mashes to get the gravity up on that one, I’ve done high gravity before with a very successful belgian quad, but that used a lot of adjunct sugars so it was just one big mash that just barely fit the brewzilla with extra sugars added at the boil. this will be a proper double mash, efficiency be damned.