I had been holding off writing this follow up post whilst waiting on the competition feedback for this beer. But as soon as this came, we then packed up our entire lives to move home, visited family in Italy, took a city break to Lisbon, and we now have our feet planted back again in London.
Amongst all of this I have misplaced my brewing notebook, which I’m sure will turn up the moment I start a new one. So I am unable to give a breakdown of the brew day, but if you read my previous post on recipe development you can see what I was aiming for. I generally didn’t have any hitches on the brew day, the beer appeared to ferment fine and was bottled without much trouble. I thought the first bottle I opened, with around 2-3 weeks of conditioning, smell and tasted pretty good; clean, malty, somewhat over-carbonated for the style but not any more so than a modern pale ale. I was pleased and held off sampling too much more in case I ran out of bottles for the upcoming LAB Open.
After conditioning for some months I opened another bottle to give it a once over before sending off my entry. Sadly though I discovered there must be some fermentation/conditioning issues as the bottle gushed strongly. As I didn’t have any other bottles remaining, I had to accept that this likely would have affected those to be sent off for judging. Nonetheless I wrote down my tasting notes as follows:
The beer has a murky copper colour, a thick creamy head of tight white bubbles. An aroma of red current, toffee apple, cola candy, with subtle chocolate and toast notes. I also picked up some phenolic and high alcohol characteristics as the beer warms up. The flavour also has red current, with marmalade and a slight mineral note. I didn’t find it overly rich, with a nice malty sweetness of biscuit. As the over carbonation quickly passes it becomes smooth. I didn’t find it too bitter, could perhaps do with a touch more, but remains drinkable. Perhaps too dry and crisp for a best bitter but not particularly bad.
Despite the gushing/over carbonation issue, I didn’t think the beer was all that bad and felt the feedback from the competition would be valuable for the future. This would be my first BJCP style competition and I received a 26/50, classifying it as ‘good’. I’ve tried and summarise the feedback from both judges as follows:
Aroma (8/12): In regards to the malt aroma it was described as pleasant, low hop aroma, light esters, acetaldehyde, and low levels of diacetyl.
Appearance (1/3): Copper/dark amber, low carbonation (after gushing), slight haze and particulate and poor head retention.
Flavour (10/20): Fruit ester forward with malt sweetness, moderate to low bitterness leaving it unbalanced.
Mouthfeel (2/5): Medium to light body, no alcohol warmth, no astringency.
Overall (5/10): Major issues with the gushing which affected the judging samples. A quite good example of the style and within the parameters, but lacks bitterness and is too easter forward and generally unbalanced. Some obvious production issues with the gushing and acetaldehyde but also lacks complexity and a little one note.
This would also be my first time judging at a BJCP style competition, so I picked up where you generally see points being made and lost at the different levels. Across the categories I was tabled with, I saw that appearance and mouthfeel were where you’d generally expect most beers to be in the upper end of scale (2+’s for appearance and 4+’s for mouthfeel). I feel the gushing and the effects it had on carbonation would have significantly impacted both the appearance and mouthfeel, so easily +2 points could be salvaged through fixing this issue alone. That being said this also indicates how much more work would be needed to move this further up the scale. I have broken down the changes that need to be made as follows:
Brewing: The body was too thin and dry, so I can easily improve the mash process to create a better body and also improve the head retention.
Fermentation: There are obvious fermentation flaws identified such as acetaldehyde which I expect are largely due to yeast health and also fermentation temperature. This beer was fermented at an ambient room temperature, so adding some control to this would be a great start, fortunately that is the next step in my kit expansion. This would also help control the ester production. Also, with temperature control there would be the ability to cold crash and perhaps improve the clarity too. For the yeast health, I believe from recent feedback across different beers that I am under-pitching, so rather than half a pack of dry yeast for 10L batch, I’ll simply pitch the whole thing going forward. I’ll talk more about the gushing in a bit, but I believe this has more to do with the fermentation than over priming the bottles.
Recipe: Generally I think the recipe wasn’t so bad, however, the beer requires more bitterness to balance the grist and to better fit the style. The clarity could also improve, but I think for now I’d focus the recipe changes on improving the score in aroma and flavour rather than play around with finings.
Packaging: Determining how I have this gushing issue is a bit of a puzzle, and something I’ve not had much of an issue with before. I have found this across two other recent brews of mine, however it has been absent, in the aged beers I’ve recently bottled. This has led me to doubt that it is the carbonation tabs themselves. Additionally I’ve not had any feedback to suggest this has been caused via an infection. I suspect my lack of temperature control and under pitching might be leading the yeast to under attenuate. They then might be slowly re-fermenting the remaining malt-sugars in the bottle after being dosed with simple sugars. To avoid this, besides improving the fermentation conditions, I need to ensure my beers are fully attenuated before packaging. Generally my beers finish very dry and I do check my gravity is stable for three days before packaging, but I also use a very cheap refractometer which might be flawed. I’ll take this into account when I invest in new bits of kit but I hope with the other changes I am making this will soon be eliminated.
If you read my original post on recipe development I said I would age half the batch in a demijohn with some BR-8 dried brett. I did do this, letting it age for about 4 months before giving it a taste and whilst not awful, it certainly didn’t improve the base beer and I felt it was not worth continuing. So along with my other aging mixed-fermentation projects this was abandoned whilst packing for house move. I do remember the sample I dried had a lot of the red fruit character as well a lot of a leather brett aroma and flavour which wasn’t particularly pleasant. Whilst I’ll admit this isn’t a fair example of BR-8’s properties I suspect this is why it isn’t suggested to be used in this way for mixed-fermentation.
I am pretty keen to take another stab at a best bitter, currently my plan is to brew this recipe again (with some small recipe tweaks) to see if I can overcome the same faults. I hope to do this in early 2026 once we have settled and have renovated my brew kit. I hope to post about this very soon but a lot has been learned with this recipe.
Babette’s Yeast 
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