Boltmaker Clone

Name TBC

I’m a big Timothy Taylor fan and I’ve brewed a clone version of Landlord (aka Grenadier) on a few occasions now which is rather delicious. Even the old man is a fan! I am more than partial to a pint of Boltmaker, having first sampled it a few years ago off the back of it being named Champion Beer of Britain at the Great British Beer Festival in 2014. The Head of Steam in Leeds (the old one, not the new one) serve a very good pint which, thanks to Covid, I haven’t enjoyed for a long time now.

This recipe is simply a scaled up version of the Graham Wheeler recipe. The Malt Miller were a little low on the Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire Ale so I’ve given it a go with the White Labs WLP007 Dry English Ale which I had some success with when I made La Marmotte d’Or for the first time last year.

GRAIN BILL

All in all brew day went pretty smoothly. Admittedly the strike water would have heated up a bunch faster had I set it 3000W instead of 1500W the night before when I set the time, but that’s not the end of the world!

A Brew of Firsts

As well as this being the first occasion on which I have brewed with Golden Promise as my base malt, this brew saw the debut of a couple of new pieces of kit. My buddy Darryl had got himself an iSpindel earlier this year and was impressed with it and because I am addicted to buying stuff off ebay, I managed to pick up a ready built one for a very sensible price. To coincide with that, I have gone for the paid subscription to the Brewfather app. It’s only USD 1.99 a month and it has loads of features (including saving all the iSpindel data to each batch). Plus it looks nice.

I did have a look at Ubidots, but Brewfather just seems to provide a much wider package (oo-er!) along with integrating everything very smoothly. Calibrating the iSpindel took a little while, but there’s a whole bunch of info out there to help. Which is a good job really, because the official documentation is not hugely intuitive. I found the Woolly Craft Beer video on YouTube very helpful.

So as you can see, we’re pretty much at the end of primary fermentation. I’ll leave it another week or so before bottling and hopefully by then I’ll have decided what I’m going to call this one!