When I got back into homebrewing in 2022, one of my first ambitious ideas was to create a trilogy of beers. These beers would not only share common ingredients across range of styles and ABVs, they would also be connected by a unifying theme or story.
The Inspiration
I had been reading this passage about Highgate Dark Mild from David Sutula’s book “Mild Ale.”
“Entering an area of small, neighborhood shops and multifamily houses in the largely residential village of Walsall, one must negotiate a maze of winding side streets to find the venerable Victorian building which, for the last 100 years, has housed the Highgate Brewery. Built in 1898 to generic, “off-the-shelf” plans, Highgate’s six-story brick facility exemplifies a standard Victorian tower brewery.”
Almost instantly, I was reminded of H.P. Lovecraft’s short horror story “The Music of Erich Zann,” in which the main character finds himself in a six-story apartment building at the end of a labyrinthine street he cannot retrace, living on the edge of some mysterious realm his mind cannot comprehend. If you haven’t read it before, go give it a try.
This story became my anchor for this concept. Three British ales inspired by different passages from The Music of Erich Zann.
I had also been reading about a historical brewing method called parti-gyling, where brewers in the UK would make several beers of various strengths from a single high-gravity mash. The first beer would be the strongest, then the remaining wort would be diluted with water to produce a second, weaker beer, and so on for a third beer with even less strength.
This gave me the idea of three beers with identical grain bills, each brewed to a different strength and with its own unique character. However, parti-gyling at such an extreme level on my small 6.5-gallon electric system seemed a bit too challenging at this point in my journey, so I decided to do something different:
I created three different recipes at different strengths, brewed them in order from weakest to strongest, and then harvested the yeast from each batch to reuse it for fermenting the next one.
The weakest beer absolutely had to be a Dark Mild. After all, reading about mild ale was how I started down this rabbit hole in the first place. So then, what about the strongest beer? Well, there was another kind of beer historically served alongside mild ale: something they used to call “keeping ale” or “stock ale” because it was kept in barrels and aged for years. Today we just call it Old Ale. Our boy Lovecraft just happened to write about a pantheon of sleeping alien gods called The Great Old Ones, so this seemed like the perfect style for beer #3. Which left the middle beer to end up as an English Strong Ale with some darker characteristics.
The Recipes
These are small-batch, all-grain homebrew recipes, all targeting a mash efficiency of about 70%.
Erich Zann’s Glance at the Window
Dark Mild, 3.3% ABV
Yield: 3 US Gallons
Stats
• Original Gravity: 1.034
• Final Gravity: 1.009
• Bitterness: 19 IBUs
• Beer Color: 22 SRM
Malts & Adjuncts
• 2 lb Golden Promise pale malt
• 15 oz Maris Otter pale malt
• 8.5 oz British Crystal 50-60L
• 3.5 oz Roasted Barley
• 3.5 oz Invert Sugar
• 1.5 oz Carafa Special III
Hops
• 0.35 oz East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, @ 90 min
• 0.4 oz East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, @ 10 min
• 0.25 East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, dry hop @ 2 days
Yeast
• Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire Ale
Water Profile
Ca 90 / Mg 1 / Na 50 / Cl 75 / SO4 150 / HCO3 78
Mash Profile
15 min @ 145F
45 min @ 158F
10 min @ 168F
Fermentation
Ferment at 64-68F for about 2 weeks. Top-crop the yeast around 60-72 hours into primary fermentation, to use for Shrieking Viol.
Carbonation
1.8 oz dextrose to reach 1.9 vol of CO2
Erich Zann’s Shrieking Viol
English Strong Ale, 6.3% ABV
Yield: 3 US Gallons
Stats
• Original Gravity: 1.063
• Final Gravity: 1.012
• Bitterness: 30 IBUs
• Beer Color: 37 SRM
Malts & Adjuncts
• 2 lb 12 oz Golden Promise pale malt
• 1 lb 8 oz Invert Sugar
• 1lb 2 oz Maris Otter pale malt
• 9 oz British Crystal 50-60L
• 9 oz Roasted Barley
• 4.5 oz Extra Special Roast
• 3.5 oz Carafa Special III
Hops
• 0.44 oz Fuggle, 4.5% alpha acids, @ 90 min
• 0.34 oz East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, @ 90 min
• 0.34 oz Fuggle, 4.5% alpha acids, @ 15 min
• 0.23 oz East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, @ 15 min
• 0.17 oz Fuggle, 4.5% alpha acids, dry hop @ 3 days
• 0.17 East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, dry hop @ 3 days
Yeast
• Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire Ale
Water Profile
Ca 60 / Mg 1 / Na 60 / Cl 80 / SO4 60 / HCO3 120
Mash Profile
40 min @ 154F
20 min @ 163F
10 min @ 168F
Fermentation
Ferment at 64-68F for about 2 weeks. Top-crop the yeast around 60-72 hours into primary fermentation, to use for Unfathomable Darkness.
Carbonation
2.2 oz dextrose to reach 2.1 vol of CO2
Erich Zann’s Unfathomable Darkness
Old Ale, 9.5% ABV
Yield: 2.5 US Gallons
Stats
• Original Gravity: 1.086
• Final Gravity: 1.014
• Bitterness: 63 IBUs
• Beer Color: 54 SRM
Malts & Adjuncts
• 3 lb 8 oz Golden Promise pale malt
• 1lb 10 oz Maris Otter pale malt
• 1 lb Black Treacle
• 10 oz British Crystal 50-60L
• 10 oz Roasted Barley
• 6 oz Extra Special Roast
• 5 oz Brown Sugar, light
• 4 oz Invert Sugar
• 4 oz Carafa Special III
Hops
• 0.6 oz Fuggle, 4.5% alpha acids, @ 90 min
• 0.6 oz East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, @ 90 min
• 0.2 oz Willamette, 5.5% alpha acids, @ 90 min
• 0.3 oz Fuggle, 4.5% alpha acids, @ 15 min
• 0.3 oz East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, @ 15 min
• 0.1 oz Willamette, 5.5% alpha acids, @ 15 min
• 0.1 oz Fuggle, 4.5% alpha acids, dry hop @ 3 days
• 0.4 East Kent Goldings, 5.0% alpha acids, dry hop @ 3 days
• 0.1 oz Willamette, 5.5% alpha acids, dry hop @ 3 days
Yeast (co-pitch with both)
• Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire Ale
• Wyeast 9097 Old Ale Blend
Water Profile
Ca 70 / Mg 1 / Na 50 / Cl 100 / SO4 75 / HCO3 80
Mash Profile
40 min @ 154F
20 min @ 163F
10 min @ 168F
Fermentation
Ferment at 60-68F for about 2 weeks.
Carbonation
1.94 oz dextrose to reach 2.1 vol of CO2
The Labels
Monstrous tentacles — some glowing, some black — in the background for all three labels. The primary color shifts for each label to make them instantly distinguishable. For the title of the beer, I went after a 80s-horror-movie poster look. Hidden in the background are the historical markings X, XX, and XXX for the different strengths of ale. And on the right, each of them got a hefty doze of literature. Nice to have something to read while you sip on these. The passage that directly inspired the name of each beer is highlighted in green.
Final thoughts
I’m still very proud of these beers, especially with how distinct from each other they ended up tasting, despite having a lot of shared ingredients. Glance at the Window was chewy, woody and ridiculously quaffable. Shrieking Viol had sort of a Bailey’s Irish Cream or chocolate milk flavor that was really unique. Unfathomable Darkness is still possibly the best beer I’ve ever made, some 40 batches later: slightly sour and funky from the brettanomyces in the Old Ale yeast blend, deliciously complex and not too sweet. I will be brewing this series again for sure.
I also started brewing one of these batches at 8:30PM and finished around one in the morning. The vibe felt very cold and eerie, certainly appropriate, but I’m not sure I would go that late again!
I would desperately love to visit some old breweries in the UK. Have some real historic and exemplary mild ales. Stock ales too. I think not just for the beer itself, but to sit in those ancient pubs and soak up the atmosphere. I want to visit breweries that feel like they have hundreds of stories to tell, that have a presence and a soul. Those would truly be unforgettable.
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