Well, after living with the first 2 versions of the American Mild for a few weeks now, I have some thoughts and ideas about the direction of this project.....

Thought I'd start a thread to document my attempts at coming up with an "American Mild" ale. I want to end up with a sub 4% beer that doesn't have flavor and mouthfeel comparable to water! I'm basing it on the English Mild, obviously, but with American ingredients. My goal is to come up with a beer with the body and flavor impact of a traditional mild, although not the same flavor. I'm guessing this will take at least 3-6 attempts to get to what I have in mind.

A couple months ago, my friend Mitch Scheele, who writes for the Northwest Brewing News, contacted me about an experiment he wanted to do. He had invented a piece of equipment he calls the “Hop Screw”. It’s a stainless tell cylinder with holes in it, a bar across the top to attach it to your boil kettle, and a plate and screw handle on top. A bit like a stainless cider press. The idea is that you attach it to your kettle before you start collecting wort.

Here in Oregon, we had the best year for mushrooms in the last 20 years. Yummy bits of fungal goodness were popping up all over in the woods behind my house. When my wife came back from a walk in the woods with a grocery bag full of chanterelle mushrooms, it was time to brew the Wee Shroomy! If you don't know, that's a Scotch ale/wee heavy that has 2 1/2 lb. of chanterelles added to it after primary fermentation.

Things to keep in mind as you experiment...

I wrote a while ago about my experiments to increase sulfate levels in my Rye IPA. My latest batch, with a sulfate level of 300 ppm, is far and away the best of the many batches of this recipe that I've made over the years. So, now what I need to do is brew it again, exactly the same way, to find out if the changes in sulfate were the reason or if I just had Ninkasi looking over my shoulder when I made the last batch. That's what I'm doing today...brewing exactly the same recipe, with exactly the same ingredients, down to the same bags of malt and hops.

I just got done writing up the recipe for my Wee Shroomy for the book. Basically a wee heavy with chanterelle mushrooms added to it. After trying various methods of dealing with the mushrooms, the one definite thing I've decided is that I hate the "soak them in vodka and then add the vodka" method. It adds an undesirable heat to the beer. I simply chop and freeze the mushrooms before adding them. Many people, though, seem to be deathly afraid of not soaking additions in vodka, to the point of not even trying anything else.

My job has a very unstructured schedule. Sometimes it's a day of work here and there, sometimes it's 2 weeks straight followed by a week or 2 off. I'm heading into a 10 day stretch of no work and looking forward to getting my brew on for the first time in a while! I'm planning on getting in at least 2 batches of relatively low alcohol, but (hopefully) flavorful beers. Both will be experiments because I haven't brewed either recipe before. One will be a low alcohol Belgian style beer, made with W3787 Westmalle yeast and some beautiful Hallertauer pellets I picked up.

You can learn something even with an unsuccessful experiment....

Rather than thank everyone individually for every post in the forums, I wanted to just give everybody an overall thanks for your contributions. We're off to a great start and we've got a long way to go, but every post is valuable to us and hopefully it will be to other homebrewers.