Brewers Best Scottish Ale

Bashing a Brewers Best Scottish Ale kit. The grains are very old, so I thought I would augment them a bit with some new additions - 4 oz of Goldswaen Red Malt and 4 oz of Briess Chocolate. Then the Diastatic was low, so I added a pound of Maris Otter malt. I double crushed my grains. I tripled the mash time. Blacker than Midnight, Blacker than Pitch, Blacker than the foulest Witch...

I plan on getting some chocolate wheat malt. Many online sources claim more chocolate notes from chocolate wheat and none of the roasty additions that barley or rye bring. Maybe next time.

I'm gonna start the mash and let it go until I can boil later today. It'll shut off automagically after an hour.

The boil is simple. Crank it up to a boil, add the LME, boil 40 minutes. Add the DME - boil 5. Knockout. Chill, Transfer.

There was a complication...My basket I planned to use impeded the boil, so I removed the basket 5 minutes after tossing the Cluster hops in. I had to remove the basket, meaning no hops. So, I tossed in an oz of zappa hops to take its' place. I hope it doesn't affect the flavor much. Zappa is floral and citrus with spice...yikes, this could be very good or very bad.

This was my first time using Apex London. It took about 32 hours before I started hearing a steady bubble rhythm from my fermenter. So, it was a tad slow to start, but it's been cranking slow ever since and the wort is very clear with little clumps of yeasts percolating through the beer. Maybe I underpitched, using only 1 packet and it was 2 months out of date, but the beer is small - even with my additions, I got an Original Gravity of 1.048.

My wort fermented for about a MONTH. I didn't plan it that way - it just kinda happened. The Final Gravity was 1.013 so the beer is 4.59% - we'll see what Zappa did to the taste in about 10 days.