Edinburgh Breakfast Ale

Classic, historical Edinburgh Breakfast Beer - a very light, unhopped Scottish Ale that was meant for daily drinking in place of other sanitation methods for water.

In Edinburgh, ales were traditionally unhopped, with beer being distinguished by being bittered, initially with herbs and later rather reluctantly with hops. Edinburgh continued the use of bittering herbs much longer than the rest of Europe, out of the belief that hops caused erectile dysfunction or "brewer's droop" - and Edinburgh was one of the last places where brewing was completely controlled by women.

There are multiple references from the mid-18th century onwards to having beer or ale at breakfast, and a casual modern reader might assume that all of Edinburgh was wandering around in a drunken haze. In fact, it would have been a breakfast ale, brewed specifically for the purpose, and perhaps lighter even than this 2.8% ABV ale.

In this particular brewing session, we used a perforated plate system to achieve an approximation of fly sparging during the lautering and got a pretty astonishing 90% efficiency out of the kettle. I will be using this method again. The refractometer read 1.027 SG, the hydrometer 1.031. I used the average of the two.

Since there are no hops, the purpose of the boil was to sanitise the wort and get some of the proteins to coagulate, hence it's only a minute long. In practice, this was ten minutes while we faffed around with our counterflow chiller. This batch was the inaugural outing for said chiller, and it took us a bit of time to figure it out.

I added six grams of Saccromyces to the boil and oxygenated for a minute with pure oxygen after we had achieved 18 ºC. It's in the fermenter now and I'll have tasting notes in a few weeks.