Old Mann Brown - The Tasting

I mentioned back in April that my parents were coming to visit us here in Virginia, and that I was planning to brew a clone of Mann's Brown Ale as it is a beer my dad quite often talks about. I made one change to the recipe as the homebrew shop didn't have any Kent Goldings hops when I popped in to get my ingredients, but they had Fuggles, so I switched.

Last night, after a week and a half in the bottle, I decided to see how it was coming along and popped open a couple of bottles for myself and my dad to try.

Early indicators are good, the carbonation is good, the colour is a rich mahogany with a light tan head, it certainly looks the part, and at just 2.9% definitely a session beer. The nose has a touch of apples and pears hidden in with caramel and chocolate notes. Tastewise, the chocolate and caramel are there again, with a good bready backbone and a spicy hop bite from the Fuggles. Three mouthfuls later the glass was empty and I was headed to the cellar for another bottle.

Overall, a very encouraging start to what could be my beer for summer...

Old Mann Brown

At the end of next month, my parents will be flying across the Pond to come and stay with us for a month. The last time they came was in 2010, just after I had a DVT removed from my right leg, and again they stayed for a month. The big difference this time will be that we now have a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom house rather than a somewhat pokey 1 bedroom apartment. There will be no sleeping on an airbed for 4 weeks for my wife and I, and my parents won't have to feel bad about having evicted us from our room. Oh an we have a garden for them to provide free labour for - some couples have grandchildren to foist on their parents, we will have tomato plants and bean poles. I am fairly sure they are looking forward to it!

My dad, in common with a lot of men of his generation, is a Londoner. The Griffin Brewery, home of Fuller's, would still be his local brewery if he hadn't joined up at 15 and spent the next 30 odd years in the pay of HM Queenie and Sons, PLC. Dad spent a lot of time in Germany, and has something of a love for good lagers, especially Schwarzbier. However, the one beer that Dad talks about more than any other is Mann's Brown Ale, the first (if I remember rightly) modern bottled brown ale. Again if I remember rightly, modern brown ale was essentially the bottled version of draught mild.

As you can imagine, I don't get home to the UK very often and so having my parents coming to stay is something special, more so because a couple of days after they arrive it is Dad's birthday. What better then than to attempt a recreation of Mann's Brown Ale? I am planning to brew this in the next week or so, and the recipe at the moment looks like this:

• 80% Maris Otter
• 10% Caramel 120
• 4% Chocolate Malt
• 4% Wheat Malt
• 2% Roasted Barley
• 14 IBU Kent Golding for 60 minutes
• 6 IBU Kent Golding for 15 minutes
• Windsor yeast

I am aiming for an Original Gravity of just 8.3° Plato, or 1.033, and expecting to get an abv of 3.2%, which is slightly higher than the original 2.8%. I put the recipe together based on what I have read in various sources about brown ale in general, and a couple mentioning Mann's in particular. Hopefully, Dad will like it and it will be fairly similar to what he used to drink.