Brewing mangel ale

Much has been made in the past few months about rises in the prices of hops, barley, metals and fuel feeding through to the price of beers and ales. Some brewing companies and industry experts even predict prices will hit £4 a pint in 2008. Well, I have a solution – that’s them in the photo. Mangels. You doubt me? I’ve turned up an ancient recipe for mangel ale, which I’ve redacted into a modern homebrew recipe and then spent all day concocting a batch as a way of averting beer price rises for the Other Half. What a thoughtful, bearded, homebrewing bloke I am…

You will need 40lb of mangels—which you will almost certainly have to grow yourself, six gallons of water, four ounces of hops (Kent hops were used in the original 1700s recipe) and a 6g packet of beer yeast (a strain suited to dark, strong, fruity beers is best). Ideally, you’d have a six-gallon brewing vessel with internal heater but if not, do as we do and brew in 10lb batches. Start by pulling the excess roots off the mangels and scrub them thoroughly. Rubber gloves are a good idea as cleaning 40lb of mangels in cold, running water is very hard on the hands.

Top and tail the mangels, then cut them into slices. About a quarter of an inch thick works best, while thicker slices may need a slightly longer boiling time. Discard any mangels that show signs of bruising, rot or decay as the bad flavours will pervade the entire mangel. All slices should be a bright, creamy white colour.

Cover the slices with hot water, bring to the boil, then cook at a fast simmer for one hour. The original recipe called for 90 minutes but our experiments showed that almost all the sugars and flavours were out of the mangels after an hour. Replacing the liquor with fresh water and simmering for the extra 30 minutes simply resulted in hot water with a vague taste of mangel and a very low sugar content.

Keep the mangels covered throughout the boil. This conserves energy (the cooker could be set to half the heat otherwise required) and, more importantly, the mangel liquor. Keep an eye on the water level and, if needed, top it up with freshly boiled water.

After an hour, remove the solids with slotted spoon or tongs to a large basin, then strain off the liquor through a muslin into another heat-proof basin. Carefully lift the muslin out of the way and then decant the mangel liquor into a five-gallon brewing vat.

Be extremely careful when pouring the hot liquor into the vat - you don’t want boiling liquid poured over your legs and feet. If you spill any on the vat or the floor, clean it up fast as the high sugar content of the mangels leaves a very stick residue.

Take the cooked beet solids and transfer them to a press, then squeeze out all the remaining liquid. It’s essential to do this as the final liquid is very high in dissolved sugars. I use a cider press, but there are various ways of achieving the same ends - even squeezing the beet pulp in muslin with gloved hands will do the job, albeit less well. If you’re brewing in batches, you’ll need to repeat these steps several times until you have six gallons of mangel wort in your brewing vat.

Take a sample of the wort, cool it to 20C and then measure the specific gravity to get an idea of the sugar content and alcoholic potential. Although I knew from the tasting the mangel wort that it was fairly sweet, I was surprised to find the Original Gravity was about 1.053 (plus or minus one). Typical beer worts have an Original Gravity range from 1.035 - 1.055, so the mangel wort is towards the high end for dissolved sugar with about 19 ounces of sugar per gallon. Potentially, that’s 7% ABV but I’d settle for around 6-6.5% ABV using WYeast’s Belgian Strong Ale Yeast.

Half fill a large pan with the mangel wort, then add four ounces of hops. The original recipe specified Kent hops so I used Brupaks Golding, a hop developed in Kent in the 1790s with a soft, earthy aroma that should work in harmony with the earthiness of the beets. After adding the hops, I added more wort until the pan was full, then simmered it hard for an hour. The hopped wort was strained off through muslin into a heat-proof basin, then the hops contained in the muslin were wrung out hard to obtain all the liquid. The hopped wort was then poured into the brewing vat containing the rest of the wort.

The wort will now be left to cool overnight. In the morning, I’ll stir it hard with a beer paddle to aerate it, then pitch the yeast and cover the vat with well-secured muslin. After 48 hours, I’ll put an airlock and immersion heater in place and ferment the wort for a week. It will then be racked and left to settle for 48 hours, before being primed if necessary and kegged. I’m not a huge fan of finings, but I suspect they will be needed given the amount of particles in the wort. Once kegged, I’ll leave the mangel ale to age for a fortnight to a month and then sample it to see what we’ve got. For now though, I can say the wort is nicely flavoured, pleasantly earthy and beet-like with good edge of bitterness. It is very sweet, though.