Since last week was all about the Irish Stout, it only seems right that I balance the scales by offering up an English beer this week; thus, we’ll be discussing the English mild! Like chefs who test their skills by cooking an egg, many brewers consider the mild to be their real test of brewing. Mild requires a brewer to be able to make a beer that is light but malt-forward, impactful but not overbearing, rich but not heavy, and low enough in ABV to be drunk by the pint while watching your favorite football team (take “football” in either sense of the word).
A challenge? Yes, but certainly one that every brewer should strive to meet because this is truly one of the great and classic world beer styles.
Style
I once heard someone at a beer festival describe the mild as being “like a bitter, but dark.” In my head, I ran across the hall and gave the miscreant a solid swing across the head with a cricket bat. Although the two styles share a country of origin, the English mild and the English bitter are not all that similar. And while the English bitter has been for centuries a mainstay of the beer world, milds have only recently mounted an impressive comeback from the “Endangered Beers” list.
Mild is, as noted above, a light beer—just not in color. It should be easy to drink, low in alcohol, and light on the tongue. Go easy on the bitterness, using just enough to balance the malt flavors, which, if you’ve chosen wisely (see below) should do most of the work for you. The style allows for a wide range of malt expressions, and the key is selecting malts that will reinforce and complement each other to add complexity without making the beer too “bulky.”
Ingredients
You’ll want a good Maris Otter as your base malt, contributing about 82 percent of your gravity points (we’re shooting for an OG of 1.040). For the remaining 18 percent (and with such a low OG we’re only talking a few ounces of each), I use equal parts amber malt, brown malt, and chocolate rye. Why those three? The amber malt adds a rich biscuit flavor with some caramel notes (it clocks in at about 28L and works better than a light crystal malt, which can taste too sweetly thin). The brown malt offers a rich toasted nutty flavor and a touch of roast, which will help create an impression of dryness. As for the chocolate rye, it’s my go-to when I want a relatively easy-on-the-palate chocolate malt. But while a lot of brewers will recommend pale chocolate, I’ve found that it can impart far more roasty character than its Lovibond number would suggest, whereas the chocolate rye is a lot softer and adds some great secondary spice notes. Done!
If you find that it’s too sweet/heavy on your end (and you’re sure you’ve gotten a full fermentation), you might consider backing off on the specialty malts and/or adding a touch of black patent for drying. I’d recommend doing it the way I’ve described first. In such a light beer, the risk is that you end up with something that tastes more like watered-down coffee than beer, so my recipe calls for a substantial dose of specialty malts that will leave behind lots of dextrins. Aim “heavy” on your specialty malts and work backward.
Hops are simple in this beer, as all we need is a little bittering. Use any hops you like in a 60-minute addition to achieve about 15 IBUs. Done and done.
Yeast is important though not really essential in this beer—only if you want a bit of ester character to come through (it is, after all, English). I like the Wyeast 1318 (London Ale III) to add a pleasant strawberry ester. It also isn’t one of the great attenuating yeasts on the market, so you can be reasonably sure you won’t thin out the beer too much! But we’ll want to be careful of diacetyl with this strain, as it’s both undesirable in the style and not a great flavor in this profile. More on that just below.
Process
You might want to try mashing a bit warmer than your usual by a degree or two to ensure you don’t end up with a too-fermentable wort. I don’t think a temperature adjustment is necessary, and this one gets my standard 152°F/66°C mash. If you end up too thin or too heavy, I’d much prefer that you address it in your grist rather than your mash tun for repeatability’s sake!
Like most beers, this one is made in the fermentor. Avoiding diacetyl will be your mission, so start cold and finish warm. I pitch this yeast at a brisk 60°F/15°C, and hold it there through the first four days of fermentation. After that I let it free-rise to finish up fermentation and clean up any diacetyl precursors that might be lurking about. Don’t be afraid of letting this one go too warm (a good reason to make it in the summer months!) once you’re out of the initial fermentation “danger zone.” With such a low gravity you can be sure of a complete fermentation pretty quickly; I usually bottle this beer 10 days after pitching, and thanks to a highly flocculent yeast, it clears up very rapidly and you can serve it almost immediately.
In Closing
Try this beer out the next time you’re in a rush and need something fast. It’s one of the great “speed beers” out there, and it provides a lot of flavor in a very “small” package! Just be sure that you don’t let it drift too far from its roots—the tendency is to go a little too “big” on it—and if you, do you’ll end up making a porter. Mild is its own beer, and properly balanced can more than stand on its own two feet.
Cheers!