Scotch Ale

It's hard to balance an interest in triathlon training with an interest in beer, which is why it's been a while since we last did a home brew. However, today we finally did our third, and finally did what we had planned to do first, a Scotch Ale. We're still keeping it simple and using malt extract as the base for the beer (as opposed to doing a mash), but this time we added the hops ourselves and used some grains for flavour. Here are the ingredients that went into our brew:

• Unhopped pale liquid malt extract
• Crystal malt
• Chocolate malt
• Brown sugar (imparts a rum-like flavour says the recipe)
• Fuggle hop pellets
• Safale S-04 yeast

The wort is dark in colour, quite hoppy and very, very sweet. Actually, it's pretty awful at the moment. Though from previous experience I've found this is not a great indicator (to me anyway) of what the beer is going to taste like.