Finally getting around to using these.
Doing a dark mild today and tomorrow. It's a beer I've brewede many times so I know how to expect it to taste and it showcases a number of spec malts, including most of the type I purchased from NFH.
Usual recipe is
3kg Simpsons Maris otter
150g Dingemans aromatic
150g Dingemans biscuit
250g Simpsons heritage crystal 70-80L
100g Simpsons chocolate
30g Simpsons roast barley
18g challenger@60 (6.5%aa)
10g@10
1469.
As heritage is no longer available, I now mix light, medium and dark in equal quantities.
Todays brew will feature NFH malts where applicable, tomorrow will be as usual. In about 2 weeks I should have a couple of kegs to compare.
Tasting the raw malts, my brief assessment is as follows:
Fair bit of stalk in the kilned malts but very crisp.
Roast malts are quite unevenly roasted, especially the milk choc.
Sweet and raisin flavours in the raw crystals.
Crisp biscuit flavour to the biscuit.
Quite charred/burnt toast character to the choc malts. Simpsons choc (only one I tasted side by side but I'll fix that tomorrow) is a lot more of a dark/bitter choc/roast coffee kind of flavour.
Mostly promising in the raw material, will see how it all pans out in the fermentation.