I love Mild. There is just something about this style of beer that speaks to me. I love the toasty flavours with supporting malt complexity, I love the lower ABV that allows you to drink more than one, and I love that, so far, I have had good success brewing this style of beer. Mild (BJCP 11A) isn’t a style you find a lot of in bottle shops or tap lists in North America, usually if a brewery is making a low ABV beer it’s either a Session IPA or some kind of English Bitter. I’m sure part of the reason for this is that low ABV beers with low bitterness don’t tend to keep as well over time.

Historically, as the story goes, the term mild was used to refer to a beer lacking the sourness that aged beers tended to have, unfortunately they didn’t have StarSan in the 1800’s. Today, mild is defined as a style of beer by the BJCP. A Mild is a, low alcohol, malt focused beer with character ranging from lighter malt flavours like caramel and grainy up to dark chocolate or light roast. The bitterness should only play a supporting role to balance the malt, but not distract from it.

This is the second Mild I have brewed in my short brewing career. The first one turned out very well, but had a bit too much diacetyl for my taste, probably due to the WLP005 (Ringwood) strain I used. Keep in mind that low levels of diacetyl can be nice in certain English styles of beer. For this iteration however I wanted to use a cleaner yeast, so I used WLP002, which I already had on hand anyway. I have found that I really like the toasty character that brown malt lends to Brown Ales so I upped the amount from my previous recipe. The pale chocolate is there to give a nice deep brown colour and some light roast malt flavours of dark chocolate. The Crystal 65L is there to give some toffee flavours and to add some body.

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