A Mild Victory!

The poll are closed, the votes have been tallied and there is a clear and decisive winner, and if I may be honest, a somewhat surprising winner it was too. The chosen beer style for this year's International Homebrew Project is Mild, more specifically Scottish mild from the 19th century. Ron posted just this morning about the differences between a Scottish mild and its English counterpart.

As I say, I am surprised that Mild came out on top, especially with pale ale and stout also options on the poll. I really thought people would go for the stout, even though we did a milk stout last year. When I first did this project, in 2010, the overwhelming choice of beer style was an American Pale Ale. I don't want to extrapolate too far as a result of these results, but it seems that the people who read Fuggled any interested in brewing history and are prepared to try something a little different and out of the ordinary (ordinary here being adding a shit load of hops and using a Belgian yeast strain). I find that really encouraging for some reason that I can't really explain.

Hopefully I will have the actual recipe for posting on Friday. The revised timeline for the project is on the IHP 2012 page, and if you are planning to take part either leave a comment there or send me an email. 

I am always surprised that more breweries over here don't do Milds, especially given that we hear so much about beer being best drunk fresh, and mild is the perfect style for that. Perhaps as a little side project to this, everyone who brews the recipe should give a few bottles to local craft brewers and see if we can stir some interest for more commercial mild?