What are your Top 3 AKs?

I probably won't articulate this very well, but parti-gyle is basically where you get two different beers out of one batch of milled grains. The first runnings are your stronger wort, when you sparge you get a lower gravity wort. So you could blend all this wort together to make one beer, or you could parti-gyle and make one stronger beer and one weaker abv beer out of one batch of grains.

 

That helps. I've heard of this process, but just didn't know the technical term.

 

I would assume that they didn't. In my experience, most professional brewers are pretty ignorant of brewing history and styles and just tend to pull names out of their asses for the most part. Maybe they saw AK on an old beer sign or something and knowing nothing about the actual beer, thought "That would be a cool name for a mild, right?" This is why the world of beer is so convoluted and contradictory. Brewers simply don't care enough to be consistent in anything.

 

here in the states we will no longer be able to enjoy our AKs after the recent ban....wait. wrong AK.

 

Thanks for the history lesson! I appreciate this thread.

 

From Mr. Pattinson:

"AK is another of those things I obsess about. Let's make this clear right at the start: it isn't Light Mild. AK is one of the types of Light Bitter Beer that appeared in the final decades of the 19th century. As drinkers began to demand lighter, less-alcoholic beers, brewers developped a new class of beers .

A standard Pale Ale of the 1880's had an OG in the range of 1060º to 1065º. If you brewed it properly, it took several months to be ready for sale. AK was 1045º to 1050º and was tapped within a couple of weeks. It was at the forefront of the new class of Running Bitters. After 1880, brewers had a clear incentive to turn their beers around quicker. The new system introduced that year taxed beer based on the gravity of the wort before fermentation. Brewers settled up with the excise at the end of ever y month. Which meant that the tax would have been paid on a fully-matured Pale Ale months before the beer could be sold.

In 1900, AK was as common a beer name as IPA, especially in the South. Cheaper than full-strength PA, it was often one a brewery's best-selling beers. Only one remains: McMullen's AK. I can remember just one other being around in my drinking life, Hole's (later Courage) AK, brewed in Newark. So where did they all go?

They were the victim of falling gravities after 1914, similar to Porter. Breweries had a habit of retaining the name of their most prestigious Bitter, usually PA, as they cut gravities and culled their beer range. AK, being the bottom of the Bitter pile, was often the first to be cut.

I'd love to see AK make a comeback, though I doubt it ever will. At least commercially. There's no reason why you home brewers can't bring it back to life at home." -bold added.

 

I would have been more concerned if they attached the AK moniker to a Stout, and their commercial description of the AK Mild DID show that they checked it out and didn't pull it out of their asses.

I agree though, consistency with given styles is a major concern in the US. Stop throwing butt loads of hops into every style! Maybe, there wouldn't be a hop shortage to deal with.

 

this one seems to actually have a lot of hops thrown in it, though. All of Ron and Kris's recipes are at least 1:1 BU:GU, and one had 57 IBU in a 1:041 beer! Though the dry-hop amounts were kind of low.

 

The 47 is dangerous and simple, nimble yet reliable, and obviously available somewhere. In England these are the beers that I love. I will not utter the S word, but drinking a bunch and talking without becoming stupid, is an English specialty.

 

I checked my review, here's what I said back in 2010 but I have had it since. Not a lot of hoppiness to my palate:

I had this on tap last night at the local Old Chicago.

It poured a clear dark amber brown with a small head of foam and had some decent lacing.

The smell had some notes of biscuit, light caramel malt, and a slight hint of some hop bitterness.

The taste had a nice biscuit malt flavour, not overly done, with caramel malt sweetness and very light bitterness in the background. A very nice flavourful Dark Mild..I had 4 20oz pints(served in the Guinness glasses); I wanted to get a pitcher after the first one but the server said..pitchers are only for domestics! LOL!!

Light bodied but not too light, it had a medium light amount of carbonation which worked well.

Drinkability? 3.9%abv, baby! Tasty and very easy to drink. I'll be drinking more until it is gone.

 

For those who care, as a result of this thread, Martyn Cornell revised his AK blog entry here:
https://zythophile.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/second-thoughts-on-the-mysterious-origins-of-ak/

(Looks like this thread actually had way more impact than the average thread here - not bad with all things considered.)