A formative beer in Mike Clayton-Jones’ brewing career and a nod to Jason and Craig from Big Shed Brewing in Adelaide, Seven Dollar Saturday is a delicious milk stout for you to make your own.

Here is the original recipe for Seven Dollar Saturday, our first milk stout and one that formed the basis of several more we have produced over the years. 

In recent times the style has fallen out of favour, but it has always had a soft spot in my heart.  Lactose is really easy to overdo, so is intentionally understated on this recipe to avoid the gritty-ness that it can bring when used too heavily.

I have omitted any water additions, as this will depend very much on what you start with. For reference, we are based in Reading with some of the hardest water I have experienced – as it happens great for making dark beer, so we typically don’t do much in the way of water treatment beyond lactic acid to target the right pH.

If you are using water treatment, I would always recommend using component salts and acids over catch all water treatment products, to aid in control and allow you to tweak very specific ratios. 

For what it’s worth and more broadly speaking if you are wondering what to spend your money on when it comes to homebrewing, I would always recommend starting with good quality, reliable and efficient temperature control for fermentation and work back from there. 

By all means feel free to tweak the below to suit you, the beauty of homebrewing is you can literally make what you want. 

My ethos was to change one thing each time you brew the same recipe to see the effect, if you change five things targeting a specific profile in the finished beer, it becomes much more difficult to know which change had what impact and then to take that on to your next recipe. 

Happy brewing!

Seven Dollar Saturday

Target OG: 1.062
Target FG: 1.020
Efficiency – 75%
Batch size – 25l

Grist
Extra Pale – 4.8kg - 80%
Chocolate – 0.6kg - 10%
Pale Chocolate – 0.24kg - 4%
Light Crystal – 0.24kg - 4%
Flaked Oats – 0.12kg - 2%

Mash
Target Mash temp – 68C
Liquor:grain ratio – 2.8l/kg
Mash time – 60 minutes
Mash liquor – 16.8l
Sparge liquor – 18.2l (75c)
Collect 28l wort

Boil – 60 minutes
Boil hops
60 minute - Columbus – 20g - 15%AA target IBU – 32
15 minute – Lactose 0.5kg
10 minute – Hallertau Mittelfruh – 6g – 3.75%AA target IBU – 0.8
10 minute – yeast vit – as directed based on product specs
5 minutes – Hallertau Mittelfruh – 12g – 3.75%AA target IBU – 1.9

Fermentation & conditioning
Yeast – S-04  Fermentis/Safale English Ale
Pitch temp – 18C
Free rise – 20C

Cold crash to 10C at end of fermentation, if possible transfer off yeast cake and chill to 0C for minimum 7 days. 

If you have the ability to force carb in FV before packaging, I feel it gives you far greater control over your finished beer, and with modern homebrew kit being that much more advanced than the simple bucket set ups I started with that may be possible.  

That said, use your standard carbonation and packaging method as this is very much equipment and personal preference dependant.