Not a week goes by without our customer service team receiving an email asking do we have an idea of how to brew Ghost Ship by Adnams. So we felt it was long due to find out as much as we could about how this popular citra beer is brewed.

As part of our Brew With Us series we reached out to the team at Adnams to find out more, they kindly shared their recipe with us and invited us along to visit the brewery so we could see exactly how it is brewed.

Ghost Ship is brewed with Pale Ale, Rye Crystal and Cara Malts which add depth and those moreish, biscuity hints we all know and love. A blend of Citra and other American hop varieties provide Ghost Ship’s bold citrus flavours of lemon and lime, aromatic elderflower notes, and that famous hoppy finish.

 

---

Ingredients Included

Simpsons Best Pale Ale Malt
Simpsons Caramalt
Simpsons Malts Red Rye Crystal

Total Malt Bill: 4790g

Chinook Pellets (35 grams)
Cascade Pellets (150 grams)
Citra Pellets (142 grams)
Pilgrim T90 Hop Pellets (10 grams)
LalBrew Farmhouse – Dried Yeast 11g (1 packs)
SafAle S-04 11.5g (2 packs)

---

Method

Beer Style (main): British Ales
Beer Style (sub): English-Style Summer Ale
Batch Size: 23
Original Gravity: 1.046
Final Gravity: 1.010
ABV %: 4.5
IBU: 45

THE MASH
Temperature °C: 65
Length (mins): 60
Out temp °C: 75
Out time (mins): 10

THE BOIL
Boil time (mins): 60 minutes

Additions and timing:

60 min – 10g – Pilgrim
5 mini – 35g – Chinook

Hop Stand – 20 min long
50g Citra
150g Cascade

Secondary additions and timing:

Day 3 of fermentation – Dry Hop – 92g Citra
Dry hops are added warm for the last 3-4 days of fermentation.

Yeast: 2x S-04, 1 x Lallemand Farmhouse
Fermentation temperature/steps: Pitch 2 x S-04 at 19c, Day 4 take a reading after dry hop, you are looking to achieve 1.020, at this stage then add the Farmhouse yeast. Aiming to achieve to achieve 1.010 by day 7, once OG cold crash to 2c and dump hops and trub.

Comments:

Adnams Ghost Ship

Our citrus pale ale is approachable, moreish, and hauntingly good on any occasion. Originally brewed as a Halloween seasonal, interest lingered, like its lemony flavours, and it is now our best-selling beer. In the foggy past, patrons of The Bell Inn, our 600-year-old pub in Walberswick, told tall tales of ghostly ships that haunted the shore. The seeds of these stories were likely sown by smugglers trying to scare people away, but they later became the inspiration for everyone’s favourite eerie brew.

In 2010 the brewing team was asked to make a seasonal beer for Halloween. There were rumours of an old bottle of Deathly Pale Ale in Southwold’s Red Lion, and the idea was to make something that resembled it. Deathly Pale Ale’s label featured a skull and crossbones, but it looked like poison and was swiftly changed before release. After encountering similar issues, the beer remained pale, but the design was reviewed and thoughts turned to shipwrecks and ghost stories. Earlier that year, our master brewer, Fergus spent and evening talking hops with Brooklyn Brewery’s Brewmaster, Garratt Oliver, and the team from Brewers Select Group. They raved about a new American hop variety called Citra, and he decided to use it at the next opportunity. We built Ghost Ship’s recipe around Citra, and it went down a storm. In 2011 we brought it back, but it went so well, we barely made it to Halloween before we ran out. In 2012 it became a permanent beer in our range, and it’s now our best-seller.

This is not simple beer to make as you will see from the videos we made at Adnams, they have a very unique dual strain house yeast that is core to the flavours of their beer.

For those of you that wish to dial the recipe fully in the Adnams team has also shared their water profile which is based on them using very hard Thames water, and as you will hear in the video they embrace their water to give their beer an individual terroir.

Alkalinity 70ppm
Calcium 150ppm
Magnesium 10ppm
Chloride 80ppm
Sulphate 270ppm

Be sure to watch our BrewWithUs videos on YouTube to get the full information about this beer and recipe.