A Summer Golden Ale with Citra and El Dorado

There's a certain kind of beer I find myself craving every time the weather turns warmer - something pale, aromatic, and just sessionable enough that you can have two without making promises you can't keep. This Golden Ale ticks all of those boxes.

I built this recipe around a classic English malt backbone, but gave it a decidedly modern hop treatment: a decent Citra and El Dorado hopstand, followed by a generous dry hop. The result sits somewhere between a traditional British golden ale and something a bit more contemporary. It's crisp, it's tropical, and it disappears from the keg at an alarming rate.

Batch Size: 6 gallons (23L)
ABV: 4.0%
Boil Time: 60 mins
OG: 1.044
FG: 1.014
IBUs: 28

Malt Bill

The Golden Promise provides a lovely biscuity base malt character, while the CaraGold adds body and a touch of sweetness. Wheat malt helps with head retention and gives the beer a nice creamy mouthfeel.

Golden Promise is one of my favourite base malts - it's got this gentle biscuity, slightly honeyed quality that works brilliantly in pale styles. Paired with Warminster's CaraGold for a touch of body and sweetness, and a small amount of wheat for head retention and mouthfeel, it's a simple but well-considered grain bill.

Hops

Dry Hop

Magnum is just the workhouse bittering hop here - clean and neutral, it does its job without drawing any attention to itself. The real interest comes from Citra and El Dorado, both in the hopstand and the dry hop. Citra brings the usual tropical punch - mango, passionfruit, grapefruit - while El Dorado adds something a bit more floral and candy-like that I really like in paler styles. Using Cryo in both additions means you're getting seriously concentrated hop flavour without the grassy, vegetal notes that can come from throwing huge amounts of pellets at a beer.

Yeast

• Windsor Yeast by Lallemand (LalBrew)
• Fermentation Temperature: 18-20°C

Windsor yeast is a great choice for this style, providing a fuller body and slight fruity esters that complement the hop character while remaining clean. I was hoping that it would ferment a bit drier, but I quickly learnt that Windsor yeast isn't able to metabolise maltotriose, leaving it slightly fuller than expected.

Brew Day

The Night Before

I get the prep done the night before wherever possible - it just makes brew day much less frantic. That means filtering my water and treating it with Sodium Metabisulphate to deal with any chlorine and chloramine, weighing out the grain bill, and making sure everything's clean and ready to go.

Mashing

Strike water into the Grainfather at 66°C, then in with the grains. I mash for 55 minutes, which gives the enzymes plenty of time to do their thing. The wheat malt is worth having in here - even a small amount makes a real difference to head retention and mouthfeel in a pale beer like this.

After 55 minutes, I raise to 75°C for a 10-minute mash out before draining.

Boil

This was a 60-minute boil and the Magnum hops went in right at the start. At 15 minutes remaining I add a Protafloc tablet and a Servomyces capsule - the former for clarity, the latter for yeast health. Neither is strictly essential, but both are good practice.

Hopstand

This is where the flavour in this beer really gets built. Once the boil is done, I let the wort cool to around 80-85°C, then add all the hopstand additions - 50g of Citra pellets and 20g of El Dorado Cryo. I whirlpool for 20 minutes, which lets all that aromatic goodness extract without contributing much bitterness. At that temperature, isomerisation is minimal but aroma extraction is excellent.

Then it's straight onto the wort chiller to get down to pitching temperature.

Fermentation and Dry Hopping

OG came in at 1.044, right on target. I pitched the Windsor, sealed up the fermenter, and let it do its thing at 18-20°C. After three days of active fermentation, in went the dry hops - 40g each of Citra and El Dorado Cryo. I track fermentation with my Tilt Hydrometer logging to Brewfather via Tilt Pi, which makes it easy to see when things are winding down.

Total fermentation time was around 14 days. FG landed at 1.014, giving a clean 4.0% ABV.

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Hazy gold - not murky, but not bright either. Good persistent white head from the wheat malt.

Aroma: This is where this beer earns its keep. Big tropical fruit - mango, passion fruit, a bit of pear from the El Dorado - with a softer floral note underneath. There's just enough malt to keep it grounded.

Taste: Light and crisp up front, with a moderate bitterness that builds slightly but stays pleasant. The hop flavour follows through well from the nose - all that tropical fruit - then finishes dry. The Windsor leaves a subtle malt softness that stops it feeling thin.

Reflections

I'm really happy with how this one turned out. The Citra and El Dorado combination is one I'll be coming back to - they complement each other well, and the Cryo additions in particular deliver a lot of hop impact without any of the roughness you can get from over-dry-hopping with standard pellets.

If I brewed this again, I'd be curious to try it with a different yeast - something like Verdant IPA yeast to see how a more estery strain interacts with those hop varieties.

But honestly? This is a very drinkable beer. It's gone from the keg faster than almost anything I've brewed this year. That's usually the best review a homebrew can get.

Cheers! 🍻