First Shot at recipie

[Neuron_Theory]

6 lb Briess Amber DME
.5 lb Brown Sugar
.88 lb Chocolate Malt
.41 lb Carapils
.5 lb Carafa II
.5 lb Caramunich

1 oz Saaz at 60 min
1 oz Fuggles 30 min
1 oz Fuggles 15 min

OG: 1.070 (17.14)
IBU: 29.2


What does anyone think? Specialty grains will be steeped at 155 F. Too many specialty grains? Don't worry about hurting any feelings. I don't have any.

[brewerTristan]

I'm not sure at the style you are going for, but assuming that you aren't shooting for a specific style, I think your recipe is a little heavy on the dark grains. Maybe cut the chocolate malt to a half pound, or eliminate the carafa II. It is my understanding that the non-dehusked carafa II is more or less equivalent to chocolate malt. Other than that, you may want to make fuggles your main bittering hop, since that is likely to have more alpha acids than saaz. Then you could move your late hop addition to 5 mins or less in the boil and eliminate the middle hop addition. This way you could get more IBUs from the bittering addition and maximize hop aroma/flavour by putting the late hops later in the boil.

Just some thoughts. It looks like with this recipe you'll have a pretty strong amber/brown ale with not too much hop character. What yeast are you using?

[mediumsk]

looks good. just dont use saaz for bittering. a belgian yeast might be good with this.

[dmtaylor]

This looks to me like a good base for a foreign extra stout, with lots of extra "kitchen-sink" ingredients thrown in on top of it. A few things, similar to what Tristan mentioned above:

1) Too much dark malt. Get rid of either the chocolate malt, or the Carafa II. Your choice.

2) Swap the bittering and flavor hop additions. Either use Saaz for your finishing, or better yet, throw out the Saaz altogether. Its very delicate character will be entirely covered up by the dark malt. Think of Saaz as the wimpiest hop in the world -- it truly is. To get really good character out of Saaz, you either need to use it in a very wimpy beer, or you need to use a metric assload of it.

3) Get rid of the Carapils. I feel it is 95% worthless, ESPECIALLY if you are simultaneously adding sugar as you are in this recipe. Which do you want -- SLIGHTLY fuller body from the Carapils, or improved attenuation from the sugar? Pick one.

Good luck, on whatever you decide. Whatever you make, it is certain to be awesome, as you have a very good base recipe here.

[Neuron_Theory]

Thanks for the tips.

I'll cut out the Carafa and the Carapils, and switch the hops to all fuggles. I just really like saaz, but I didn't know the dark grains would cover up a lot of the flavor.

Tristan: Didn't really have a style in mind. This recipe started as a brown ale recipe I found online and have been brewing, sometimes changing one thing or another. I really changed it around for this one though, so I'm considering it as a new recipe. Using Irish Ale yeast (WY 1084)

dmtaylor: I am guessing the brown sugar will add some body so I can remove the carapils? The original recipe I started with had the carapils so I left it in. It did not have the sugar though. I just wanted to get the alcohol up on this one.

[dmtaylor]

Brown sugar will not add body -- it will do the exact opposite, and will thin out your beer. The reason being, brown sugar is about 99.9% fermentable. If you just want to jack up the alcohol, I'd use a little more base malt extract, OR keep all the same ingredients but simply reduce your volume from 5 gallons to 4.5 or even 4 gallons. You could also keep the Carapils to offset the thinning effect of the brown sugar, but as I said, it seems silly to me to use it for that express purpose, unless you already have it and just want to use it up. Anyway, even without the Carapils, with a lot of extract and an OG of around 1.070, you won't have any problem with fullness or body or head retention. Throw it in, or don't, it won't have a huge impact either way to be honest.