Amber Ale recipe critique

So this will be my second batch, and I'm going for a hoppy American Amber Ale. I got a feel for the "basics" of the ingredients in the style, and put this together. I'm just not sure on the amount of chocolate malt to add, and how this hop schedule will work with this style. Hopefully I'll brew this next tuesday! Lemme know if anything in the recipe could use some tweaking:

7# Pale Malt (2 row)
2# Munich Malt
1# Crystal 40L
.5# Honey Malt
.5# Crystal 120L
2 oz Chocolate Malt

.5 oz Warrior @30 min

.5 oz Simcoe
.5 oz Amarillo @10 min

.25 oz Simcoe
.25 oz Amarillo @5min

.25 oz Simcoe
.25 oz Amarillo @0min

I couldn't find BRY-97 on Beersmith 2 so I plugged in Danstar Nottingham.

Est OG: 1.058
IBUs: 39.2
Color: 15.9 SRM
Est ABV: 5.9

I might get rid of that hop schedule and go for a single hop type throughout the boil, not sure yet. Any thoughts on this?

2 oz special b instead of Choc malt.

Move 30 minute addition to 60
10 minute to 20
Combine 5 and 0 to both at 0 minutes.

Then dry hop one (or two) ounce(s) of whatever you like.

These would be my preferences but who cares what I think? Just brew it!


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Id definitely be okay with combining the 5 and 0 min additions. But if I move the bittering to 60 the IBUs would be too high. Perhaps 40 could be better.

And out of curiosity why would you sub special b in for chocolate? I'm mostly adding it for color, not thinking too much on taste, maybe very very subtle.

Thanks for your reply!

Honey malt is pretty strong and is pretty much a crystal malt meaning you have two pounds of crystal in a ten pound grist which is a bit high for me even in an amber with munich in it. Personally thinking it will be too much, will finish too high and will be too full bodied and "sweet" tasting. That said, you need to learn on your own what you like and that's just one mans opinion. I say do it and see what you think. Half the fun of learning is doing your own thing and taste is really subjective.

JakeSparrow said:

And out of curiosity why would you sub special b in for chocolate? I'm mostly adding it for color, not thinking too much on taste, maybe very very subtle.

Thanks for your reply!

Click to expand...

It's purely a preference and is used for the same reasons. The Choc would add more color though so I see why you'd stick with it.



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I agree with INHOUSE regarding honey malt. I made a batch of brew with honey malt as 10% of the grainbill....super intense. I knocked it down to 5% in another batch...still strong. Use it sparingly unless you want it to dominate your beer.

I definitely don't want it to come out TOO sweet, and my first batch had used 1 lb of honey and 1 lb of crystal 20L with 11 lbs of pale, and it came out pretty sweet but that to me came more from not enough hops in the boil. I might skip it in this recipe to keep the OG and overall sweetness down. Also, since i don't have much to save leftover hops with, I've just substituted Simcoe for Warrior for the primary bittering and slightly modified the additions to keep the IBUs manageable and also to have perfect 1 oz numbers for the hops.