newcastle clone recipe advise

Hey guys, any advise on the following recipe? I purchased a Newcastle clone from Northern brewer but I did some tinkering, substituting some Maris Otter for DME and changing it to PM. Also I changed the hops. the kit came with an ounce of Argentinian cascade for bittering, but EKG seemed a bit more appropriate for an English brown. and I'm throwing in a bit of fuggles at 5 minutes for a touch of aroma

3 lbs Maris Otter
.25 lbs crystal 60
.25 lbs. Simpsons Dark Crystal
.25 lbs. Chocolate Malt
.25 lbs. Weyermann CaraRed

I'm going to mash at 152 for 60 minutes with 1.25 gallons of strike water, and then do 2 1.25 gallon sparges, aiming to collect about 3 gallons of wort.

Boil:
6 lbs light LME
1 oz EKG 6.00 AA 60 min
Irish moss 15 min
.5 of Fuggles 5 min

Safale s-04 english ale yeast (2 week old yeast cake from an imperial red ale)


any thought or suggestions are welcome!

I don't have any input on your recipe, other than to observe that it sounds tasty!

I just want to observe that Newcastle Brown Ale is a blend of a pale beer and a dark brown beer. The pale beer is available in bottles, but the dark beer is brewed only for blending into Newcastle Brown Ale.

So there really isn't a way to scale a recipe and clone Newcastle Brown Ale. There are a bunch of recipes bouncing around the 'net, though. In fact, I bet if you searched the HBT recipe archive you'd find a couple.

One I've tried that gets close is this:

Newcastle Brown Ale ::: 1.050/1.014 (5.5 Gal)

Grain Bill (75% Efficiency assumed)

9 lbs. - Maris Otter - 2 Row malt
2 oz. - Chocolate malt
2 oz. - Crystal malt (60L)
1.5 oz. - Black Patent malt

Hop Schedule (25 IBU)

1/2 oz. - Target @ 10%AA - 60 min.
1/2 oz. - East Kent Goldings - 15 min.
Yeast

Danstar Nottingham Ale
Mash/Sparge/Boil

Mash at 154° for 60 min.
Sparge as usual
Boil for 60 minutes
Cool and ferment at 68° to 71°
Recipe adapted and changed slightly from the one found in Clone Brews

But I must report that it's not an exact clone. Close, but not exact.

I think your clone will also get close. But I think it's going to be quite a bit stronger, darker and sweeter.

YMMV!

Bob

Bob's recipe looks spot on. I'd go for that one.

Thanks for the input guys!

I went with what I had, since I had it on hand. After sampling the wort, I think Bob's right, it's going to be a bit stronger and sweeter. I hadn't realized that there was such dark malt in Newcastle, but my friend brought over a 6 pack and upon drinking them, it looks like Bob's would be just about right.

NBA is brewed with Maize.

BobNQ3X said:

...I bet if you searched the HBT recipe archive you'd find a couple.
Bob

Click to expand...

Here ya go

I knew I'd seen it somewhere! Nicely done, BM!

Bob

P.S. I have to admit I've a great deal of trouble of calling you BM. Sounds vaguely scatological. But it's easier to type than Biermuncher.

Newcastle Brown Ale ::: 1.050/1.014 (5.5 Gal)

Grain Bill (75% Efficiency assumed)

9 lbs. - Maris Otter - 2 Row malt
2 oz. - Chocolate malt
2 oz. - Crystal malt (60L)
1.5 oz. - Black Patent malt

Click to expand...

I did essentially this recipe as a porter, but with DME instead of the maris otter and it was a 2.5 gallon batch so actually only used 3lbs of the DME. Anyways my point is that I bottled my "porter" today and it looks and taste like Newcastle. My color did not turn out at all and I used 4oz of chocolate and crystal but with half as much base malt as this recipe has! Not sure what happened to the color of my beer as even in the recipe calculator I used said it was suppose to be within the SRM ranges for a robust porter!

Anyone ever lose color or did not end up "extracting" enough color from their grains while steeping?

BierMuncher said:

Here ya go

Click to expand...

Two thumbs up on this recipe, it's a proven winner.