Gerst

First post! Woo!

I've been trolling this site for the past month and want to thank everyone, this place has been such a great resource. My wife bought me a brew kit for Valentine's Day and I already have an APA bottled and a "Jahnerweizen" bubbling away in my primary! Which brings me to my question...

I have an empty carboy and want to make a clone of a hometown favorite, the Yazoo Gerst. Literally everyone that I know loves this beer, including me which is weird because it's pretty malty. I found a "recipe" online and it is obviously AG. Does anyone know what the extract equivalent of these malts are?

Yazoo Gerst Amber

50% Pale malt
31% Vienna malt
12% Cara 20 malt
7% Flaked maize

Bittered with Perle, flavor and aroma with Tettnanger

OG: 11 Plato
FG: 2.5 Plato
IBUs: 11
SRM: 5.0

For the pale/vienna malts you could substitute Munich extract, which I believe would be a mix of pale and munich extracts. I've never heard of Vienna extract, but that doesn't mean much.

You can steep the caramel 20 grains.

As for the corn, I think it has to be mashed, but if it were me, I'd just leave it out. What corn does is lighten a beer, add fermentables without much flavor. You could, I suppose, sub in a little bit of corn sugar for the flaked corn.

What kind of yeast are you using? That's very low IBUs, by the way, even for a lighter beer.

Awesome, I was wondering if steeping the corn would work. I'll probably just leave it out and add some sugar. I'll be using an ale yeast, haven't decided on a specific strand yet. I know it is very low IBUs, that's why I'm surprised that I like the beer. My tongue is in heaven with an IPA. It just tastes so smooth that even my mother and sister who are not big beer drinkers, will drink on it.

That's a really good beer, Gerst. Did you ever try your recipe?

Responding to Pappers reply above, I don't think you'll be happy with your clone if you don't include the maize. It's very present in this beer and a key component, IMHO. You could do a partial mash with a coupla pounds of pale, the maize, and C-20.

I've been considering giving this beer a try when I get a recipe I like. I was going to use WLP080 Cream Ale and ferment at around 60-62 deg.

Update: version 1.0 of my recipe was a total disaster. been in the bottle one week and is the worst beer i have ever tasted. definitely going to dump this batch... good thing its only 24 bottles.

on a happier note, i created an ipa recipe that is dry hopping right now and the hydro sample i took before dry hopping tasted incredible. also have porter in the primary for swmbo, gonna give Gerst 2.0 a shot once i rack that to secondary on some tasty home made vanilla extract. cheers!