exchanging Crystal 80L for 10L?

Hello.

I want to brew my first All Grain and I want to make Ed Wort's Haus.

My local home brew shop only carries Crystal 80L but the recipe calls for 10L.

Can I just substitute? whats the difference?

THANK YOU!!

You could substitute to get the right color, but the flavors are going to be drastically different. You could use carapils instead with little change in flavor/color contribution

Here is a good resource:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Crystal_malt

Your beer will be darker in color and more carmally in taste with the darker grain. To counter that you could run your recipe through any software even the free online software http://beercalculus.hopville.com/recipe and start decreasing the amount of crystal 80 until the SRMs (color) and the gravity matches.

The difference will be more of a caramel/toffee flavor from the 80. It will still be a good beer, just a darker, and with those flavors added, instead of the much lighter sweetness of the Crystal 10. It depends on how close to Ed's you want your brew to be, but the 80 won't hurt anything either.

If your brew shop has Cara Hell, it would be closer to the 10, though still a little darker (20-30L as opposed to 10).

To figure this out, first type in the original recipe with the 10l and that will tell you the srm and the og of the recipe. Then delete the crystal and switch with the same amount of the 80l...this will show you the change in those variable, then start backing off on the amount until you get as close as you can to the SRms of the original recipe..then if the gravit is drastically under the og of the original recipe, up the extract or the basemalt til you arrive at the og..

thanks.

even though the color will be the same with decreasing, how about the flavor?

Beer-Baron said:

thanks.

even though the color will be the same with decreasing, how about the flavor?

Click to expand...

It will be close in flavor when you back it off. You will find out that you will be using significanlty less of the darker malt, this when diluted with the rest of the recipe will make it pretty close.

This is how you learn to come up with your own recipes....

thank you. i'll run it through and report back with what I did

For example if your original recipe was 5 pounds of Bries amber extract and 3 pounds of crystal 10L that would produce a beer with a starting grravity of 1.051 and 10 srms.

To match those numbers you would have to reduce the amount of 80l to 7 ounces and raise the amount of liquid extract to 6 pounds, 12 ounces. Hope this helps.

Well I did it. It meant upping the 2 row from 8 pounds to 8.5 pounds and only adding 1 OZ of crystal 80 instead of the 8 OZ originally called for.

Is that 1 OZ of crystal going to do ANYTHING? Or is it pretty much just like removing it from the entire recipe?

I'd just use the full amount of Crystal 80 and make a not-so-pale ale, but I love the flavor Crystal 80 brings to the party.