Recipe Opinions

So after brewing 2 batches and one waiting until Monday, I decided to piece together my own recipe. My last batch (Irish Stout) and the one I am brewing on Monday (Red Hook Clone) are both partial mash kits from Midwest, so I decided my first researched recipe should be partial as well. This is going to be an Amber Ale and after toying around with Beer Calculus, I came up with this:

5 gal batch
6lbs Unhopped Amber LME (Briess)
1lb Amber DME (Briess)
1lb Crystal 60 (Briess)
10oz Special (Briess)
4oz Roasted Barley (Simpson's)

.75-1oz Galena- bittering
1oz Cascade- aroma
Irish Moss
Gypsum

White Labs California Ale Yeast

I already bought everything, due to Midwest having a promotion for Veteran's Day week with 20% off for current and former military (former Navy) and the sale ends tomorrow. I am really just looking for some opinions or tips for when I build my next recipe. So whatcha think?

I would cut your crystal to 1/2lb or less. There's already a lot of crystal in the extract. You don't need the gypsum. Water additions don't really do anything for extract based beers. Everything else looks okay.

Kudos for jumping in to designing your own recipe - for me, recipe design may be the most enjoyable part of the brewing process. You can learn alot about how ingredients impact the final flavor of your beer by designing the recipe yourself. For this recipe, two general things jump out to me. First, this cannot be a partial mash recipe. because you don't have any base malt. For a true mash (partial or full), you need some base malt (e.g. pale malt, pilsner malt, Vienna malt, etc). Looks like you have an extract with steeping grains recipe...which will work just fine.

Second, if you want as much control as possible over the ingredients that go into your beer, ditch the amber extract and use only light or extra light extract. You can build the color and flavors from the specialty grains. As it is, you don't know what went into the amber extract (nor how much). Is there crystal malt in it? Probably, so the percent crystal malt in your beer just went up. Are there roasted malts in there? Maybe. With light extract, you pretty much know it is only pale malt. Remember that color and flavor are not the same - you can get the same color by using different malts. Ultimately you want to think about the flavors and not just hitting the right color.

Your recipe above will turn out well. It might be on the fuller/sweet side because of all the amber extract and the crystal malt, but you'll start to learn how much crystal malt you like. Some folks like to use a lot, others less. But I found it takes time to figure it out.

I would cut the roasted barley in half. In an Amber Ale, you're looking for the roasted barley to contribute some red hue to the beer, and maybe some toastiness. If you're going to use 4 oz., I'd steep it for less time than the other specialty malts. I too would ditch the amber malt extract.

For converting to grain, take your LME/DME and divide by .75. You have a lot of grain in this with an estimated starting gravity in excess of 1.071 (could be nearly 8% ABV)

Your color at this point is nearly BLACK. Between your Crystal60 and the Roasted Rye something has to give. I agree w/pieman, cut the Roasted Barley! You could cut the Rye to .1# and meet your color. You could also cut the Crystal60 in half and still be at 18SRM and save a few $$ for use later.

What rye? He's got no rye in his original recipe.

skwieland said:

For converting to grain, take your LME/DME and divide by .75. You have a lot of grain in this with an estimated starting gravity in excess of 1.071 (could be nearly 8% ABV)

Your color at this point is nearly BLACK. Between your Crystal60 and the Roasted Rye something has to give. I agree w/pieman, cut the Roasted Barley! You could cut the Rye to .1# and meet your color. You could also cut the Crystal60 in half and still be at 18SRM and save a few $$ for use later.

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The extract is going to get him to about 1.052. With just steeping the grains, he might get to 1.057, with mashing he might get to 1.063. I don't know where you get 1.071 from.

What rye?

I agree with others, you might want to reduce the crystal and Roast Barley.

The Special Roast can self convert, so you can mash with it. I don't know how high it's diastatic power is, and whether it will convert the starches of the Crystal and the Roast (might be another good reason to reduce them). With 'borderline' diastatic power, you might want to mash longer to improve conversion. Try mashing for about an hour.

Thanks for the advice guys. I will cut the Crystal and Barley in half. I would had liked to mash the base (2-row), but I am not setup for it nor am I experienced enough yet. I may go with the amber LME with a base DME and save the amber DME for later. All of those ingredients in Beer Calculus gave me a much lower gravity than 1.071, more like 1.063 with an ABV of 6% or so. So will cutting those two grains (Crystal and Barley) in half with a Light DME sub for the Amber help this recipe out? I will plug it into Beer Calculus and see what I get.

1 lb of Light DME instead of Amber, 8 oz of Crystal 60, and 2 oz of Roasted Barley in Beer Calculus and I came up with this:

1.055 OG
SRM of 18
38.7 IBUs
5.6% ABV

I also get the same results with this:

Substitute the 6 lbs of Amber LME with 3.3 lbs of Briess Light Gold
3 lbs of Light DME
1 lb of Crystal 60
10 oz Special
2 oz of Roasted Barley

My question is will I get that much better flavor by not using the Amber LME and instead use the Light LME with a whole lb of Crystal versus using the Amber DME with only 8 oz of Crystal (recipe up top)?

BlindFaith said:

My question is will I get that much better flavor by not using the Amber LME and instead use the Light LME with a whole lb of Crystal versus using the Amber DME with only 8 oz of Crystal (recipe up top)?

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I think so. The crystal malt will likely be fresher than the amber dme and it's less processed. As mentioned, it gives you more control as the brewer.

Captain Damage said:

What rye? He's got no rye in his original recipe.

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Should have said BARLEY like the sentence before. Maybe i should not mulititask while responding... rye was MY ingredient!

MANY APOLOGIES for the confusion I may have caused.