Adjusting recipes for "session" strength

Hey all, I've decided to scale my recipes from their original strength to "session" strength. Is it just as simple as keeping the same % on the malts, but with less malt or is there another technique? I know the hop bill will be scaled differently, but I'll play around with that.

i did a session amber recently - not quite at right carb level yet but tastes a little watered down

i think the key is to keeping most of the specialty/non base malts at their original level or very close and simply reduce the amount of base malt to get to the gravity level you want

Yeah in theory I'd think you would want to keep the amount of specialty malts the same so you get the same level of non-fermentables from them, but lower the base malt to the abv you're looking for. In practice I think its a lot more complicated than that, but should give you a place to start. For instance going the other way, if you wanted to take a 3% stout recipe and make it a 9% RIS, I don't think you'd want 3x the amount of roasted barley since it'd be way too strong. But I don't think the same amount would necessarily be enough to counter the alcohol content. It sounds like something you'll need to either play around with a little, or check out some of the recipes on here and see if you can find a similar session-strength beer to base your general percentages on.

I do it all the time and I usually keep all percentages the same while lowering the gravity. I try to do it proportionally, if the original recipe is 1.060 70 ibu IPA then a session version at 1.040 and 50 ibu makes sense. Your taste will be your guide, but the above method has worked really well for me.

There is a Brew Strong episode about doing this:

http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/688

It sounds simple in theory, but it's been the hardest thing for me to do!

I want more session beers- as I want to drink more than two. I've had real trouble reducing the ABV and still keeping the balance of the beer. I've found that it's much harder than I thought it would be! The body changes, the depth of the flavor changes, and so on.

I find that going from 6.5% to 5%, say, isn't such a huge jump. But for others, especially hoppy beers with a nice malt backbone, I struggle with the balance of the recipes.

Thanks all. Do yiu think there would be an intetest in setting up a database of session recipes on here? Seems like a lot of brewers are looking to do more session beers, and I'm thining this may not be a bad idea... Many of them are floating out there currently, but are difficult to find because of the way recipes are indexed... Thoughts?

bjohnson29 said:

Thanks all. Do yiu think there would be an intetest in setting up a database of session recipes on here? Seems like a lot of brewers are looking to do more session beers, and I'm thining this may not be a bad idea... Many of them are floating out there currently, but are difficult to find because of the way recipes are indexed... Thoughts?

Click to expand...

That's a great idea! It would be cool to have a thread with let's say 5 or so recipes of every style (including session and non-session styles.) I'll start a thread for it if you don't.

Sounds great, be my guest.

I brew session beers almost exclusively. They have ranged from very good to "meh."

A few tricks I use:
--Adjust the grain bill proportionally, then add in very small amounts of coloring malts, like Black Patent. 1% can really do wonders for color without a significant flavor contribution.
--Mash higher. Session beers can be watery, so mash at 155F and above to build dextrines
--Use "cheater" body builders when necessary. Maltodextrine isn't a crime. Neither are oats.
--Use a pitching rate calculator. I was getting funky flavors for a while, until I realized that I was overpitching by a huge margin. A full packet of US-05 can handle a 1.065 beer, but I only needed half a packet for my 1.035 beer. The yeast were ripping through the beer so fast that fermentation was done in a single generation (I guess...I didn't observe their mating habits).

I'd love to hear your tips and tricks!

If we open a category for session recipes, I'll post my best ones. My Dingo Session Bock and Hoppy Otter recipes were really, really good!

I'd love to see these recipes, I'm in the a similar boat.

Yeast selection also plays a huge role in session beers. Using very attenuative strain can ruin the blance of a beer and make it feel watery/thin in the mouth.

I have requested that the site administrators add a category for Session Beers. Feel free to chime in with support or suggestions.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f22/add-session-beer-category-recipe-database-271067/#post3330845