American Brown Ale...your opinion?

Friends:

I brewed this recipe last weekend and mentioned about it in the AG forum, though I didn't get too big of a response there as it was quite a long post...so I hope y'all can give some feedback here.

Just wondered what you thought of this as an american honey brown recipe? What might you do different? Do you think the malt/hops will complement or detract from the recipe? Too nutty...will it fight against the honey?

Your thoughts greatly appreciated...

American Honey Brown Ale:

Projected efficiency - 75%
Projected gravity - 1.060
Estimated color - 15.7 SRM
Bitterness - 40 IBU
Projected alcohol - 6.0% ABV

10# British 2-row pale
1# Crystal 60L
12 oz. Cara-Pils/Dextrine
4 oz. Chocolate Malt
4 oz. Victory Malt
-------------
1 oz. Northern Brewer (60 min)
1 oz. Cascade (30 min)
.5 oz. Amarillo Gold (1 min)
.5 oz. Cascade (1 min)
1# Granulated Honey mixed at flame-out
-------------
Wyeast 1056 - California Ale yeast

Single infusion mash at 152F and batch sparge.

This beer is on primary right now, so hopefully I'll give you a status report in a couple of weeks. I'd planned on dryhopping with a little bit of Amarillo or Cascade, but I'm a little worried about it fighting the malt too much. What do you think?

only thing I would try different next time would be changing up the hops a bit. Too much citrus for a brown I think. But then again, if you like the way it turns out, who cares right?

Looks good. Gravity is right at the high side limit. IBU's are dead on (though I agree with Chimon on the citrus flavored hops) and the color looks just a bit on the light side. SRM of 15.7 vs a range of 18-35.

Let us know how it turns out.

Thanks, guys. Yeah, that was my concern as well, and so I wanted to play the dry hop by ear. I'll likely draw some off as I go to secondary and see if I'm going to be hiding the malt too much, but my first thought is that I'll likely forgo the dryhop.

Still, the hydrometer sample tasted nice, both before boil and after it.

More than anything, I wanted this brew to be an experiment, to see how the chocolate, victory, and honey additions worked together and to see how the hops played against it.

Thanks!

An American Brown can have some citrus character to it, that's fine. They tend to be hoppier than English browns. I tend to look at them as not really being very roasty in character, just kind of a good, strong malt base with some hop flavor. Personally, I'd toss in a pound or two of Munich (subbing for the base malt) to bump up that character.