Planned Recipe for first All Grain Brew

Im in a week I am going to do my first all grain brew and Im posting my planned recipe to get thoughts on it.

8 lbs 2-Row Brewers Malt
1 lb 2-Row Caramel 10
1 lb Caramel Munich
3 lbs Biscuit
1 oz Hallertau (@ 50 min)
1 oz Cascade (@ 10 min)
Irish Moss
Safbrew S33

Calculations
OG 1.071
ABV 6.9 (at FG 1.018)
SRM 15.4
IBU 25.6

Any thoughts or issues with the plan?

Your recipe needs some adjusting. Biscuit malt is a nice malt, but most often you'd want to use .5 pound or so and certainly not 3 pounds.

You're doubling up the crystal/caramel malt by using both crystal 20L and cara-Munich (same basic thing).

That's a very low IBU for a 1.071 beer, but I don't really think your calculation is accurate, as I can't imagine getting 1.071 with that grainbill. I'd increase the bittering hops to be more balanced, and reconsider the cascade hops if you're going for a noble-hop type beer. The yeast strain choice is very odd for that combination of malts and hops, and it's a very "English" yeast strain.

I guess I"d think about your goals for what you want to make. A "clean" crisp beer? Citrusy hops? Neutral hops? Fruity yeast notes? Because this beer is sort of all over the place and needs to be reworked.

I am going with this in regard Safale-33.... It's been a long time since I've used it. I am assuming that it will ferment out (attenuate) at 65% to 70%, and that you're efficiency will be around the same 70%.

Yooper, is right... the Biscuit is a little much. A half-pound (8 oz) would do fine. You might also consider reducing your Caramel 10 usage... to maybe 8oz as well.... and the hop bitterness will just about match.

I assume you know how to keep your ferment temperatures under control. Clean crisp fermentations, IMO, are better in the early stages of learning brewing so that off-flavours can be learned about.


When you get a feel for your system, you can do greater varieties of stuff. You see, if the batch comes out all malty (not neccessarily sweet) and finishes high then you know it was something in your conversion. The caramel can throw your guess off. Sticking with one ingredient and perhaps a two-small ingredients when first starting out is good advice.

If you don't mind, I routinely brew with almost entirely pale malt and pinch of this and a pinch of that. I try to rely upon mash temperature and fermentation temperature adjustments to make different brews. In a lot of ways, making beer is life trying to adjust your sights on your rifle: Get your posture, eye-relief, breath control, trigger discipline in early and you are shooting good groups at 36-meteres on calm, partly-cloudy days, you can progress to shooting at 200-meters learning to adjust your windage, then you can progress to 300-meters and learn to adjust elevation, then move back to 200-meters, rinse and repeat, and finally move to 500-meters and rock the socks off of them! Annihilating your target!!

http://www.fermentis.com/SHARED/Doc_52528.pdf

I appreciate the two great responses. To be honest, I don't know anything about recipe design (as I'm sure you gathered.) I just opened up BrewMate, picked a style (Traditional Bock, even though I know this wont taste like one) and tweaked the ingredients to get the specs into what seemed like a reasonable range (ie that's why there was so much biscuit, to boost the cooler.)

Does anyone have any resources to study for recipe design? There is obviously a lot of knowledge out there on "if I add this, it will have this affect" here in this forum, but I need to get a little smarter on it on my first. I've read Palmer, but his chapter isn't dumbed down enough for me.

@chesterbelloc - You're obviously military, so I offer the following explanation for why Palmer writes over my head: I'm an infantryman, currently stationed at Fort Benning, who just returned from 3 years in Germany (which explains my recent interest in homebrewing.) Cheers.

bmw2621 said:

Im in a week I am going to do my first all grain brew and Im posting my planned recipe to get thoughts on it.

8 lbs 2-Row Brewers Malt
1 lb 2-Row Caramel 10
1 lb Caramel Munich
3 lbs Biscuit
1 oz Hallertau (@ 50 min)
1 oz Cascade (@ 10 min)
Irish Moss
Safbrew S33

Calculations
OG 1.071
ABV 6.9 (at FG 1.018)
SRM 15.4
IBU 25.6

Any thoughts or issues with the plan?

Click to expand...

Being that this is your first all-grain, I would keep it simple. A lot of people brew SMaSH (Single Malt and Single Hop) beers to get an idea of the tastes that certain malts and hops have before combining them into more complex brews. You also are going to want to get your processes down to a consistent level (mash temps and ferment temps) before going after complex recipes.

Here is what I would do to the above recipe:

9.25# Two-row
0.5# Crystal/Caramel 80 or 120 (that should get you an amber Bock-esque color)
mash at 154 or 155 for an hour to get around 1.050 OG
1 oz Hallertauer at 60min
0.5 oz at 30min
0.5 oz at 5min
Irish Mosh at 15min
use US-05 yeast (assuming you want to use a dry yeast). US-05 will be a lot cleaner, meaning it won't affect the taste as much as S33, provided your ferm temps are on the lower end of it's range.

That should give you a nice, clean beer. Just make small changes as you brew more batches until you get a feel for what those changes will do your final product!

As for reading material, Palmer is good, but I started out with Papazian's "The Complete Joy of Home Brewing". Very good intro book. Just got his "The Home Brewer's Companion" and I like that so far!

Why not just use an established recipe? I didn't know anything about designing a recipe either, so I opted to use a highly recommended recipe from someone else (Beecave's Haus Pale Ale; excellent!) for my first all-grain. If you know the recipe is good, then you'll be much better able to focus on your procedure. Well known recipes usually have great discussions attached to them so every little question you might have on it will have been discussed (temperatures, yeasts, etc.) and there is a great deal to learn there. I'm 10 or so batches into my all-grain experience and I'm still brewing from other people's recipes. I do have a much better understanding of what goes into a good recipe but with so many great recipes out there I haven't yet felt the draw to create something "new". I'm getting my process down pretty well though.

bmw2621 said:

You're obviously military, so I offer the following explanation for why Palmer writes over my head: I'm an infantryman, currently stationed at Fort Benning, who just returned from 3 years in Germany (which explains my recent interest in homebrewing.) Cheers.

Click to expand...

Yeah... I've whacked a few rounds off in my day.

Once a rifleman always rifleman.

If you would I'll restate it but using the M2 example.... You see you have to charge it twice to make sure the brass seats right, inspect your pawls and timing, count the clicks on the barrel, before you load though because you don't want to.... just kidding.

BillyBocks recipe looks good that should turn out great