Amber Ale Suggestions

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ThinkinDavid

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So I'm looking for a nice and balanced Amber Ale. I've just begun home brewing and I want to play with the blend of hops and malts along with alcohol content. So what I'm thinking of is a variation of my first brew recipe, a simple amber extract and Willamette hops. I want to add 1 lb. of extract and 1 lb. of dextrose to the recipe to give my yeast plenty of food and nutrients. I also want to steep some grains to play with the character. Plus some good hopping to match the malt. I do like my hops but I don't want to over power it. Here's the breakdown:

7 1/2 pounds Amber malt extract
1 lb. Pale malt
1 lb. Biscuit malt
1 1/4 oz. hops ??? (60 min)
3/4 - 1 oz. (15 and 5 min)

Simple enough?
 
I recently made an amber ale. Here is the recipe I put together:

6# Amber dry extract
1# Extra light dry extract
.5# Honey malt (steeped grain)
.5# Caramunich (steeped grain)

.5 oz Perle (50 min.)
1 oz Argentine Cascade (20 min.)
.5 oz Perle (3 min.)

1/4 tsp Irish moss (10 min.)

1 oz. Sweet orange peel (5 min. during wort cool-down)

US-05 yeast

I'm a big fan of the hop combination. I probably could have cut the specialty grains down to about 0.25 lb each. I've never experimented with alcohol content, but I think you may need to look into that a little more. The yeast should have plenty of sugars from the malt alone. Yeast will consume the dextrose first because it is a more simple sugar and ethanol becomes inhibitory to the yeast at certain concentrations depending on the yeast strain so you may need to look into champagne yeast or something. I wouldn't want you to end up with an overly sugary beer!
 
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