Honey Ale Recipe (Comments/Help Appreciated!)

I decided to try my hand at designing a recipe for the first time, and wanted to run it past you guys. Tell me what you think..

Malt:
4.00 lbs Light Liquid Extract
1.50 lbs Amber Dry Extract
0.75 lbs Honey Malt
0.50 lbs Honey

Hops:
1.25 oz Tradition for bittering - 60 min
0.50 oz Hallertauer for Aroma - 15 min

Yeast:
1 pck German Ale Yeast




My goal is to have a cross between an amber and a light that has a distinct honey flavor. I would also like it to be a little sweet to the taste, with a sweetness a little more distinct than most beer's... something along the lines of a Leinie's Sunset Wheat. Is having Honey Malt and Honey overkill? Is the lactose needed to make it sweeter, or is it unnecessary?

Questions/Comments/Concerns are greatly appreciated, as I could really use the feedback. Thanks!

-Jake

A common misconception is that adding honey will give you a good honey flavor. In reality, with a half pound of honey in that recipe you'd get indistinguishable results using corn sugar instead of the honey. The honey malt you have will give you a good amount of honey flavor though.

That being said, with all those specialty malts you'll probably need something to dry it out. I don't think you need the lactose, and if I were you I'd drop the crystal 10L too. That honey malt is going to add a lot of unfermentable sweetness, and the Amber extract will have some as well, so although I don't know exactly what you're going for, I think it'll be plenty sweet without the crystal 10L.

How big is your boil? And how much hop bitterness do you want from this? It seems to me that you should drop a half ounce to an ounce of bittering hops depending on when you're adding the late additions and how big your boil is. With a 2.5 gallon boil, the changes I suggested above, and your hop additions at 60 min and 15 min, I'm coming up with 20 IBUs for 1 oz. tradition and 28 IBUs for 1.5 oz tradition. This is also dependent on the %AA of your hops, but I used the hopville calculator defaults.

For reference, the online sources I found put Sunset wheat at 16-19 IBUs.

I modified the recipe, getting rid of the lactose and crystal malt, lowering to 1.5 oz bittering hops, and added .5 lbs of honey malt to make it a little heavier/darker. I planned to boil the entire 5 gallon batch at once. My iBrewmaster App puts it at 37.88 IBU's?

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it. Keep it coming!

-Jake

If you're doing a full boil you'll get better hop utilization, so you may even want to drop it more. For reference, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is 37 IBUs.

I can say that for me personally 1.5 lbs of honey malt is way too sweet, way sweeter than Sunset wheat. I'd advise you to keep it at one pound, but it's your beer so you can do whatever you want with it. If you do keep the extra half pound then I would say you'll need the bitterness of the hops to balance it.

I haven't actually used the honey malt yet. I have about a pound at home for a recipe I am getting ready to try, so I have been doing similar research to what you are doing. The general consensus with regards to honey malt seems to be that you probably don't want to use more than 1/2 lb. It sounds like a little goes a long way. With the exception of 1, all the recipes I've seen use 1/2 lb or less. The exception was a cream ale recipe that used 3/4 lb balanced with some 7.5% Cluster hops as a 60 min addition. My guess is that 1 lb is going to be really sweet tasting.

As for the actual honey, slowbie is right. Honey adds no actual honey flavor, and doesn't really even add much sweetness. It just ferments out for the most part. And I'd also suggest skipping the lactose.

I do like the idea of hallertau for aroma. I was toying with the idea of using hallertau or Mt hood for my recipe.

The palatable sweetness is what I'm going for, so I might bring it down to 1.00 -1.25 lbs of honey malt, with 1.75 oz of tradition to balance it out?

Jakeedaman21 said:

The palatable sweetness is what I'm going for, so I might bring it down to 1.00 -1.25 lbs of honey malt, with 1.75 oz of tradition to balance it out?

Click to expand...

If you go with 1lb or more, report back with the results. I'd be interested to know how sweet it is with that much honey malt.

I'm going to take back all my advice RE: honey malt and say that you probably want to top out at .75 lbs. in five gallons. I do 2.5 gallon batches and right now I have one going with some honey malt. I mistakenly remembered putting .5 lb honey malt, but it was actually .25 lbs, and although the beer isn't done yet, the sample is pretty sweet. My IBU levels were mid 20s to low 30s. So I would advise cutting the honey malt to .75 lbs and the hops to 1.25 oz. Again, I don't know your preferences, but I think a pound is going to be too much for just about anyone.

Ok, I modified it again... I reduced the Honey Malt to .75 lbs, and upped the light LME to a 4.00 lbs can, as well as bringing the amber DME to 1.50lbs. Bittering hops reduced to 1.25 oz, which brings it to 33ish IBU's as well as my desired color/weight that I am looking for.