Brewing a big beer for aging

I'm looking for thoughts on the balance in this recipe or pointers to other big recipes along these lines. This should be a beer that ages for 5+ years. I'm looking for a very complex beer with notes of smoke and sweetness backed by an alcohol presence. This will probably end up with spirit soaked oak cubes in it (Bourbon & Calvados) also. The general starting point for this beer is/was HoTD Adam.

What happens if I ditch the pale malt and use just use straight Munich?

Too much or little belgian candy sugar?

Other random thoughts?


http://hopville.com/recipe/417542/wood-aged-beer-recipes/wip2

I know that people say gambrinus can convert itself, but if I were you I'd be ready to do an iodine test.

Also, you didn't list your hops, but your IBU's are going to be 53?

A full pound of smoked malt is going to be... interesting. Then again, I don't like smoke flavor in anything but meat.

If you use smoked malt and age a beer for five years, don't expect it to be smoky. I have a beer on tap now thats about 2-3 months old that I made with ~60% smoked malt that is no longer smoky. I have no experience with peat smoked though, so someone else can chime in on that.

I don't think that pale ale malt should have any issues with conversion, it's a base malt. If you used munich instead you would just get a maltier beer. Personally, I really like using munich as a base malt in darker beers.

From what I read, light candi sugar doesn't add much in terms of flavor. I would go ahead and do 2 lbs of dark candi sugar. In fact, that's what I'm doing on a beer that I'm brewing tomorrow.

@Justibone The IBU's are around 1:2 (BU:GU) from Northern Brewer and Tettnang as aroma hops. I could go higher, but don't want to create a bitter beer. This is aimed at a being a complex malty/sweet sipping beer.

@devilshprune I suspect the smoke to age out and become a background note with the others flavors versus an in-your-face-rauchbier. You're right about the light sugar, I think I'll mix amber and dark for the belgian sugars to add variety.

If you're going to age it for five years you might want to up the IBUs. Beer loses between a chunk of it's apparent bitterness every year it's aged, so in 5 years it could be overly cloying.

I would use munich for the base malt instead of pale. I agree with the others about the smoky part; after 5+ years, it won't be that smoky. The dark candi sugar won't add much, if any, color. It will add rum notes to the brew. For a beer that size, 2# is adequate. But, then I would get rid of the light candi sugar if you chose that route. I would also think about bumping up the chocolate to say 8 oz.

I didn't know that smoke faded with time... good to know!

If you age it long enough I believe the Tettnang will all but disappear, right? Still, hard to go wrong with Tet's.

Justibone said:

If you age it long enough I believe the Tettnang will all but disappear, right?

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Yeah, I'd save my money on the aroma hop addition. I'd wager it would be completely gone by the 5 year mark. Throw more in at the beginning of the boil to give you a little balance of sweet and bitter after so much aging. Give this one a long boil, too. The longer the better.

Two munichs, two smoked malts, two belgian sugars...bourbon and calvados...looks like you're trying to clone Matt. Did you brew this? What changes did you make and how did it turn out?

Sonicalligator said:

Two munichs, two smoked malts, two belgian sugars...bourbon and calvados...looks like you're trying to clone Matt. Did you brew this? What changes did you make and how did it turn out?

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I didn't brew this (yet) -- but I did brew it's little brother, my HoTD Adam clone. http://hopville.com/recipe/406726/wood-aged-beer-recipes/hotd-adam

That batch started @ 1.096 and finished at 1.018 (10.34%) with 3 wks in the primary. I'm really happy with the batch and it is not at all thin for it's final gravity. The initial taste was fantastic. I'm waffling on adding oak cubes to this batch (I'm a huge fan of Adam from the Wood).

Regarding this recipe -- yeah you can guess the origins. I chatted with Alan briefly about it (while sampling a vertical of Matt @ HoTD). He didn't say much more than what's already on the Ratebeer site -- but then again, I didn't really push too hard either

I tweaked it since I last posted, but still need to do more research on the base Munich malts to use.
http://hopville.com/recipe/417542/wood-aged-beer-recipes/wip2

Glad to hear the Adam's turning out...that's a solid recipe.

Matt info, on the other hand, is proving to be a bit more elusive. I'm going to be attempting my clone of it here shortly, and I'm also a little unsure about the Munichs. I'm guessing that since he uses Gambrinus Munich in the Adam, he probably uses both versions in Matt (10L & 30L). How much, or what percentages, though is yet to be determined.

I see that you decided to swap out the base malt for Munich. Was this just a feeling, or did you hear somewhere that Alan doesn't use pale malt in this beer?

I changed it after talking to him, of course, this was after quite a number of his beers and who knows what I remembered. I was going to start with equal parts of two munich malts and see where it goes. Not sure you can go wrong with this one as long as it ferments low enough. He's pretty friendly to home brewers if you send him an email.

Adam is one of my all time fav beers. Alan, the brewer over there is a really nice guy too. I have 60gals of Adam that i painstakingly brewed 6-7 gal at a time sitting in a barrel in my garage now. Average alcohol came out to about 10% abv. It is about 5 months old and 2.5 months in the barrel and it tastes amazing.

In my mass consumption of this beer, i learned that the key is a super long boil. While most people think 180 min, sometime he lets it go much longer to get it where he wants it.

With mine i did approx 4-5 hours of boil and when it got too strong, i added some of the late runoff that was weaker in sugar to level it out where i wanted it but not sacrifice the concentration and carmelization of the flavors.