questions about LHBS recipe

My LHBS has prepared recipes that you can buy - instead of a kit, they give you some extract, grains, and hops, and an instruction sheet. I brewed one a couple of weeks ago and it's still sitting in secondary, but I've got some questions about their process.

The recipe:

200g (7oz) crushed dextrin malt, steeped for 15 minutes at 155F

2.3kg (5.1lbs) light LME
700g (1.5lbs) high malt glucose

bittering hops: 18g (.6oz) Cascade at the start of the boil
aroma hops: 8g (.3oz) Cascade for 1 minute

Dry Nottingham yeast

Their instructions say to heat 4L of water, steep grains for 15 minutes at 155F, remove grains, add fermentables, bring to a boil, add bittering hops, boil for 30 minutes, add the aroma hops with 1 minute remaining. Then they have you chill the wort and top it off in the primary to 23L.

My questions are: wouldn't it be better to do a bigger boil, like say even 10L? What's the difference between a small boil and a big boil? I've read a smaller boil will result in darker beer, but is that the main difference?

Also, why the 30 minute boil? I was considering doing a late addition of extract, which should apparently be done at around the 45 minute mark of a 60 minute boil. Could I do a 60 minute boil with this recipe or would that change the flavour of the hops? Would it be better to just follow their procedure but add the extract with about 8 minutes left (1/4 of 30)?

The LHBS isn't too much help with this because they seem to err on the side of convenience at the expense of quality when it comes to their methods (they were insistent I buy dry yeast cause it's "easier"..).

Anyways, I still have to wait a few weeks to find out how the beer tastes, so this is all premature.. but I'd appreciate any advice!

Thanks a lot,

Isaac

Sounds like a very low bitterness recipe. Cascades is a low alpha acid hop & 18 gm. isn't much. The high gravity of the wort and short boil time cut bittering even more.

Any of the mods you have proposed would increase the bittering. Doubling the boil volume would decrease any darkening of the batch and about double the bittering. Increasing the boil time would increase bittering, but you would lose most of the flavor components.

The main difference between a small and large boil size is the hop utilization rates. The lower the gravity of the boiled wort, the more hop bittering you will get out of the hops. As david noted, if you doubled the boil volume, you would ROUGHLY double the bittering of the hops/IBU of the recipe. You can read more about hop utilization by yahooing the terms, reading some brewing books such as Papazian's, or getting some brewing software (beersmith) and playing around...

I also agree with david that the recipe appears less than what I would consider ideal. I'm not a fan of any recipe with sugar added (i'm guessing high malt glucose sugar?!). Also, the hop schedule would probably give you a beer that has very minimal bittering characteristics. I'd suggest doing at least one of the things you mentioned above (doubling volume of boil or increasing to double the boil time) if not both. Or maybe even buy some more hops (ones that are complimentary to cascades) to use in the recipe (although thats totally up to you). I'm guessing you could also replace that high malt glucose with more dried malt extract for an improvement...

SilkkyBrew said:

The main difference between a small and large boil size is the hop utilization rates. The lower the gravity of the boiled wort, the more hop bittering you will get out of the hops. As david noted, if you doubled the boil volume, you would ROUGHLY double the bittering of the hops/IBU of the recipe. You can read more about hop utilization by yahooing the terms, reading some brewing books such as Papazian's, or getting some brewing software (beersmith) and playing around...

I also agree with david that the recipe appears less than what I would consider ideal. I'm not a fan of any recipe with sugar added (i'm guessing high malt glucose sugar?!). Also, the hop schedule would probably give you a beer that has very minimal bittering characteristics. I'd suggest doing at least one of the things you mentioned above (doubling volume of boil or increasing to double the boil time) if not both. Or maybe even buy some more hops (ones that are complimentary to cascades) to use in the recipe (although thats totally up to you). I'm guessing you could also replace that high malt glucose with more dried malt extract for an improvement...

Click to expand...

I actually meant to ask if anyone had any idea what that "hight malt glucose" was. There's nothing close in any beer calculator I can find so I can't even put this recipe in and find out things like gravities and such.

A guy I delivered a pizza to (imagine) gave me a few bottles of his brew of this recipe for a tip, and they were delicious, but I've no idea the process he followed (likely the included instructions but you never know).

I'll see how this batch turns out, and start playing with adding DME and increasing boil volume.

Thanks a lot for the help, guys!

Isaac