Hops and specialty grain amounts for English ale recipe

Hi,

I’m quite new to brewing, and would like to ask for some advice on an extract + specialty grain recipe for an English brown ale that I’m trying to put together. My aim is to get a beer with a pleasantly rounded maltiness that is not too bitter, and not too high in alcohol (somewhere between 4.0 and 4.5% ABV).

I’ve used brewersfriend.com to come up with the following:

Batch size = 22 L
Boil size = 7 L (I could increase this by a few litres)
Boil time = 60 min

Fermentables
2.3 kg Light Dry Malt Extract
0.3 kg Inverted Demerara Sugar (made according to the unholymess blog and cooked at 240 F for around 90 min to give a dark, partly caramelised invert sugar)

Specialty grains
0.5 kg Crystal Malt 80 L
0.1 kg Chocolate Malt
0.2 kg Victory Malt

Hops
1 oz Challenger at 60 min
0.5 oz Fuggles at 10 min
0.5 oz Styrian Goldings at 10 min
0.5 oz Fuggles at flame-out
0.5 oz Styrian Goldings at flame-out

I was planning on using Safale 04 yeast.

There are two specific areas where I’d be grateful for advice:

1. Does the amount of specialty grains relative to total fermentables sound reasonable? I want a pleasantly malty / nutty / slight caramel taste, so not an overly dry beer, but neither do I want to go overboard and end up with a sweet beer. Would I do better to adjust the proportions in some way?

2. On the hops, I feel rather lost, not least because the brewersfriend.com calculator gives both Tinseth and Rager IBUs, which always seem to disagree with each other (North English Brown Ale is given as having a target IBU of 20-30 on both scales). Will I risk getting an overly bitter beer using 1 oz Challenger for 60 min, so would it be better to tone that down? Does it make sense to split the Fuggles and Goldings additions into half at 10 min and half at flame-out, or won’t that make much of a difference? Am I perhaps adding too much complexity, or simply too much hop flavour/aroma by adding a total of 3 oz of hops?

Any comments or advice would be very welcome! I have already read quite a lot on various forums on brown ale recipes, which led me to reduce the total quantity of specialty grains from what I’d originally had in mind, but it’s done little to help me judge whether I’m doing the right thing with the hops.

Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure how much I can help with the recipe design, but I have found a way to mitigate the tinseth/rager discrepancy in Brewers Friend. Once you setup your hop additions, you can split your extract additions in two, with one added at the beginning of the boil and the other set to 'late addition.' While keeping the total amount of extract the same as you have now, you can play with adding more early or late until the two IBU figures are about equal. Tinseth seems to take into account the boil gravity more than rager, so if the tinseth value is higher than rager, move more of your extract to the beginning of the boil and less late. You will see the tinseth value start to drop closer to the rager.

I've found this to be helpful in getting a better handle on how bitter the beer will be instead of it being a guessing game. The one downside is that the two calculations will still show differing IBU values for each individual additions, but the total will be similar. Using dry extract also makes this much easier to measure out, unless you end up splitting the liquid half and half or something.

I'm curious to see if this method works for you or anyone else.

Looks ok, specially the steep and the invert. There are more late hops than what I'd expect from a Brown Ale. It has the hopping of a pale ale in a way, while most Brown ales and milds I know of have very little hop flavour or aroma.

Thanks a lot for your comments, very helpful. With the hop additions, I was trying to emulate an ale (Old Hooky by Hook Norton) that is apparently made with Challenger, Fuggles, and Goldings. but maybe at this stage it would be better to go with something simpler, e.g. just using Fuggles and Goldings, one for bittering and a small addition of the other for flavouring. Or does anyone have a suggestion for how I could sensibly include the Challenger as well?

I've had Old Hooky before. I'd expect the Challenger to go for bittering, and the Fuggles and Goldings to go in at either the 20m or the 15m mark. It has hop flavour but it's not the most aromatic of beers I've had. It had quite a clean floral bitterness if I remember right. You could add an ounce of Goldings to dry hop if you find the initial sample lacking.