Brown Ale ingredients

I find it funny my first post correlates with my first all grain batch. I only have one extract batch under my belt, but Papazian says if I have a passion, to just go for it. Also, understand I've read a fair amount of posts here on HBT and other sites, forgive me if this has been discussed on the site or is not under the correct thread as i know some members have a penchant for pointing that out.

I'm brewing a brown ale with 10# 2 row, 1# 60L Crystal, 4oz of Chocolate and a SMALL amount of black patent malt. Is this out of the question? It's too late to remove as my grains have already been milled.

Will the 1 oz of black malt be detrimental to my color and appear more like a porter or stout? Or help slightly?

My plan was to enter it in our brew club's competition under BJCP style guidelines. Is it worth it?

If you're taking the time to read this and eventually respond, Thanks for helping out a noob!

 

My 3 year old has a passion for bikes, but he'd still crash and burn if I put him on my mountain bike!
But seriously, how much is a little black patent? Can you just leave it out? Might be fine with just an ounce or two. Plug it into a program like beersmith and see what it looks like...

 

That's very close to a Newcastle clone recipe I have. Keep the Black Patent malt to 1 oz. and you should be good.

 

Ye have little faith...want a cookie? Seriously, this is exactly the response i was looking for, Demus. Thank you!

As I mentioned in the original post, it is too late. My grains have been combined and milled already. In a 5 gal batch, will 1oz really darken the beer too much to be considered a brown ale?

 

Style guidelines are fairly wide, you should be ok. Even if it's a little dark you will have made beer, and if it's tasty who cares what the guidelines say? Enjoy learning by experience....

 

What he said

 

I think it sounds great! 1oz of black malt isn't going to make it super dark.

 

45 min into boil and it's plenty brown. Not even close to too dark. I don't think the black patent made much difference. I might substitute it with something else next time. Sure smells damn good though!

 

Ok folks! I pitched Saf-05 and we are a week into primary fermentation. I took my first SG reading last night and it was all the way down to .005 @ 69°. I thought it tasted pretty damn good, considering.

I wasn't planning on dry hopping, but was still thinking about racking to a secondary to let it clear up some. thoughts? I'm gonna take another reading tomorrow to see where it's at. If my gravity hasn't moved, do you think this could go right in the bottles? Or should i give it a little more time on the yeast cake to let it chow on by-products? Should i consider cold crashing it, also?

 

I don't usually secondary, and typically would leave a beer like this in the primary for 3-4 weeks to let everything clean up and clear up. Only a week in primary is a very short amount of time before bottling, so I would certainly give it plenty more time.

 

Thanks for the feedback, Blackgoat! I didn't think I would want to bottle so soon. I had planned to leave it alone, I just found the FG to be so low that I didn't think there was much more for it to do. Seeing as vigorous fermentation had subsided so early and sat on the yeast another 4-5days. I did, however, rack it to my secondary so I could start on a SMaSH recipe I picked up on Sunday- APA malt and Fuggles. I'll leave the brown ale for a couple more weeks and see how it goes.

*I really just wanted to free up my primary to work on the new recipe. I need to try and get my ferm temps under control. And try the swamp cooler method.

 

So if I wanted to make this recipe creamier by adding a bit of flakes oats, would the flaked oats affect the beers appearance? Would it add haze?

 

I actually wondered the same thing, but with using Carafoam instead...I want to find a way to mimic a "nitro" beer using something along those lines. Maybe I'm way off, as I am new to this.