Too much honey

Hello all,

I'm a long time lurker but had to post in order to get an answer on this one.

I just brewed a batch of Blonde Ale to try out a "Party Pig" kegging system given on Fathers Day. The recipe is "Jims Honey Blonde Ale" and is origanally a 5 gallon recipe. I however, brewed a 3 gallon version.

The 5 gallon recipe calls for 2 lbs of honey and in my haste forgot to reduce this amount for 3 gallons.

I also altered the recipe with Victory grain instead of the British Amber that is called for and I aslo used Victory dry yeast instead of WYeast 1056 . (I had all these ingrediants left over from previous brews) The grains were about 5% light for a three gallon batch as well, but it's what I had on hand and very closely matched this recipe.

Everything sems to be ok, it has produced a large Kräusen and is fermenting like a jet engine at 68*.

This is only my third brew, all of wich have been all grain, so I'm not sure what I'll end up with.

Any comments are welcome.

 

Next time use honey malt in your grain bill instead of actual honey. Using honey, in my experience, just ends up giving you a very dry beer with unpleasant alcohol hotness and very little actual honey character. I know a few people who like to brew with honey but I never would (again) .

 

It's probably going to be extremely dry and thin-bodied, and obviously have a fair bit more alcohol.

I would most likely use some maltodextrin to add some body back to the beer, but it's hardly a fatal mistake.

 

If you REALLY want to fix it and don't mind having 5gal of the beer, you can also brew a 2-gallon batch without any honey, and that extra 5% of grain you missed, and then add it to the fermentor.

The conditions for the yeast will be somewhat different than if you had fermented the correct recipe from the start, resulting in a slightly different ester profile, but it should still be extremely close.

If cost isn't an issue, you can even toss out 2 gal of the stuff afterwards if you really don't want it. But none of this is necessary and I imagine the beer will be drinkable either way.

 

Thanks for all the advice. I'm glad that they are along the lines I already thought myself and tells me that I've learned a little.

It's been fermenting for 3 days now...is this something I can still do and if so how would I go about it?

I'm not too worried about it being the best Ive brewed so far, I had some extra stuff laying around and wanted to use it as a learnng experience, which it certainly has now.

 

Yeah, I would actually wait until it's done fermenting to add the maltodextrin, even.