Brown Ale - Tilburg Dutch Brown

[rizman460]

I tried brewing a brown ale as my third beer and it failed. The taste was just blah. I used Nottingham Yest and made sure I controlled the temp and kept it at 62 degrees.

I need a clone for Tillburg Dutch brown. Below is the brown I had that failed

1 lbs Amber Dry Malt
1.2 lb Amber liquid Malt Extract

1lb Briess Carmel 60L Steeping grains

1 oz Willamette 60min
.5 oz Willamette 5 min

Any suggestions for my second attempt.

Thanks in advance

 

[theredben]

Having never had a Tilburg Dutch Brown I can't help you on specific ingredients, but I know this: you need WAY more extract in there, assuming this is a 5 gallon batch. Most recipes call for at least 5 lbs of extract. Quickly running it through BeerSmith I get a starting gravity of 1.018, when you probably want at least 1.040. This gives you a final alcohol of 0.65%, which is just above being a non-alcoholic beverage here in BC.

Where did you get this recipe? Sounds okay, just needs like at least 3 pounds more extract.

 

[rizman460]

Sorry, it was

2 lbs Amber Dry Malt
3.3 lbs Amber Liquid Malt extract

 

[helmstreet]

I brewed something up yesterday that may be similar to Tilburg's. I had never heard of it before, but googled "Trappist Brown Ale" to find out if there was anything similar to what I had made. I will try some Tilburg's out at Christmas (can't get it in KY) and try to figure out if I've made anything similar.

I was getting ready to rack my Trippel and wanted to use the yeast cake for a new brew. I also had a hankering for a brown ale. So, I figured I'd just toss a Sam Smith's clone on top of the Trappist Ale yeast cake. I made this recipe up by comparing a variety of Sam Smith clone recipes. I screwed up one thing: I added a whole pound of Crystal 40L instead of a half pound like I meant to (I get distracted easily sometimes). When I was looking at the recipe at hopville, it was insanely on the malty side, so I added some phoenix hops to bitter it up a bit.

Steeped for 1/2 hour at 160* F in two gal of water:

1# Pale Malt, 6 Row, US
1# Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L
.75# Briess Special Roast
.5# Victory Malt
.25# Chocolate Malt

Brought to boil and added 6.6# Light Malt Extract Syrup

Returned to boil and added the following hops at the following intervals:

boil 60 mins 1.0 oz Phoenix pellet 10.0% AA
boil 30 mins 0.5 oz Fuggles pellet 4.2% AA
boil 30 mins 0.5 oz East Kent Goldings pellet 4.5% AA
boil 15 mins 0.5 oz East Kent Goldings pellet 4.5% AA

Pitched on to a cake of Wyeast 3787

I'll add tasting notes when I bottle and again a few weeks later, but I'm thinking this will need some time. I'll aim at a month in primary and a month bottle conditioning. This is a real wacky recipe, so we'll see if it turns out ok.

 

[Skyforger]

A (minor) thread resurrection here, for which I apologize. But let me toss this your way: Tilburg Dutch Brown is more a Belgian style ale than a British style; you need a whole different set of ingredients and practices for it.
Basically, you need to start with a sort of clone recipe for Gulden Draak or something similar, tone it down a bit, and add on some roasted/nutty specialty malts.

One person (Freezeblade) who tried to clone Gulden Draak used this:

11# Pilsner (Bel)
5# 2-row (Bel)
1# Wheat malt (Bel)
6 oz Crystal 60
4 oz Special B
3.5 oz Aromatic
2 oz Biscuit

1# cane sugar was added on the 3rd day of fermentation. OG with the cane added in was 1.089.


That looks pretty good to me. Just tone down the base malt a bit, replace the Special B with some dark malt more appropriate for a brown ale, and use Special D candi syrup instead of cane sugar (or make your own candi sugar; there are threads detailing how).

Ferment with a starter of Antwerp ale yeast, let sit in primary for a while, then cold crash for a week or two and bottle. That should get you in the ballpark.