Caramelizing Wort for a Scottish 70 -/

[mi6op]

Hey I'm going to essentially try Jamil's Scottish 70 recipe that involves boiling 1 gal of first runnings to reduce it to a caramel. I'm making 15 gallons though and am wondering if I should increase my first runnings boiling to 3 gallons. your thoughts??

 

[RonPopeil]

yeah that makes sense. i would scale the recipe.

 

[mi6op]

So what I did was collect the first 3 gal of runnings and boiled it for quite a while till I got 1.5 gal remaining. Then brought the rest of the sparge on top of it and commenced the boil. I thought I smelled smokey notes in the wort as I was ramping up to a boil. So we'll see.

 

[Onkel_Udo]

One of the important parts you may have missed is not that you are just reducing your volume but you are doing so with extreme heat...one degree shy of actually leaving scorch marks in the pot.

This is difficult to do with a 3 gallon volume for most folks' equipment. Two 1.5 gallons starting volume, much more likely. Traditionally it would be done by adding items to the pot that far exceed 212 degrees...rocks, chunks of SS, glass, whatever.

FYI, a good 70/ is one of my favorite beers and difficult to find done well anywhere. I have only been successful once out of three tries. All three beers were good but only one got the right flavor.

 

[DavidJP]

Hope it works out well.

I'm drinking now a Traquair house clone recipe that involved taking 1 gallon and reducing to 1/2 pint. It ended up quite thick syrup and i was a little worried that i might get some off flavors but after about 2 months its now coming into its best. Bottom line don't be afraid of doing the caramelization step, if anything you could go farther.

Try a Traquair recipe next if you want a stronger Scotch ale, great stuff

http://www.skotrat.com/go/default/beer-recipes/recipe-archives/

 

[mi6op]

Well I'll know how it turns out tonight when I keg it over. I am going to brew a Wee Heavy tomorrow with the repitch of yeast and am thinking of doing the first wort boil (2 gallons to around 2-3 qts. And also an extended boil - say 3 hours. Would you guys double up on wort carmelization & malliard reactions or just do one or the other.