Celebration California Common Recipe

[LongHouseBrews]

Formulating a holiday/celebration ale and basing it on a California Common Ale. Just looking for people's input on the recipe so far...thx

65% 2-row
23% munich
5% crystal 60L
5% special B
2% cara-pils
2% wheat

Northern Brewer bitter, flavor & aroma (considering first-wort & dry hopping; also considering other hop types with sim flav & arom to NB)

Wyeast 2112

OG: 1.070
IBU: 65

just looking for feed back & ideas to maybe push it abit further...

 

[skibb]

After recently just brewing a Cal Common, with a similar higher-than-style OG (mine was 1.064), so I can give a little advice.

I modeled my beer around Sierra Nevada's Cal Common - a 6.5% hop forward and dry finishing beer. I had about 9% Crystal 40L and 1% pale chocolate as my specialty malts. I mashed at 150F and pitched the proper amount, and after 2 weeks in the fermenter, my FG was 1.016 (3 points higher than anticipated). It's still a damn tasty beer, just not as dry of a finish as I would like.

So, looking at your grain bill, having about 12% unfermentables, I would recommend mashing low and long - definitely in the 140s F for at least 60 minutes in order to make sure your beer attenuates well with such a low attenuating yeast (Wyeast says 2112 has around 70% attenuation). And if you can, aerate your wort well before/right after pitching.

I dry hopped my beer (with NB and cluster - it was a damn tasty combo) and it really took my beer to another level, so I highly recommend dry hopping - especially when you are going big already.

As far as the grain bill goes, I would probably scratch the carapils - you already have wheat in there and enough crystal malts to add up to get some good head retention. Plus, taking out the carapils will help make sure the beer ends up drier.

Hope this helps!