Coopers dark ale recipe,

[shamfein]

Hey all,

Made a brew up on Saturday night i have put the recipe below for comments and opinions.

Can of Coopers Dark Ale,
1.5kg of light liquid malt extract
1.66 kg of marris otter, mashed for an hour.

boiled the marris otter wort and the LME (about 11 litres) with the following hop additions

20g galena for one hour.
30g Pacific Gem 15 minutes,
30g Pacific Gem 5 minutes.

Added in the can of coopers at flameout. so 26 litres went into the fermenter. I used Safale us-04.

I will dry hop with approx 40 grams of pacific Gem after 7 days in the fermenter for a further 7 days.

Im really hoping to get some of that blackcurrant aroma from the pacific Gem.

 

[unionrdr]

Boiling pre-hopped extracts is bad. It changes any flavor, etc hop additions to bittering. Besides darkening from Maillard reactions. I got some oaken dark berry flavors from Pacific gem in my Maori IPA.

 

[shamfein]

Hi Union,

Just a note, i didnt boil the coopers can of hopped extract,

i only boiled the unhopped LME and the wort from the marris otter.

 

[unionrdr]

Ah, OK. Just checking. And if you're going to dry hop, maybe move the 5 minute addition to 10 minutes for more flavor to match the dry hop.

 

[shamfein]

Thanks for the pointers Union, your a great help!

 

[unionrdr]

I've used a lot of Cooper's products in brewing since I started. So I like to help out with them when I can.

 

[shamfein]

A little update on the beer,

The picture of the first pour, beers is only ten days old, so very young,

It definitely has that blackberry nettle aroma and taste, not too prominent but its in there.

I think i would like to retry this recipe with US-05 yeast to see if the hop flavour comes out a little bit more.

Cheers

 

[unionrdr]

I think the US-05 does bring out the NZ hop flavors more insomuch as it's a clean fermenting yeast.