Courage RIS clone?

[Newsman]

Has anyone made a good Courage (now Wells & Young's) RIS clone? I just had a bottle of that and I love the flavor. I'd love to make something approaching that. Very smooth, not a lot of bitterness. Very flavorful, though!

 

[kingwood-kid]

I'm sure it's a different recipe somehow, but I made the 1914 recipe I found at the SUABP site. Fantastic beer, maybe the best I've made.

 

[The_Nid_Hog]

I'm brewing this one on Sunday:

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2012/02/lets-brew-wednesday-1914-courage.html

 

[badlee]

If I could get my hands on any brown malt, I would be in there with that brew

 

[Newsman]

I was gonna ask where you're located... but I see you're in Thailand. I know a homebrew show here in the States that carries brown malt, but I'm not sure you wanna pay shipping.

 

[Newsman]

I'm brewing this one on Sunday:

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2012/02/lets-brew-wednesday-1914-courage.html

Thanks. I was hoping someone had a Beersmith file for this. *sigh* Guess I'm gonna have to transcribe it into Beersmith. I'll see if I can post it here somewhere when I get done for others.

 

[Newsman]

Kingwood, Nid Hog, how much water did you mash with, how much sparge? I figure boiling for 120 minutes you probably boiled off a lot of liquid. Also, I'm assuming you had a starter? How big was your starter and what yeast did you use? Beersmith doesn't list the yeast they have in that recipe.

How long did you mash for and at what temp?

 

[kingwood-kid]

My notes say I mashed with 6 gallons at 145, and sparged with 5, but your setup may vary. Remember that big beers like this generally lose a few points of mash efficiency. MrMalty.com indicates you could go with 1.5packs of dry yeast, or make a hefty starter. Personally, I'd make a 4%-ish beer first, and use about 3/4 cup of the yeast cake to ferment this monster. Almost any attenuative English ale yeast should work fine; the nuances will be pretty well concealed by the 1.75lbs of black malt.

 

[Newsman]

My notes say I mashed with 6 gallons at 145, and sparged with 5, but your setup may vary. Remember that big beers like this generally lose a few points of mash efficiency. MrMalty.com indicates you could go with 1.5packs of dry yeast, or make a hefty starter. Personally, I'd make a 4%-ish beer first, and use about 3/4 cup of the yeast cake to ferment this monster. Almost any attenuative English ale yeast should work fine; the nuances will be pretty well concealed by the 1.75lbs of black malt.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't brew that often and mainly for personal consumption. I drank up all the last beer I made for personal consumption and have approximately 5 gallons of a Rhubarb Wit I'm donating to the LHB club for Oktoberfest (I tasted it and it's rather refreshing, but low alcohol.) Point of all this is to say I think I'll probably make a starter rather than fill up a keg with something I probably am not real interested in drinking.

 

[The_Nid_Hog]

Bradlee--if you have an oven, you can roast pale malt in order to come up with your own brown. I was going to do that this time, but another store in my area had some brown.

I'm pretty close to kingwood-kid on water. I ended up with a preboil volume of 7 gallons, which I boiled down to just under 5 with an OG of 1.094. I used WLP007 Dry English Ale and made a huge starter. I was a little late getting to my boil yesterday, so it ended up going in the carboy at about 11:00 last night. Bubbling away energetically this morning.

 

[badlee]

Newsman, thanks very much.
Nid Hog, cheers, I will look it up

 

[The_Nid_Hog]

Action in primary has just about stopped. It's as black as night, just sitting there on its yeast cake in the carboy. I'm going to dry hop it pretty soon, but I'm debating whether to rack it to secondary in about a month or just go ahead and bottle condition it. Either way, I'm looking forward to opening my first one on Thanksgiving 2014.