Help with mild recipe

[brewSJ]

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to put together a recipe for a mild ale, and I'm having trouble with the base malt. My starting point is one of Ron P's recipes (which I can't find at the moment, all I wrote down is it came from 1965) and the original recipe had 5.5 pounds of mild malt for its base plus some extras like crystal malt that I'm not going to worry about just yet.

My problem is I want to covert this to a partial-mash recipe because I'm not set up for all-grain brewing. 3 lb DME is roughly the equivalent of 5 lb base malt, so I'll start with 3 lb (golden) light DME and mash the remaining 0.5-1.0 lb of base malt to match the original gravity. My question is then how do I approximate the original mild malt? I'm not aiming for an exact clone, just a good drinkable approximation.

I had two thoughts: first, I could mash 0.5-1.0 lb mild malt (or maybe Vienna) and call it "close enough." I've lost most of the original mild flavor, but it will work so long as I have enough diastatic power to do the mash. The other thing that occurred to my was to approximate the mild malt with 2-row and some biscuit malt. I've never used biscuit before, though, so I don't know how much I should be thinking. And, of course, it's always possible I'm being stupid and there's an even better way to do this.

So, how would you update this recipe to something I can actually brew?

Jonathan

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

My question is then how do I approximate the original mild malt? I'm not aiming for an exact clone, just a good drinkable approximation.

If Pale Ale Malt is a good approximation for Mild Malt, then Briess Pale Ale DME may be an option.

 

[DBhomebrew]

If Pale Ale Malt is a good approximation for Mild Malt,

It's not.

Briess Pale Ale DME may be an option

I found Briess' Pale Ale DME to be near flavorless when compared to UK DME let alone UK malt.

@Erik the Anglophile has been working this mild malt question recently.

 

[Erik the Anglophile]

I have been looking around on the net, especially the UK forums, and it seems to be the case that mild and euro vienna are very similair in the way they are made and their characteristics, many UK malsters have re-labeled their mild malt as vienna.
I have gotten a 5kg bag of domestic vienna malt made from a heritage barley called Balder and am in the process of some trials of using it as a mild malt substitute.
I have a pale bitter conditioning now using 2/3 of the malt as Golden Promise and 1/3 vienna and some invert+wheat.
And a late victorian era inspired stout fermenting right now using half of the base malt as vienna, although I wont be able to give you any feedback on that one until about 6 months...
So by the looks of it the best way is to sub some quality euro vienna 1:1 for mild malt.