my first recipe - help please

[wizerjo]

Hi folks,

I just put together my first recipe and I was hoping to get some input on how much sense it makes. I want to make a surprise gift for my uncle (he got me into beer way back). He's been really into ipas recently so I was thinking of doing something in that vein. I'd like to try using rye as well, I've loved all the beers I've had with it. Here goes:

Extract + specialty grain, 5 gallons, 4.4 gallon, 60 minute boil

1 lb rye malt - steep
1 lb briess golden light DME - boil
2 lb rye LME - boil
2 lb briess golden light DMW - late boil
1 lb light brown sugar - late boil

Hops:
1 oz cascade @ 60 min
.5 oz cascade @ 30 min
.2 oz cascade every 5 minutes from 25 - 5
.5 oz cascade at flameout
1 oz cascade dry hop in secondary

irish moss @ 15 min
Wyeast 1056

OG 1.052 FG 1.013 ABV 5.2
SRM 6L
IBU 47

My thinking:
I'm interested in seeing what happens with one very strong hop, and cascade seems like a good all around one to go with.

I feel like it could be a little darker, and I'm open to some other steeping grain or DME/LME, just not sure what makes sense with rye.

I have the brown sugar in there to up the ABV a bit, and brown sugar feels more interesting than regular table sugar, does it make sense to use it here?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

:cheers:

 

[BlackGoat]

hi there, my first reaction was that it seemed like quite a bit of brown sugar for such a light beer. If this was something heavy like a porter I might think otherwise but it just feels out of place to me in what appears to be a rye IPA. I might have just replaced that with more light malt. Also, and I'm not sure about this without looking it up, but I thought that rye needed to be mashed? I'm not exactly sure how much of anything you'll get out of steeping rye, but hopefully someone else can comment on that. How about steeping a bit of a light crystal... maybe something like 1/2lb of 20L?