New Zealand Hopped Amber Ale Recipe Help

[stevethepirate]

(I accidentally posted this in the wrong section to begin with)

Hi I have been wanting to try a recipe with some southern hemisphere hops for a while and came up with this amber ale. The recipe is for a 5 gallon batch with a 3 gallon partial boil.

6.25 lbs. Light DME
9.00 oz. Caraaroma
9.00 oz. Crystal 60L

0.50 oz. Galaxy (13%) 60min
1.00 oz. Nelson Sauvin (12%) 15min
1.50 oz. Nelson Sauvin (12%) 5min
1.00 oz. Galaxy (13%) 5min
1.50 oz. Galaxy dry hop
1.50 oz. Nelson Sauvin dry hop

Wyeast 1028

OG: 1.056

I am mostly just not sure about whether I am over using the Nelson as I have heard it can become overbearing quite easily. Any advice or tips would be awesome thanks!

 

[cwhouston]

Hey - glad to see you having a crack with our kiwi hops. My first thoughts are that your recipe appears to combine English-ish ale malts and yeast with new-world hops, which I've never tried myself and my experience of tasting NelS hops is that I'd be wary of using an English ale strain and dark malts like cararoma with them - ditto citrussy hops like galaxy.

All the NelS beers I've had are kinda American IPA like or 'pilsners'.

If it were me, I'd replace the cararoma with carahell to between 5 - 10%, lose the crystal and aim for a APA or AIPA with US05 or similar. I'd also scale back the 5 miniute additions to 0.5 oz each and then split the batch and dry hop with 1 oz galaxy in one and 1 oz NelS in the other.

I am of course, very happy to be wrong! ;-)

If you are interested, I recently tried out the new kohatu hops:

Hopville . "Helter Skelter" American Pale Ale Recipe

Whatever you do - please update with results. Brew on.