Ordinary Bitter advice

[HamiltonBrian]

Good morning and good brew day everyone. I'm getting ready to grind grain in a few minutes. I'm getting ready to do 13 gallons of Ordinary Bitter. This will be a split batch with different yeasts.

I am just playing around with different grains and I wanted to get some advice on their use.

Base malt will be 16# Maris Otter. Then I was thinking:
Munich 8oz
Black patent 4oz
Chocolate 4oz

Essentially, I dismissed the use of crystal since I wanted something less sweet but I wanted to bring SRM into the BJCP guidelines. This combo gives an SRM of 11 according to Beersmith where the guidelines specify 8 - 14 SRM.

Thoughts, comments, questions? Or does it seem alright?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Most brewers, certainly in the North and especially Scotland used caramel to adjust colour, it's not worth messing with the flavour to get the colour right when colour was historically a bit of an afterthought.

5% or so sugar is pretty normal and will dry things out a bit - ideally invert #3, golden syrup is often used at the homebrew scale.

I wouldn't be so afraid of crystal - just be sensible with quantities, you need that hint of toffee for the style, and there should be enough going on elsewhere to balance out a slight hint of sweetness.

 

[HamiltonBrian]

Most brewers, certainly in the North and especially Scotland used caramel to adjust colour, it's not worth messing with the flavour to get the colour right when colour was historically a bit of an afterthought.

5% or so sugar is pretty normal and will dry things out a bit - ideally invert #3, golden syrup is often used at the homebrew scale.

I wouldn't be so afraid of crystal - just be sensible with quantities, you need that hint of toffee for the style, and there should be enough going on elsewhere to balance out a slight hint of sweetness.

Thanks for that. If I swap out those other ingredients with 1# Crystal 80, it won't quite get to the 7SRM (but I really don't care about that). I just don't want it to be too sweet.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

If you're that worried, I'd substitute half the crystal for sugar/invert/golden syrup - there are historical examples where the sugar content went as high as 20%, it really is part of the style (although invert obviously brings more flavour than table sugar).

Other thing to consider is 5% flaked barley/maize or torrefied wheat if you have them, again pretty typical.

If you don't want to use caramel, you could always boil for longer?

 

[Norselord]

What about doing decoctions to add color?

 

[HamiltonBrian]

What about doing decoctions to add color?

That's something I've never tried nor thought of. I like a pretty simple mash routine.

 

[Norselord]

That's something I've never tried nor thought of. I like a pretty simple mash routine.

Me too.

Decoctions work in simple beers - by that i mean beers without complex hopping, or funky yeasts.

Beers where malt matters and a the hops happen early in the boil.

 

[Norselord]

Follow a nice tight one, where you get just one malt, but by taking off fractions and boiling you are getting various natural mash stops and also various levels of maillard reactions to provide complexity.