Scotch Ale Woes

[onipar]

It seems nothing can go right with this brew. http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/beerkits/HopeandKing_Pro_TH.pdf

I was supposed to have an OG of 1.060, but I only hot 1.050. I'm not totally sure what the problem was, but I suspect either my thermometer was giving me an off reading, or I messed up my water salt additions somehow.

So after two weeks I checked the gravity, and it was 1.004! It was only supposed to drop to 1.014.

On the bright side, I guess I managed to squeak out a bit more alcohol. On the negative side, I'm thinking the body and sweetness might not be were it should...

Anyone have this problem with a Scotch ale? Anything I can do to help it?

I am planning on adding 2 oz of medium toast oak cubes with 4 oz of rum in secondary, so maybe that will help it along a bit?

 

[aiptasia]

My house scotch ale has a much higher SG than 1.060, so yeah starting at 1.050 and ending at 1.004 is going to be a very dry product. If it does taste dry, there are a few things you can try to re-add some sweetness and body. First, you can add a little lactose sugar to the beer. I'd probably add it by the ounce and gently stir it in until I started to notice some sweetness creeping back in. Another trick you can try is to prime your beer with some darker dry malt extract. Darker kilned DME is going to contain more non-fermentable sugars, which will add some body and sweetness back to the beer. There are some priming calculators on the web that will help you with the amounts to use to prime your batch. Dark brown sugar and pure maple syrup are also some alternative priming sources.

FYI, The yeast I favor on Scotch ales is actually Windsor dry ale yeast. It's lazy, it takes it's sweet time to ferment, it takes forever to floc out (cold crashing helps) but it produces some great batches of Scotch ale.

IMHO, for a 5 gallon batch, you might be better served with just one ounce of oak cubes. Oak can be overpowering in beer and it takes a lot of sampling to get it just right. In mine, I use 1 ounce of light toast American oak chips that I soak in a few shots of Johnny Walker Red for a week. I put the chips in a sanitized mesh grain bag with a sanitized quartz stone so the bag will sink to the bottom of the fermenter and toss it in for about a week prior to bottling. I'll start pulling samples with a turkey baster at two days after adding the oak and taste test daily until the beer juuuuust tastes over-oaked. Then, I pull the grain bag out and bottle it up.

From bottling to first sip, I usually let mine prime and condition for a full month. At that time, there's just enough oak bite faded from the beer to make it truly enjoyable.

 

[onipar]

Thanks for all the advice! I'll try some of the things you mentioned,and probably only use 1 oz of oak. thanks!