Sierra Nevada pale ale, sorta

[hilljack13]

I made the SN pale ale using their recipe they post. Super glad they did that!...Anyway, I don't have enough pale malt on hand to rebrew so I was looking for substitutions and vienna keeps coming up. I'm starting to question if this is a good replacement because the vienna malt I have (weyermann) is very dark. Like ~over 10 SRM maybe more. For reference below is a 100% Vienna test I am doing.

Also, they use caramunich III and I have plenty of caramunich II, which I thought might help due to the darker Vienna. Obviously this is a different beer at this point, but I plan to use the same hop schedule and grain bill by percentage, US-05 yeast.

My purpose is to try something different and use up the Vienna, I have 55lbs to go through. Is this something that sounds like it could turn out similar to SN? Anyone try something close to this?

 

[G_robertus]

Vienna usually is a bit darker than Pale Ale (PA) malt, which itself is darker than Pale malt. Weyermann's is only 7.5 EBC (3°L, 3.75 SRM) though, which is about the same as PA. SN Pale is listed at around 1.6°L or 4 EBC which is closer to pilsner, lager or extra pale malt. You can brew very good beers with Vienna though and I actually prefer that for a bit of character in some beers when I don't want English stuff. The colour on your photo is hard to judge though and you should look at it when it's in a glass, but it shouldn't be too dark if the bag is labelled correctly.

I wouldn't compensate for lighter caramel malt with a darker base malt, but I'm also inclined to think that it won't matter all that much in a hoppy beer. Just brew it with what you have and see whether you like it. You can change one of the malts for your next iteration to see whether that suits you better, or try SNPA with just Vienna.

 

[hilljack13]

Thanks. I figured with this still in the fv it would be difficult to tell. I'll schedule the brew day and see what happens. Not holding my breath, but might have something nice come out of it.

 

[Mack]

I brewed almost exactly what you did, the color was a bit off, but the taste was accurate, and that's what matters to me. I feel like the hops take the lead here, and tend to push things in the right direction.