I'm planning on brewing a single hop IPA with Simcoe next weekend. Considering brewing a true SMaSH with Maris Otter / Simcoe but wonder if it's worth it. Would the beer ultimately be better by adding some vienna, wheat / oats and or a light crystal to add a bit to the malt character of the beer while still allowing the hops to dominate.
There's no right answer as it ultimately comes down to personal taste. I would just make the observation that professional brewers are often baffled by homebrewers' insistence on throwing the kitchen sink at grain bills when most commercial beers have relatively simple grists - see Ron Pattinson's blog for examples.
I'm lucky in that I grew up with Boddington's bitter (known internally as their IPA since the 19th century), which as
Ron has shown has always been mostly UK 2-row and perhaps a bit of US pale, boosted with some sugar and adjuncts.
In 1901 (I'm not that old!) it was 92% pale malt, 8% invert #1 for 1.055 and 2.89oz of Goldings/Cluster, it wobbled a bit through the 20th century with maize, diastatic and what not, but
by 1987 it was 99% pale malt, <1% sugar (effectively just for tweaking the gravity to the 1.034 target) and hops were down to 1.2oz of old Goldings (the hopping rate dropped dramatically in the 1980s). One of the most popular commercial beers in the UK was a SMaSH to all intents and purposes.
Now in some ways Boddies is an exception, but it is the archetypal Manchester pale which is a definite regional style within the English bitter tradition. So you can see where I'm coming from when I say that the kind of beer I choose in a pub is actually pretty close to say 1.040-1.045 100% pale Maris Otter with 25IBU of bittering and then a 100g pack of hops in 3-4 gallons.
Sure, if I was really trying to show off I'd add maybe 5-10% invert, 5% torrefied wheat for head retention and use Warminster malt. But frankly 100% Fawcetts Otter gets me within 95% of where I want to be, and it a) makes inventory much simpler - no odd bits of grain hanging around and b) a simple grist makes it easier to concentrate on other things whilst repeating the same grist makes it easy to perfect my process without worrying about weird stuff like oats screwing things up. And I can get sacks of Otter pretty cheaply, certainly a lot more cheaply than little bits of speciality grains.
Using an entire 100g pack of hops (standard size in the UK) makes for easy hop inventory management too - I only have one pack of bittering hops open which helps the domestic negotiations in regard to "all your brewing crap" in the freezer! I could use alpha extract, but I have a house rule about always using EKG in my beers so that's what I tend to bitter with.
That then gives me a easily reproducible baseline that I can brew in my sleep, which allows me lots of scope to experiment with hops and yeast - and all I need to worry about is "do I have at least 3.5kg of Otter in the sack?", and it's easy to compare between brews.
So there's lots to be said for if not a literal SMaSH, at least a very simple grain bill, especially when you're doing a lot of experimenting with yeast and hops. I can't speak for other styles but US homebrewers seem to get English bitter all wrong, they go for a neutral yeast and then load up with 15-20%+ of speciality malts because they think the complexity comes from the malts and not the yeast. Get yourself an interesting yeast (they're fascinating!
) and dial down the speciality malts to no more than 10-12% - and half of that is torrefied wheat for head retention rather than flavour.
I'd suggest that Fuller's are on the crystal-heavy side (certainly for my tastes) but as per
the actual brew logs the only speciality malts they use in the main partigyle are 7.2% crystal and a whisper of chocolate malt.
Sure, adjuncts have their place, but if in doubt, I'd go simple.
