Adding Apple & Caramel to a Brown Ale

For a 5 gallon batch

10# base malt
1# of British Crystal 50L
1# of D-45 candi syrup
1 gallon of the best apple cider you can buy in the fall.
WY1099

Boom...caramel apple beer!

 

plus enough midnight wheat to make it a brown ale.

 

I mostly agree with Betty, but slightly modified based on my experience brewing apple ales many times over the years... brew the batch with all the ingredients for the 5-gallon batch, except only make 3 gallons (or maybe 3.5). Then add 2 gallons cider in the last 10 minutes of the boil. All you'll really get from the cider is tartness unless you use a lot of it. 2 gallons is the minimum I would recommend. 2.5 to 3 gallons would not be wrong.

 

I won't argue with using more cider.

 

Forget cider, use frozen apple juice concentrate as a sugar addition. Won't thin out your beer as much as using cider.

 

Booooo...

 

It takes 20# of apples to make one gallon of cider. Cider is pressed, unfiltered apples.

 

It would absorb more beer and you don't have enough space in your fermenter to get enough apple flavor using whole apples.

 

Betty is right. Juice is the way to go. Adding whole fruit would be painful and a waste of good beer.

 

In reality we'd lose beer and gain comparatively little apple taste.

 

I'd go with this option, but I like the flavor of apple juice over cider.

 

Is this basically an option to choose whether you want clear beer (use juice) or cloudy beer (use cider)?

 

Well, the actual option is whether or not you want a beer-ish cider or an apple-ish beer. I'm just giving the OP my advice to what it seems he wants: an apple-ish beer (I make a beer-ish cider every fall) Most cider is around 1.045. Apple juice concentrate as almost as heavy as candi syrup. Would you rather have 3 gallons of 1.060-ish beer diluted with 2 gallons of 1.045 cider, or produce 5 gallons of 1.050 beer and add the flavor and fermentables of 2 gallons of juice (two cans of concentrate) in a 24oz (volume [I may be mistaken on that volume]) sugar addition?
Either way, the sugars from the concentrate or cider are going to ferment out fully.
A large part of apple flavor is the sweetness. There are a lot of variables in play (crystal malt use, mash schedule, yeast attenuation and ester production), but the more concentrated the wort you produce, the more flavorful the beer.
I will say that you should use a yeast that produces a high amount of esters. There are a few British strains that can have an apple/pear fruitiness. For my beer-ish cider (graf), I like to use a weizen strain with pear notes, but that's a whole other beast.
I don't want to elaborate too much on the subject, if anyone is really interested, PM me. Too much fermented apple talk and the thread might get locked down.

 

I'll add in another vote for concentrate. It won't dilute the beer as much as juice/cider. For the caramel flavor, you could go D45 candi syrup as someone had mentioned above and/or go heavy-handed with the C20 or 40 and honey malt.

This won't be a popular suggestion, but you could also go the artificial route. Pinnacle makes a caramel vodka that's passable, and there are a few apple bourbons out there (stag, crown). I'm sure those are artificially flavored which should survive the fermentation. Note that these do contain sugar, so you would want to add to primary and not at bottling.

 

Oh, god, please don't touch off that argument here as well.

There's a whole thread dedicated to it!