Please critique my recipe. I wanted a lower alcohol easy drinking beer, not too sweet with a hint of caramel and a touch of bready/toastiness. This is a 5 gallon extract with steeping grains. Thanks in advance. 5.5 lbs Briess Golden Light LME 0.5 lb Caramel 80 0.25 lb Special Roast 0.25 lb Roasted Barley 0.5 oz Chinook at 60min (13.9%AA) 0.5 oz Cascade at 10min (6.8%AA) 0.5 oz Columbus at 10min (18.2%AA) 0.5 oz Cascade at 0min (6.8%AA) 0.5 oz Columbus at 0min (18.2%AA) (all hops pellets) US-05 yeast OG 1.048 FG 1.012 37.2 IBU 15.4 SRM Recipe generated in Brew Builder from Brewmasters Warehouse Steep grains at 158 F for 30 min. Remove from kettle and add malt extract. Bring to a boil and add first hop addition. Add hops at times indicated. Chill to 70F and pitch yeast. Allow to ferment until completion. I have concerns about the special roast and roasted barley, also I had thought about adding some wheat in here for head retention (papazian style - not mashed) but wasnt sure about that either.
If it were me, I'd replace the Special Roast and Roasted Barley with something like biscuit, Victory, or my new favorite, amber malt. I think the color will be better and I believe you will get more of the bready/toastiness that you are looking for. Now, as many will point out here, the malts I recommend are best used in a mash, rather than as steeping grains. True enough. There are two things that you can do: (1) Ignore the "mash only" advice and just steep the biscuit/Victory/amber. Before going all-grain, I steeped plenty of "mash-only" grains with great success. YMMV. (2) Add in a pound of 2-row (for enzyme content) to the specialty grains and conduct a mini-mash, which in your case will mean steeping the grains (158 F is fine) for a half hour or so at a water to grain ratio of about 2 quarts/lb. Good luck!
In my experience 2oz of Roasted Barley will get you into the deep amber color, you have 4oz. I have messed up measuring and used 4oz in an Amber and the color was closer to black and the roast noticable. So I say cut the RB to 2oz max. Otherwise looks fine to me.
Thanks for the input, I will take out the speacial roast and reduce the roasted barely. Any opinions on the wheat? Would quick oats add any breadiness/head retention?
Both of those need to be mashed. If you do go for a minimash consider some Munich malt. It will give some head retention and "maybe" some of the breadyness you want. Munich malt is low in diastatic power so beware. A handfull of wheat will solve that problem in a minimash.
I was not aware that Munich malt adds any head retention, vs. say, any other base malts. Caramunich maybe?
No, I mean Munich. My evidence is emperical, but I have my suspect I know what part of Munich is contibuting to head retention. Since I only suspect and have no other evidence I will just leave that alone. I will give a brief story about how I came to this conclusion. Then others can either take it, leave it or go figure it out for themselves. When I first started creating a malt bill for an amber ale I included Munich malt. These were the first times I tried Munich. My ambers always had great head. As I started to include Munich in other grain bills, like porters, I noticed and improvement in head generation and retention. The independent variable was Munich so I think Munich contributes to head. That is my story and I am sticking to it cause I got no reason to lie. -Black Sabbath
Interesting idea, I know (read) that munich gives a thicker mouth feel to beers, but no idea how this would play into head retention. How much would you add percentage wise? Brewmasters Warehouse has Breiss Munich LME which is 50/50 mix, I could adjust the recipe to include some that along with a reduced amount of Golden Light. Other than that I adjusted my recipe as follows: 6.0 lbs Briess Golden Light LME 0.5 lb Caramel 80 2 oz Roasted Barley 0.5 oz Chinook at 60min (13.9%AA) 0.5 oz Cascade at 10min (6.8%AA) 0.5 oz Columbus at 10min (18.2%AA) 0.5 oz Cascade at 0min (6.8%AA) 0.5 oz Columbus at 0min (18.2%AA) (all hops pellets) US-05 yeast OG 1.048 FG 1.012 37.2 IBU 11.76 SRM Recipe generated in Brew Builder from Brewmasters Warehouse Steep grains at 158 F for 30 min. Remove from kettle and add malt extract. Bring to a boil and add first hop addition. Add hops at times indicated. Chill to 70F and pitch yeast. Allow to ferment until completion.
I use 20% Munich, so if you used half and half of that Munich extract and Pale extract you would be pretty close.
