Hi All. Brewed my first beer on Monday 12/16 - a Two Hearted clone, ingredients put together by LHBS, and using an 18 month old smackpack of Wyeast 1450 (which came slowly but beautifully to life and is still bubbling along). I was so thrilled by the experience that I wanted to brew again immediately, and I had one past-date pack remaining, smacked and bulging. However, to go with it I only had leftover ingredients from Hubby's recent brew-days, sealed up tight in the freezer. What the heck, I did it anyway. Here's what I put together, and I'd love some input from experienced brewers as to what I might end up with, flavor wise. I know it's a Frankenstein's monster with NO style - but humor me? Another 2 1/2 gallon batch, and I used (going by hubby's scribbled notations): 2 lbs two row base malt and 12 oz six row (mashed); 1/2 lb CaraMunich and 1/2 lb Biscuit (steeped); 1 1/2 lb Pilsen Light DME (disolved in hot water and added to the wort). Brought to boil and added 1/2 oz Perle at 60; 1/2 oz Liberty at 20; and 1/2 oz Cascade at 5. Cooled to 70F in the snowbank and pitched Wyeast 1007 German Ale, pouring back and forth several times between two big clean kettles to aerate, then into the fermenters and into the 65F basement. Brewed late Tuesday... yesterday evening (Thursday) fermentation was evident and today it's really rocking along. OG was 1.040. What should I look for at finish? And what on earth will it taste like...? Weigh in?
Why didn't you just add the CaraMunich and Biscuit to the mash? It'll be a cloud, and malty beer. Thats for sure.
Hmm... I think I was afraid of tannins from the Biscuit. Something I read somewhere and probably mis-remembered. Malty is AOK, hubby prefers that. I'm the hop-head in the family. I'm just pleased it's fermenting happily.
Sounds like pale(ish) alt to me. And I agree with FATC1TY, I would have mashed all the grains together. Whatever it is, I bet you make beer. Also, I hope you are all out of expired yeast now
This sounds like a great time! Way to step outside the lines. As others have voiced but not supported, if you are mashing part of it why not go ahead with all of it together. Biscuit isn't necessarily one that would give you tannins but large amounts of some highly roasted malts might, or a higher than recommended mash temp with most grains. You mustn't feel the need to put a style name on this thing. The beauty of it is that you'll end up with a very fun beer that you pulled out of your own ass. Cheers to the new brewer [That said, I think you might actually be looking very realistically at some type of maibock here. A little darker, a little hoppier, but certainly within reason]
Plug all of that into brewersfriend.com and see what it comes up with .. Its free to use for 5 recipes and I made the best beer I have ever made with this website... an all cascade pale ale made with fresh hops. It was all grain and the recipe came out almost exactly as the site said it would . OG , Color, IBU and ABV. Check it out.
Thanks, everyone. Next time I'll mash all together. Any specific outcomes that would have produced - other than saving me a step? Would I have ended up with higher OG? My experiment is very light gold, quite pale compared to the first batch sitting beside it (deep amber). Also, fermentation is ROCKING - I blew an airlock on one of the bottles last night (resanitized and reinstalled it as activity seems to have settled down a bit). Not bad for 1 1/2 year old forgotten yeast! I neglected to mention my fermentation setup. 1st batch is in a lovely little new 3 gallon carboy with new bung and airlock. My mad scientist batch is fermenting in five different (boiled, bleached, ultra-sanitized) glass bottles: two one-gallon milk jugs, two half-gallon milk bottles and a growler. Four different bungs and mismatched airlock parts on the milk bottles, a piece of heavy duty tinfoil over the mouth of the growler. Looks like a hillbilly moonshiner lives in my basement - but hey, brother, whatever works!
I think you will be fine. You have enough character malts and hops to give good flavor for a session beer.
jncastillo - bless your heart for giving me brewersfriend.com. I did exactly as you suggested and the site says I have a to-style North German Altbier. OG expected for my ingredients was 1.040 (right on the money!); FG 1.010, ABV 3.96, IBU 40.96, SRM 10.24. I am pleased as punch. Now for the name: Odd Bits or Spare Parts ?
A Your very welcome ! Glad it worked for you .. I find it to be pretty damn accurate and a hell of a tool when you are trying to figure out how things work and how to get to a goal inside a recipe. Now go make another recipe without being blind this time !
Will do. I want to take these two for a taste run before I do any more brewing. I'll let you know how they turn out.
Yeah even tho it might be hard to peg exactly what you'll get, you'll certainly make beer, and will quite likely even make tasty beer. The fact is that beer is pretty forgiving if your fundamentals are strong and you don't go too crazy outside the realms of reasonable when it comes to your recipes. There's a whole lot less wiggle room for a RIS than there is for something that will probably be somewhat IPA or APA-ish, but the mid-gravity, fairly hoppy to hoppy American style beers have TONS of flexibility. Suppose your grain/extract combo was given to everyone on this forum. I bet every person could come up with a completely different hops schedule and they'd all be good. Which one was best would probably be somewhat open to interpretation, but they'd almost certainly all be at least drinkable. I just popped a test bottle of my weird saison-ish beer made with extra dark extract, an eclectic mish-mash of grains for the mini-mash, and T-58. Part of the reason the recipe is so strange is that I picked up a bag of grain that someone didn't pick up (cheep!). No worries, it's made two tasty beer batches so far, and I can probably get two more out of it. This beer is a bit odd but it's plenty drinkable and even qualifies as tasty beer. Oh, I also wanted to prove to myself that there's nothing wrong with amber or dark or extra dark extracts, so I simply tried making beers using those extracts. I can't see any reason NOT to use them (not that you'd need them all the time, of course). But if you just want some color and body, the amber and extra dark extracts (munton's, FWIW) have not imparted excess sweetness, maltiness, or roasty/whatever flavors to these two beers, they seem to have provided more color than anything. So now that I'm not just regurgitating the old standard "use extra light, and add specialty grains for color and body" advice, well, what does that mean? Nothing, I suppose. There's nothing wrong with the old standard advice, but it's not the only way to make tasty beer. You can also use amber, dark, and even extra-dark extracts and still make fine beer. My new advice would be to consider what your goals are, and how to best accomplish those goals, and use the ingredients that best accomplish those goals. Or you could just throw a bunch of stuff in there and see how it comes out. I may actually have enough misc grains to make a kitchen sink batch of all-grain beer. Might have to do that, just to see what happens. I won't skimp on the hops. disclaimer: I am going to re-use parts of this post on my blog. No need to type the same thing twice, and I like to put impressions and results in the comments.
oops, posted wrong link. actually I never posted that recipe, will remedy that in a bit when I get to my other computer.
Thank you ACJ, very helpful. I mentioned in a prior post that I'm a bread baker, and after so many years I simply have a feel for the correct balance of ingredients, moisture level, yeast type and activity, kneading, when to bake, when it's done etc. Unless I'm attempting something special that I've never baked before I don't use a recipe. My spouse is just the opposite: completely recipe-bound, even for stuff he "should" know by heart (like his college-days chili recipe). He carries this approach with him into brewing, coupled with an inflexible adherence to Style. The combo makes him a rigid, mathematical, no fun (for me) brewer. I do understand that this intensity and precision ARE his fun. But our disparate attitudes about cooking/baking/brewing make us a poor fit in the kitchen... My first solo brew, the day before the beer that began this thread, was a to-recipe IPA, and it went off like clockwork. Also, I've observed enough brew days to be familiar with the components and the process. So for beer two I assembled ingredients and equipment that were already here (even better than cheap!) - and just played. I made beer. Maybe it will be "tasty beer". Hope so. But making it was fun, exciting, has me all sparked up to make more - and get better, and master "real" styles, and share, and, and - and isn't that the whole point? Cheers!
If I understand, you did not mash your biscuit malt, which lacks enzymes to convert itself. By steeping it, you probably extracted some flavor compounds and some soluble starches. If you had enzymes presence, as per a proper mash, these starches would get converted to simpler sugars that yeast can ferment. I'm not sure how your OG, as measured by a hydrometer, was affected, because the soluble starches also should impact the density of the wort in some way. However, it is likely that your FG will be higher and your ABV lower than if you mashed the biscuit. Other possible impacts: The soluble starches may impact the taste. I'm basing this off past comments of other forum, most notably homebrew42, who has advised against steeping accent malts like biscuit and munich in the past. However, many homebrew authorities have no qualms about recommending the steeping small amounts of such malts, apparently feeling that the flavor accents gained outweigh the detrimental aspects of the starch. The soluble starches could be digested by bacteria, so if infectious agents have made it into your beer, you are providing them with a food source that the yeast cannot compete for - this might be a gateway to infection if you plan to store the beer for a long time. However, it is a 2.5 gallon batch of a 1.040 OG beer; it is not a great candidate for long-term storage to begin with. Drink up!
Nobody ever came up with the next new sensation in beer by following someone else's recipe. Only thing is, make sure you write down what you DO put into a beer. That way you'll be able to reproduce the recipe if you happen upon the next new sensation. Otherwise you might be making "never the same twice pale ale." I suppose I've risked this here and there with my "hops by the handful" measurement technique.
