Thinking of doing a peppercorn CDA this weekend at the request of a family member coming down. I've done a CDA before but had mixed feelings about it "ill post the recipe" was wondering if anyone has any comments or concerns on how to go about this, so far my idea is to go by the recipe but tweak the hops a bit maybe go with some cascade hops at flame out. My idea is to add the peppercorns in at flameout any ideas are welcome thanks! CDA Boil hops- .5 oz Columbus .5 oz citra Flameout- .5 oz citra .5 oz Columbus 1 oz centennial Yeast- Nottingham "thinking of going with 1056 next time" Extract- 3.3 lbs muttons dark Grain- 1 lb crystal 15 .2 lb crystal 120 .4 lb midnight wheat .1 lb chocolate 350l This is for a half batch about 2.5 gal
General comment:You may find it easier to formulate receipes using a pale pilsner or extra-light extract. Using dark extracts puts you in a position of greater uncertainty. Did the darkness come from roasted grain? Did it come from dark crystal malts? Which leads to "Do I augment the extract by adding more roasted malt, or do I augment by adding more crystal?" Pale extracts are generally 100% basemalt or close to that, with some carapils. If you want to build a dark beer around that, you can add dark specialty malts to get the taste you want, knowing with certainty that there are none in the extract. Start with a blank slate rather than an unknown. As to peppercorns, I've never used them, but it gets done from time to time. I bet you can find examples by googling. Or wait for someone to chime in.
Thanks for that yeah when I did the recipe the first time it had a distinct rough malt flavor which I can guess now was the dark malt, ill try the pale on this try and see might just adjust the grain bill hops where pretty on point so ill be probably going light on the cascade addition I'm thinking of adding.
Troeg's most recent scratch was a rye black IPA with peppercorns. It was ok, kinda muddled. I've used a small amount of green peppercorns in a saison that turned out well enough.
