Help with English Brown please

[pegcitybrewer]

I'm working on a northern English Brown recipe and I'm just curious for input.

7.05 Lbs light lme
8.8 oz victory
8.8 oz biscuit
5.3 oz caramel 20L
5.3 oz caramel 80L
5.3 oz pale chocolate

1.2 oz ek goldings at 60 min
0.5 oz ek goldings at 5 min

Sorry I'm Canadian and converted from metric so the measurements are strange

 

[PastorofMuppets]

victory and biscuit are virtually the same.

try this

.75 lb special roast
.5 victory
.5 crystal 40
.25 pale chocolate

That along with your 7.7 lb LME is the brown ale from brewing classic styles which is a gold medal winner.

Good luck

 

[pegcitybrewer]

I followed your advice and just bought the brewing classic styles recipe, I substituted caramel 45, they didn't have 40. Also the lhbs had coffee special roast which they said was the exact same thing. Now that I'm home and can read the recipe in the book, it says special roast should be 50L but I'm pretty sure this coffee special roast was 125L. Is there any way to calculate how this will effect my recipe?

 

[PastorofMuppets]

yeah coffee special roast is not the same as special roast at all.
its much darker. its not just the lovibond rating. These special malts all have different processes to make them which results in the different flavors. In alot of cases the color is secondary to the flavor that the maltster was going for.

I would maybe do .5 lb of what you have. I think it will make good beer but with a bit of darker roast flavor and darker color. if you want less of that then dial it back. Check out www.brewtoad.com for help with those adjustments. it will help you figure out what color. You can input the recipe there and tweak it.

 

[pegcitybrewer]

Damn, my grains are already ground and mixed together, oh well, it's a good starting point, I can tweak it next time, thanks for your help!

 

[PastorofMuppets]

relax and dont worry. you will still make good beer. you may even love it.

 

[titansvol]

You will have to let us know how it turns out with the different grain bill. I have made the NEB from brewing classic styles several times and it turns out very well.

 

[pegcitybrewer]

You will have to let us know how it turns out with the different grain bill. I have made the NEB from brewing classic styles several times and it turns out very well.

I will for sure. Gonna brew this weekend whenever the kids allow me the time, I'll for sure post updates.

 

[pegcitybrewer]

So I brewed today and forgot that this was an American recipe. When I topped up after the boil I topped to 5 British gallons and not us gallons. So I have a 6 gallon batch instead. OG 1.043 hopefully it goes down to 1.010.

 

[pegcitybrewer]

Apparently I'm the worst for updates. I've brewed this three times now with different tweaks to try to get it right. The coffee special roast was too much. Dialed it all back a bit and partial mashed my latest version

 

[JKaranka]

Did you end up with a porter first time around? Looked ok for brown porter.

 

[pegcitybrewer]

Never made a brown porter before. It definately had a roasty taste to it, but it was also almost cloying and it was kinda awkward. I redid it right away and it helped a lot to use the right malts. I just reduced all the specialty grains a bit and brewed it again yesterday. I also used wyeast 1028 this time. First time used s-04. So that should change it up