Hi Everyone,
I'm trying to put together a recipe for a mild ale, and I'm having trouble with the base malt. My starting point is one of Ron P's recipes (which I can't find at the moment, all I wrote down is it came from 1965) and the original recipe had 5.5 pounds of mild malt for its base plus some extras like crystal malt that I'm not going to worry about just yet.
My problem is I want to covert this to a partial-mash recipe because I'm not set up for all-grain brewing. 3 lb DME is roughly the equivalent of 5 lb base malt, so I'll start with 3 lb (golden) light DME and mash the remaining 0.5-1.0 lb of base malt to match the original gravity. My question is then how do I approximate the original mild malt? I'm not aiming for an exact clone, just a good drinkable approximation.
I had two thoughts: first, I could mash 0.5-1.0 lb mild malt (or maybe Vienna) and call it "close enough." I've lost most of the original mild flavor, but it will work so long as I have enough diastatic power to do the mash. The other thing that occurred to my was to approximate the mild malt with 2-row and some biscuit malt. I've never used biscuit before, though, so I don't know how much I should be thinking. And, of course, it's always possible I'm being stupid and there's an even better way to do this.
So, how would you update this recipe to something I can actually brew?
Jonathan
I'm trying to put together a recipe for a mild ale, and I'm having trouble with the base malt. My starting point is one of Ron P's recipes (which I can't find at the moment, all I wrote down is it came from 1965) and the original recipe had 5.5 pounds of mild malt for its base plus some extras like crystal malt that I'm not going to worry about just yet.
My problem is I want to covert this to a partial-mash recipe because I'm not set up for all-grain brewing. 3 lb DME is roughly the equivalent of 5 lb base malt, so I'll start with 3 lb (golden) light DME and mash the remaining 0.5-1.0 lb of base malt to match the original gravity. My question is then how do I approximate the original mild malt? I'm not aiming for an exact clone, just a good drinkable approximation.
I had two thoughts: first, I could mash 0.5-1.0 lb mild malt (or maybe Vienna) and call it "close enough." I've lost most of the original mild flavor, but it will work so long as I have enough diastatic power to do the mash. The other thing that occurred to my was to approximate the mild malt with 2-row and some biscuit malt. I've never used biscuit before, though, so I don't know how much I should be thinking. And, of course, it's always possible I'm being stupid and there's an even better way to do this.
So, how would you update this recipe to something I can actually brew?
Jonathan