I was wanting sum thoughts on this recipe it’s a 5 gallon batch going for A ale
8lbs-2-row
3lbs of white wheat
1/2 lb-flaked barley
Hops
1.5 oz of liberty 50 mins
.5 oz of cascade 10 mins
Main concerns are the hops flavors and bitterness I’ve always had a hard time creating good combinations of hops any opinions etc are appreciated
My first question of you is this: what are you trying to create? What kind of flavors, and why the white wheat and flaked barley? What do you expect they're going to do for you?
Answering the question about bitterness is going to be difficult without knowing the Alpha Acid percentage of the liberty hops. The greater the percentage, and the longer you boil those hops, the greater the bitterness you'll achieve. From what I can see online, Liberty hops will likely have between 3 and 5 percent Alpha Acids, which isn't a high amount. You're offsetting some of that with using 1.5 ounces instead of the 1 ounce of bittering hops recipes often specify. You'll also gain some bittering from the cascade, which generally has somewhat higher AA than Liberty, but not a tremendous amount.
So, we're back to: what are you hoping this recipe will bring out? You don't specify a yeast, which is as important an ingredient as the others. Different yeasts will produce different flavors. Have you a yeast in mind?
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I brew a lot with S-05 or its equivalents, WLP001, Wyeast1056. It's a pretty clean yeast, so I get mostly the flavors from the malt and the hops being more forward.
I also brew California Common beers (an Anchor Steam type of beer). For that I'm using Wyeast2112 or WLP810, both of which produce a specific type of flavor in the beer--flavor that comes from the yeast, not the ingredients, which are pretty basic.
So think on what you want your yeast to be as well as the ingredients. Your ingredients above are fairly....bland, in a way, and maybe that's what you're looking for. But that kind of blandness can be a nice palette on which to paint your hops or your yeast flavors, depending, again, on what you're looking for.
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The same thing goes for malt. I like Maris Otter malt--it provides a richer flavor (in my estimation) than standard 2-row, gives me a fuller flavor in beer made with it than with 2-row. I like it, many others do as well.
But not everyone. Others want a different flavor profile, and will adjust the malt accordingly. So think on what you want that malt to do as well.
