I have been brewing amber ales lately. At first I was making my own recipes from studying internet sources. They were good but not what I got from one local brewery. Then, I asked for that recipe and brewed it and then brewed Pizza Port Shark Bite Red (from morebeer.com). These two have 20% and 21% caramel malt in 1055-1060 OG recipes. That was more caramel malt than I ever dreamed of. Shark Bite Red has 2.25 lbs. C80 and 0.5 lbs. C120 in 5 gallons. I knew it would be cloying for sure, but it isn’t. It finished at 1012 down from 1058 with US-05. It is approaching dry and crisp. 60 IBUs help, I am sure.
Both have been excellent amber ales. I really like the Shark Bite Red especially.
My only rule about recipes is to use whatever you want to, in any quantity you want to, to achieve the result you want. It seems silly to otherwise limit yourself. The issue is not the ingredients, it’s the understanding of how to use them.
I think that the bugaboo over caramel and crystal malts has been overstated. I see them mostly in IPA’s, but I can tolerate them in other styles, such as an amber. Oddly, for my standard Helles recipe, I use a little Goldswaen Carahell (around 5-6%) and it works out pretty well with an IBU to balance at around 18 IBU’s. Others may stick with a Munich or Vienna addition to the pils base as the “other than pils” malts…try it out and choose what tastes best.
If you have the skill to balance crystal malt at or above 20%, I’m truly impressed. Because not many can - at half that.
I think the backlash against crystal was WELL deserved because it was way overused, in my opinion. Maybe, because of this backlash, it has made brewers re-think their crystal additions and use it a bit more evenhandedly nowadays. Objection sustained, as I see it.
Crystal malt is kind of the defining ingredient for an Amber ale. I think that the idea that “too much Crystal malt” is going to lead to an overly sweet or cloying beer is an old brewer’s myth dating back to times when many homebrewers were using extract + steeping grains and didn’t necessarily have access to the quality of yeast that we have today. Underattenuated beer with a lot of crystal malt is pretty blah. A well-attenuated Amber ale with enough IBU’s and hop character to balance the Crystal can make for a fantastic beer.
I agree, but that’s the trick isn’t it. In my opinion, there are a lot more failures than success stories. Maybe the pendulum is starting to swing in favor of more appropriate crystal usage, but I’ll continue to be skeptical. I’ve had too many overly sweet caramel/crystal beers. Maybe it’s me. Could be.
Which is how I developed my Waldo Lake Amber recipe. Amber flavor, but not sweet. It was popular enough that a couple companies used to sell kits of itl
This article Homebrewing Beer: Crystal malt experiment - Attenuation test is about an experiment with crystal malts. One of the conclusions is that steeping crystal malt yields sugars that are less fermentable than mashing. According to these results, extract brews with steeping grains may not be able to handle as much crystal as all-grain brews.
The thinking that crystal malts are bad sort of started when Vinnie Curlizo said they clash with hops. That’s what people heard.
More accurately he said the higher Lovibond crystal malts, C60 or so and above had dark fruit flavors such as raisins, plums, and dark sugars that would clash with piney and citrusy hops. He advocated using less that C40 colored crystal malts which are mainly sweet.
I wonder how the new fruity hops would go with a dark crystal malts?
As an aside, when looking for Amber recipes to try I came across Waldo Lake Amber. One thing about your recipes is there are many varying copies of all of them online. You and Drew should publish a book that is the definitive copy of all your homebrew recipes.
PS. I did find your version from the old AHA recipe wiki on the way back machine. You put a link to it on a bulletin board and it came up in a Google search.
