Belgian Manhattan Quad - Please offer advice

I promise this will be the last recipe I post for a bit.  I greatly appreciate all the help I’ve received so far with my other posts.  What are your thoughts:

Malt:
11.60 lb Pale Malt (2 Row)
.83 lb Carafa I
.73 lb Munich Malt - 10L
.62 lb White Wheat Malt

Boil:
.13 oz Nugget (90 min) 
.25 oz  Nugget (75 min)
.5 oz Styrian Goldings  (75 min)
1.5 oz Styrian Goldings  (5 min)

1 lb D-180
.75 lb Dextrose
.5 lb Brown Sugar, Dark
.5 lb Brown Sugar, Light
Sugars added with 15 minutes left of boil

Flameout:
1 orange (zest)
1 cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon dried chamomile
8 cardamom pods
1 star anise
1 teaspoon dried lavender
1/4 teaspoon wormwood leaf

Yeast:
Wyeast Labs #3787

Prime with 3.75 oz of table sugar and 2 tablespoons of Angostura Bitters

Add rye whiskey soaked oak cubes to secondary

when I saw manhattan style I was afraid there would be tomatoes in it. Like they do with chowder

I have no experience brewing Quads, and little experience drinking them. To me though, it seems like you have an awful lot going on here. I know there were suggestions on your other beer to not try too many flavor additives at once, or it will all get muddled together or trample each other. My only real suggestion is to simplify, but again that is an uninformed suggestion.

69franx I understand where you’re coming from.  The herbs should all work together to give me a vermouth flavor.

haha I’m all for experimenting with new flavors, but I’d be afraid of tomato in my beer too.

Some of the best beers are the simplest beers.

Choose 1 possibly 2 spices if they work together.
Choose 1 sugar type.

How are you getting your grain weights?  I generally go in .25lb increments, maybe 1/8th lb. if necessary.

The main issue is mixing all kinds of sugars and spices together and expecting one or two to stand out.

Do you want people to say this is really nice orange flavored beer?

Or do you want people to say, this tastes like mud?

Complexity is usually derived through simpler means like using a different base malt.

Just some thoughts.

I appreciate the input.  I use a powder scale. I already have dextrose and brown sugar.  The D-180 would’ve been added anyway.  It’s cheaper than buying more D-180 and should work well together.  No single ingredient should stand out. When making a tea several ingredients can work very well together as long as there is balance.

I was going to post the same thing.

I mean the weights in your recipe, not what you use to weigh grains.  IMO, odd weights simply make a recipe more complex than need be.

A good test is to remove one ingredient.  If you don’t notice a difference, it’s not really contributing anything worthwhile.  The difference between mud and complexity.

When scaling recipes for various efficiency or volumes, I often have weights that like this. I’ll go to the 1/10 of an ounce even. Sure it takes more time, but it doesn’t make it more complex. I also weigh my hops and water additions to the 1/100 of a gram.

I’d lose the wheat and bump the Munich up to a lb.

You’re so down on wheat in quads.  But I think I agree with you.  I’m not sure what the wheat brings to the table in this beer.

haha yeah I like wheat in my quads. I dig the sweet, doughy flavor but I’m not against removing it.  It would be cheaper to lose it and bump the Munich.

Have you used wormwood in anything before? Is 1/4 tsp in 5 gallons an acceptable amount? Wormwood is potent, vile stuff. Best be careful with that one!

I’ve used wormwood for homemade vermouth.  I’ve never brewed with it though.

Yeah, that’s kinda it.  I feel like every ingredient needs to justify it’s existence in a recipe and I just can’t see what wheat brings to the party.  But that’s me…if someone can justify that addition, then cool.

OK, you’ve just justified it for me!  But I don’t know if the wheat will actually give you that flavor.

I like the flavor of wheat but it will get lost among everything else in that recipe. I’ve seen more than a few quad recipes with wheat but it seems the rationale is to balance a huge amount of dark sugars so the beer isn’t too thin rather than for flavor. However if that’s the case here I would cut the dextrose.

I haven’t brewed this recipe yet, but wanted to come back to it. Personally this beer means a lot to me as it’s in memory of my grandfather whose drink of choice was a Manhattan.  I’ve been brewing quite a bit recently and decided this did need some changes.  I’m not positive if I still want to use bitters for bottling.

Malt:
11.75 lb Pale Malt (2 Row)
.85 lb Carafa I
1 lb Munich Malt - 10L

Boil:
.1 oz Nugget (90 min) 
.25 oz  Nugget (75 min)
.5 oz Styrian Goldings  (75 min)
1.5 oz Styrian Goldings  (5 min)

1 lb D-180
1lb D-90

Sugars added with 15 minutes left of boil

Flameout:
.5 oz Orange Zest
3 grams cardamom
1 oz crushed coriander

Yeast:
Wyeast Labs #3787

I will still add rye whiskey to soaked oak cubes in primary for 10 days.

Be really careful with the cardamom. I’m not sure how much 3 grams are but I used one crushed up pod and it was pretty noticeable.