Hi, colleagues!!
I am going to elaborate a Scottish Ale next week for first time.
And I have a doubt!!! :o
The most of recipes I saw including sugar (candy sugar).
But my question is… can I add more cara-malt instead of candy sugar??
I don’t like the sugar very much and I prefer to get fermentable material from the malt, directly…
What do you think about??
Best,
Never heard of using candy sugar in a Scottish ale…the recipes you saw probably included it just to boost alcohol a bit, since it will ferment out.
You certainly don’t need it in there.
My Scottish Ale is just 2-row and 20L Munich…and that’s it, except of course for the hops (and not much of that).
And for a strong Scotch Ale, it would just be increased amounts of the malts and only a bit more hops.
There are lots of interpretations of the styles however.
cara malt and sugar also do opposite things in a beer. As the Professor says, sugar is in a recipe to boost the alcohol without adding any body, cara malts are there to boost the body and, to some extent, perceived sweetness of the beer.
Agreed, forget about the sugar. Never heard of a Scotch Ale recipe calling for it.
Ok, great.
Thank you everyone for your answers.
I am calmer about the sugar, I won’t add any one!
Sugar seems contrary to what most are trying to achieve in a scottish ale. I’ve never seen a recipe with it.
In general I agree with no sugar in these. But I have been toying with the idea of adding a little into my annual 1.120 wee heavy to try to drive the FG down a little from where it’s been in the last couple of years.
Although for the 2012 version I think I’m just going to drop my mash temp a bit more and extend the mash time even more and see what that does.
Is it possible that the OP is looking at recipes for SCOTCH ale? isn’t that a somewhat popular belgian style? which might indeed have candi sugar in it.
Scotch Ale is not a belgian style. It’s in the same grouping (Scottish and Irish Ale) as the Scottish 60/- 70/- etc. Scotch Ale is also referred to as a “Wee Heavy”.
Now that I think of it, the Belgians do make a Scotch Ale-- McChouffe (and I only remembered that because I saw bottles of it yesterday in a liquor store).
I don’t know their formula (except that they do use Belgian yeast) but I guess it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think there may be some candy sugar in there. I’ve seen it described in more than one place as a “Scotch Abbey Ale” (which itself sounds intriguing). I’m not very big on Belgian beers at all , but I intend to pick up a McChouffe this week and give it a whirl.
But if you’re looking at a more traditional or ‘authentic’ (whatever that is) Scottish or Scotch Ale you probably don’t want any sugar in there (nor would you want smoked malt of any kind).
But in the end it does really come back around to “whatever works”.
The end result is generally more important than how you achieve it.
Had a McChouffe a few days ago. It’s a winter standard for me. While it does seem to have a low level of what we think of as “Belgian character” I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a Scotch ale, exactly, either. Let’s just call it “a damn fine beer!”.
Daniels does mention the use of sugar in some Scottish Ales. However I personally dont care for it in their as to me the goal of a Scottish ale is to achieve a sweet malty profile and keep the attenuation fairly low. Sugar does just the opposite of those things.
Id personally opt against sugar. Make sure you mash high! 154-160(I do 158) to keep the fermentables lowers, and miminal hop presence. You dont want more than 15 or so IBU’s for the 60-70 area, and no more than 25 or so for a Wee Heavy.
Yeast is a great place to experiment here for attenuation purposes. Daniels cites Eurpean Ale, Irish Ale, Edinburgh Ale, or Cal Ale as possibilities, and some folks even using lager yeast with success.
Keep the ferm temp low also, no higher than 65.
Ive actually got a split batch of 70/- I brewed up this weekend fermenting now. I pitched WLP029 Edinburgh Ale in one batch and WLP060(experimenting with this since Ive had good success with 001 but wanted a touch more maltiness in there. Im fermenting at 60 degrees on both. Ill post back with results in a month or so!
That’s the one I was thinking of i think.
Sounds good to me! I’ll look forward to having some later in the week.!
I don’t have BLAM handy to check, but I seem to recall that Stan says one of the Trappist breweries originally sourced their yeast from McEwan’s. Unless I’ve misremembered that completely.