Fixing a bitter scottish ale

Ingredients
1

So, I brewed a scotch ale the weekend before last, and had a bit of issues with efficiency, so I ended up at about 1.068, rather than 1.075. I used Skotrat’s Traquair house ale clone recipe, but subbed EKG for hops.

I pulled a sample today to test my gravity, and it dropped all the way to 1.013. I tasted the sample, and while it is reasonably tasty, its overly bitter, and doesn’t have that caramelly sweetness I expect out of a scotch ale.

I was reading Radical brewing, and I thought that maybe to give this a bit more body and flavor, I could take about a pound of light dme, and a half pound of sugar and cook it down until it caramelizes and gets a bit darker. I would hope to add some more maillard products and unfermentable sugars to add some more of that flavor. Any thoughts?

2

Sugar is going to be pretty fermentable, even if you boil it down pretty far. Just extract would probably be better. Better still would be a mini-mash with like C-120 or something like that, and boil that to oblivion.

Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. I make a lot of sugar syrups, mostly for Belgian type beers, and I never tried boiling down Special B wort into syrup. I’ll have to try that.