No to the first question. You won’t get any fermentable sugars from the corn in this recipe.
The purpose of using flaked corn in a recipe is to add fermentable sugars while lightening up the beer’s body and color. You do get a little corn flavor from it, but not much. Steeping it like in this recipe might add a slight corn flavor, and yes, it might add a haze from dissolved, but unconverted, starches. Not sure why you’d want to do that in a cream ale.
That said, in the interest of me taking my own advice, I shouldn’t criticize this recipe without having my own empirical observations about steeping flaked corn at ~150 degrees in the absence of an enzymatic base malt. I’ve never done this, nor am I going to, but it might turn out just fine.
I’ve steeped flaked barley, Victory, and Aromatic malts in extract batches and I picked up a flavor contribution without noticing excessive haze. But that was either to add body or flavor to a more flavorful beer. Flaked maize in a Cream Ale is a different animal. It’s purpose is primarily to add fermentables without adding much protein. It may add a bit of flavor, but that’s not necessarily the primary goal of the maize in this recipe. If I were brewing that recipe I’d consider using dextrose or table sugar instead, since that would probably come closer to accomplishing what the maize was included in the all grain version of the recipe for.
When I was an extract brewer, recipes that used corn used it in syrup form. I had a number of recipes with corn syrup and also rice syrup. In an AG recipe, I agree that it’s about lightening the body and color, possibly getting some amount of corn flavor and it also seems to lend a smidge of sweetness depending on the percentage used. I generally don’t go higher than about 10%.
i notice OP is really interested in the making of macro beers, and its kinda boggling to me really.
on a homebrew level if you want to make a BMC style beer there are tons of CAP recipes out there if you want to go the corn route, if not i would just do pale 2 row grain or extract and add dextrose to lighten colour and body and hop to ~15 IBU with whatever hop you want.
Great, but what does that have to do with the OP? We’re talking about a recipe that has flaked maize with no enzymes for conversion? What does that do to the final beer?
Sure, I’m interested in macro beers, but again what is the purpose of having flaked maize in a recipe with no enzymes for conversion? What does it do the final beer, or is it just a mistake?
Now don’t go feeling sorry for yourself, you have valid points but they just didn’t seem to apply directly to the OP. In fact your website and recipes were valuable resources to me when I got started.
The easy way out for converting an AG recipe to extract is to convert the base malt to extract and steep everything else. I’ve seen many head scratcher extract recipes over the years, and I’m sure part of it is because the authors never brewed them. The person who wrote the recipe probably wasn’t thinking about this at as high of a level as we are
If you want to make things a bit more complicated (maybe fun), you do a mini-mash with the flaked corn and some malted barley. I imagine you could do this with these grains in a bag in your boil kettle, do the mini-mash at 150F for 20 minutes, then remove the bag and brew the rest of the recipe.
Meh, I have no intention of brewing this. I was just browsing recipes of some of these online retailers and it seems a lot of them are flippantly put together with no thought given to the end result. You really have to hunt to find a well thought out recipe. But all of you are correct, I could do an all grain or a partial mash, use dextrose or corn syrup to make up for the lack of conversion, etc… (basically correct and compensate for the bad recipe).
Got a charge out-of this video where the guy puts 2 lbs of corn syrup into a Brewers Best Cream Ale. I’m not saying his methods are good or bad, but they seem satisfied with the end result.
