Could I use twice as much 60L? The recipe calls for 4oz of 120L. Don’t have it on hand but do have 60L. Thought?
-James-
Nope, using twice as much 60 wouldn’t be anywhere near the same. You could use the same amount of 60, but it would be a bit different beer than you intended.
In a way it would be like saying that a recipe calls for a pound of toffee, don’t have any so I’ll use two pounds of carmel.
“Friends don’t let friends drink bad beer”
What you might be able to do is to steep some Crystal 60 in a little warm water for 20 minutes, then boil it down to a very thick, caramelized syrup, and then use that in your beer. Not sure how close this would come to real Crystal 120, but hey, it might make for an interesting experiment. At the very least, you’ll make beer!
You could bake the 4oz of 60L at 350F for 30-45 minutes. That would get you in the ballpark…
Dave
This would probably get you in the same ballpark for color, but there would be big differences in flavor. If you needed to sub them out, I’d probably split the difference and go with about 6 ounces of the C-60. The darker crystal malts have a more significant flavor impact on an ounce-per-ounce basis. The actual flavor won’t be the same, but I think that the flavor impact will be closer.
Indeed. C60 is more caramel whereas C120 is more raisin.
Agreed, 120 is getting up into the Special B flavor-range.
Great article in a recent Zymurgy about testing grains for color, flavor, etc at home in small batches - I think it was in pint jars. Anyway, one of the examples given for her experiments (sorry, forget her name and I don’t have the magazine with me) was the crystal malts. Did a good job of demonstrating the differeneces in color and flavors of everything from L10 to Special B I believe. Again, you’d have to check the article for specifics. I’m sure this post is too late to help with the O/P’s situation…but maybe next time.