I have a lot of crystal and specialty malts with lovibond ratings of 50 to 300 left over and I’m thinking about throwing them all together with enough 2-row to make a 5-gal batch just to use them up. I’d add only minor amounts of black patent or roasted.
I like malt forward brews, but I’m thinking I might want to increase bittering hops by 25% to counteract additional sweetness.
Comments please and I’ll thank you in advance for your advice.
There’s all sorts of beers you could make with a combination of darker malts but throwing them all together and hoping for the best is one of the best ways to make a recipe that tastes like brown rather than something you really want to drink.
My favorite beers are in the brown ales to stout spectrum. If I can get the sweetness balanced, I probably will be satisfied with the results.
I think the amount of extra bitterness will depend on how much crystal your going to have in the recipe. Reference point: Celebration Ale has 10% C60 and it has 65 IBU. Celebration is not sweet but you can taste the crystal flavor.
I wouldn’t go higher than 10% Crystal.
+1. Also, I wouldn’t go much over 10% total dark roasted roasted malts - chocolate, black patent, roasted barley. My pretty roasty American Stout uses 10.8% of a mix of chocolate malt and roasted barley.
The worst that can happen is you don’t like he beer. This is homebrewing! Experiment. Just post your result here.
If the beer isn’t to your liking, age it, sour it, blend it. Nothing in this hobby has to go to waste. Heck, I even took a small batch of leftover and made a batch of BBQ sauce out of it.
I’m still a bit confused about the limitations most of you are suggesting on the crystal and the darker malts.
According to the extraction table (5.1) from Ray Daniels Designing Great Beers, crystal malts have virtually the same extraction value as base malts and chocolate/black/roast have about 10 gravity points less.
I like malt-forward beers, and don’t care if they are dark in color as long as they taste good to me. If I used 50% pale, 45% crystal of various lovibonds, and 5% black, you think the beer would taste awful?
I understand the black and roast would add bitterness, so I would use them sparingly.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
I think you a mis-equating “malty” with “crystal-malt flavor.” Sure crystal malts add maltiness to a beer, but they also add a candy-like element that can be overpowering and can quickly push a beer into the undrinkable category.
I can’t say that I have had a beer that is close to 50% crystal malt, but I have had some that are 15% and the crystal malt flavor was just too dominant. Personally, I have a maximum of about 10% crystal malt in beers that I make, and so yes, I think a 45% crystal malt beer would taste awful.
This ^^
I think what is meant is that the beer will taste muddy rather than like a brown ale.
A brown ale is mostly base malt with ~10%-15% crystal/color malts for color and flavor.
The other thing to think about is that crystal malts add unfermentable sugars to your brew so the extraction isn’t the only thing to be concerned with. at 45% you might well end up with a lower attenuation than you would like.
But that said, it’s your beer.