Wondering if there is a conversion factor (by a percentage reduction) to change a recipe’s grain bill into a session grain bill. Lets say a recipe calls for 10 pounds of marris otter. To make it a session brew, should the 10 pounds be reduced by 20%, or whatever, to 8 pounds? There must be a formula or some way to make the adjustment.
There is no rule or formula. Simply formulate the recipe for the OG you want.
the problem with only reducing the base malt is that the percentage of specialty malt in the recipe goes up and can throw things out of balance. You can look at grain bills as percentages and not pounds and reduce everything proportional to one another, but I dont think this is necessarily the right way to “sessionize” a beer recipe either.
Start from the ground up when making a new recipe.
Totally agree. I know a number of people only reduce base malt but that doesn’t work for me. You end up with a different beer.
There’s a lot more to brewing a great session beer than scaling the ingredients. Jen Talley wrote an excellent book on the subject. Definitely worth a read:
Jen’s book is a good read. Good old Utah and its prior low ABV caps (now raised to reasonable levels) made session brewing a near (beer) necessity.
You can spend a bunch of hours looking at this sites bitter and mild recipes. It may have what you want, or not. It is fascinating.
I recently read the book “Session Beers: Brewing for Flavor and Balance, Jennifer Talley”.
My expectations were higher than what was read. Chapter 2 was the meat of the books title.
However, overall it was still good to have my views/beliefs reinforced.
For some time now I only brew session beers. Recipes in the back of this book reinforce
what I had learned the long/hard way. Start with 8.5 pounds total grain for a 5 gallon batch, most consisting
of base malt. Recipes in the book have commercial scaled recipes, and also scales them down to 5 gallons.
Most of the scaled down recipes hover around 8-8.5 pounds total grain. I would start with 8.5 pounds
total grain for 5 gallons and adjust from there.
I brew 4.25-4.5 gallon batches and only use 8 pounds. Over time I had used 7.5, 8, 8.5, 9
,and used my taste preference and buzz factor after a few beers to determine where I wanted the ABV to be.
Long story short, use 8.5 pounds total grain for 5 gallons, and use your preferred ABV and taste
to guide you from there. Brewing session beers is certainly challenging for flavor and balance, as
the ABV & grain amounts change, so does the flavor profile. Currently Yuengling-Light is a good
commercial example of a low ABV beer, 3.8%.
I use BeerSmith and I put in the grain bill and then you can click on the gravity bar to adjust the gravity. It will keep the percentages the same but hit the gravity that you want.
British ales are the most satisfying session beers IMO. Agreed this site is awesome.
One lesson that I’ve learned from brewing some of Ron’s recipes is that keeping carbonation on the lower side is benificial for session beers. Higher carbonation tends to a thin mouthfeel.
Ron’s 1957 Whitbread IPA recipe is the only “Session IPA” I’ll ever brew. It is phenomenal.
I make lots of session beer below 4.5% abv. Lots of good advice and references so far. Reduced carbonation helps a lot with mouthfeel. Select your yeast strain for lower attenuation and watch non fermentable vs fermentable grains accordingly. Adding an extra 1/2-1 pound of special roast, victory, biscuit, black malt etc goes a very long way toward preserving flavor/mouthfeel. Don’t be afraid to cut back on the hops. Balance is THE key.
A final note, I’m religious on my water to grist ratios hitting 2 quarts per lb total with 1.25 going in the mash. For smaller beers I like to adjust this to mashing with 1 qt per lb and sparring with.5 qts per lb reducing my runoff volume and efficiency but increasing the maltiness of the beer. My normal efficiency is 79% but comes out around 71% with this method.
Cheers!
I need to brew that again.
I have this beer on my “to do” list and was wondering what yeast you have had the most success with. I believe the Barclay Perkins website recommends 1099, but I can imagine a whole host of options working here. Thanks in advance.
Windsor is a good substitute for 1099 (which might be harder to find, much less to keep it fresh). Or maybe even better, the old Munton’s ale yeast.
I use Muntons a lot with good results.
If you put a recipe in BeerSmith you can tell it to adjust the OG. It will reduce all grains to hit your target OG keeping the relative percentages. Other software can probably do the same thing.
It will adjust hop additions also. But, I usually do that manually to match the hop profile I want.
Dave, or anyone, a question regarding Windsor: What is your experience with clarity using Windsor?? Lallemand describes it as a Low Floc yeast but that wasn’t my one and only experience with it. I won’t say I found it to be Hi-floc as I used it in a Porter and who can really tell, but I did find it quick to finish and the fermenter developed a nice pack of sediment at the bottom. Or maybe I’m just incorrectly equating flocculation with clarity?? Maybe it’s more a function of time?
Besides clarity, for the Whitbread IPA I am looking for a malty profile with some helpful fruity esters.
If anyone wants to put a strikethrough across any of these options, please feel free! 
WY1099
WY1318
WY1469
WLP002
WLP005
Windsor
I have to eliminate Muntons as I will be ordering from MoreBeer and apparently they don’t carry it.
1469 has glorious stone fruit esters that arent overly strong and it finishes dry. Great yeast strain
I find that Windsor takes a fair bit of time to clear, so Lallemand’s assessment is pretty accurate as compared with my experience. It will drop clear with time and cold, but it takes a few weeks…gelatin or a similar agent would of course hurry that along. Of the ones listed above that I have experience with, WLP002 drops clear like a champ. I’ve only used WLP005 once, so don’t have a lot of comparison. I can say that Windsor has some really interesting character, which is less pronounced in WLP002 (a much cleaner yeast in my experience).