Tips on Brewing a 3.5% (Or Thereabouts) Ale

[nicksonic]

Thanks for the info, will report back once it's brewed and sampled

[rpt]

I've done 4 brews with WLP-002. The first was an IPA and I got over 80% apparent attenuation but that did contain sugar. The other brews had much lower attenuation that was quite well correlated to mash temperature.

[Padalac]

I concur with what people have already said regarding, mash temp, attenuation, speciality malts. A couple of extra tidbits:

-caragold may be a good shout.
-try using a decent % of richer, denser base malt, such as munich, vienna, or mild malt. You could go 60% maris otter, 40% munich for example. Mild ale malt has higher dextrin content, so it should make it feel like a bigger beer.
-carbonation - don't overcarb. i think lower abv ales work better at a lowish level of carbonation, for example, cask ale, which usually works really well at lower abv. i think you get a fuller, creamier impression, and the flavour and sensation of the reduced co2 doesn't overpower the thinner beer.
-West Yorkshire yeast (wyeast 1469) is great for low abv beers.

[nicksonic]

Using another malt had occurred to me but I was undecided so thanks for the suggestion.

I'll hopefully be brewing this in a week or two so will post again with the final recipe. Cheers!

[Bazz]

I have a low ABV beer planned for the future and was intending to ferment it with Windsor, for it's high flavour low attenuation characteristics.

[gr_baker]

I've made quite a few quite low abv beers (1 to 1.5% abv) I use a grain bill that includes sweeter grains like crystal, mash at 72C and don't sparge. Safale S04 works well too.

There's a local brewer around here that mashes all of their beers at 72C to give taste and mouthfeel. They use invert sugar to give alcohol content and reduce the intensity of the mashed grains. The combination of the two works really well and one of their beers is 3.5%, it's fairly well hopped and it's a cracking pint.