Yeast for Guiness Clone

[ashbyp]

I'm going to have a go at a Guiness clone this weekend, and I've procrastinated and haven't ordered the Wyeast Irish Ale I was planning to.

So it's S04 or Nottingham. Which would be best, you reckon?

I'm doing the extract based recipe from Clone brews, don't have the recipe at work but it's something along the lines:

pale dme
roasted barley
flaked barley
acid malt

[mysterio]

Flaked barley needs to be mashed does it not? I dont understand why there is acid malt... very odd. I would go with Nottingham but make sure you have some base grain to mash with the flaked barley to convert it... and chuck the acid malt.

[ashbyp]

Flaked barley is def in the extract recipe... I seen quite a few extract recipes than include stuff that is supposed to be mashed...

The acid malt, as I remember, is supposed to give the ale a slightly sour taste.

[richard_senior]

AFAIK the key to guiness is the addition of soured beer.
Apparently there are better ways to sour beer than just leaving it open to the air.. but I'm not sure what they arey.
Buy a can of guiness and leave it open with a towel over it for a week.
Stick it in a pan and heat it to just under boiling with the lid on, then add it to your beer as you rack it.
Not sure if this takes the place of acid malt or not?

[booldawg]

How about Windsor for the yeast? Should leave you a bit of residual sweetness and enough body.

[steve_flack]

Flaked Barley needs to be mashed otherwise all you'll add is unfermentable starch (and gloopy glucans). Acid Malt is a waste of time given the amount of roast barley usually in a stout recipe.

If this is the recipe http://www.brewingkb.com/recipes/Guinne ... e-497.html then I don't think that's remotely a guinness clone. To my mind this is a Guinness clone

70% Pale Malt
20% Flaked Barley
10% Roasted Barley

BTW, I'd use Nottingham given the choice of the two yeasts but S-04 would also work. I think drier is better though.

[ashbyp]

Flaked Barley needs to be mashed otherwise all you'll add is unfermentable starch (and gloopy glucans). Acid Malt is a waste of time given the amount of roast barley usually in a stout recipe.

If this is the recipe http://www.brewingkb.com/recipes/Guinne ... e-497.html then I don't think that's remotely a guinness clone. To my mind this is a Guinness clone

70% Pale Malt
20% Flaked Barley
10% Roasted Barley

BTW, I'd use Nottingham given the choice of the two yeasts but S-04 would also work. I think drier is better though.

Yes Steve - that is the recipe. Interesting comments - now I don't trust the Clone brews book, which is a shame

Since I don't have a mash tun, I can't do your version. I dont like the sound of gloopy glucans so plan B I think...

[mysterio]

Pretty common error in recipe books. I think Brewing Classic Styles includes flaked barley in the extract stout recipe.

AFAIK the key to guiness is the addition of soured beer.

Are we talking about the draught stuff you get in pubs here? Never seemed sour at all to me.

[steve_flack]

Some of their recipes (Clone Brews) are decidedly suspect.

If you want a dark beer what about a mild. Much easier to do with extract as the speciality grains can usually all be steeped.

[steve_flack]

Pretty common error in recipe books. I think Brewing Classic Styles includes flaked barley in the extract stout recipe.

]
My only criticism of that book is that all the recipes are extract recipes when clearly JZ is an all-grain brewer and IMO has probably just converted them to extract - I doubt he's brewed them that way.

I guess they were after maximum sales as there's a bigger proportion of extract brewers in the states. I think they should have left it as all-grain with extract as a footnote....rather than the other way around.

[ashbyp]

Some of their recipes (Clone Brews) are decidedly suspect.
If you want a dark beer what about a mild. Much easier to do with extract as the speciality grains can usually all be steeped.

aye - I also have a recipe for a brown ale (which, I think is actually just the name given to milds in bottles?) - so i'll try that instead.

It's issues like this that will force me to buy a blooming mash tun and spend 6 hours brewing a beer rather than 2 1/2.

[steve_flack]

I would say that mashing would only add a couple of hours at most to a brewday. It depends on your process but with a 60 minute mash and batch sparging it would be considerably less than that.

I guess you have the water to heat beforehand but I usually get up and turn that on and go back to bed for a bit. I brew early in the morning and I'm usually all cleaned up by midday.

[richard_senior]

Are we talking about the draught stuff you get in pubs here? Never seemed sour at all to me.

Yeah, Guiness
If you compare guiness to murpheys one of the things you notice is that guiness is dry.
The dryness apparently comes from soured beer kept in special old wooden kegs riddled with lactose bacteria. They add a proportion of this to every batch they make.
You can make any old stout without it, but apparently if you want that trademark guiness dryness.. that's the trick.

[steve_flack]

Although that is true about adding sourness, I'm not sure it applies to all the brands of Guinness. I think it's just the FES that gets the soured beer. The standard guinnes doesn't get any. In any case they don't use the big vats any more. The sourer beer is fermented using a bacterial culture as opposed to any longer term maturation in oak vats.

If it's dryness you want in a beer you can get dryness by increasing the attenuation....by using nottingham or particularly US-05.

[richard_senior]

Qu'est-ce que c'est 'attenuation' sil vous plait?