Your thoughts please

[marcarm]

Planning on brewing this tomorrow, loosely based on GW's recipe for Adnams Explorer.

4.00 kg Pale Malt, Maris Otter (5.9 EBC) Grain 1 88.9 %
0.25 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (118.2 EBC) Grain 2 5.6 %
0.18 kg Acid Malt (5.9 EBC) Grain 3 4.0 %
0.07 kg Black (Patent) Malt (985.0 EBC) Grain 4 1.6 %
40.00 g Challenger [7.50 %] - Boil 90.0 min Hop 5 33.8 IBUs
10.00 g Kazbek [7.70 %] - Boil 15.0 min Hop 6 3.7 IBUs
10.00 g Kazbek [7.70 %] - Aroma Steep 20.0 min Hop 8 0.0 IBUs
5.00 g Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 mins)

Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 3.9 %
Bitterness: 37.4 IBUs
Est Color: 21.8 EBC

The colour in the recipe is meant to be 30 EBC, but to get that colour through Beersmith I'd really have to up the black malt which I don't want to do. The recipe calls for 36g and I have nearly doubled that already, is that too much for this type of beer?

I'm looking for a nice summer ale that can be easily quaffed during a BBQ, I am also planning on adding a hop tea made with Kazbek after initial fermentation has ended. I have dry hopped before and lost loads of beer to the hops, so either my technique is wrong or I did something wrong with that.

Yeast will be from a local brewery, fermented at 20 degrees.

Thanks

[micmacmoc]

I've never heard of kazbek hops! Have you managed to get some Adnams yeast? Apparently its a dual strain and difficult to replicate, unless you get some from one of those mini kegs of ghost ship. G'luck with your brew, it'll be good beer anyhow!

[Rookie]

If you want more color but not the flavor of black malt use some midnight wheat or caraffa. Mill it separately and add it at the end of the mash time just before starting the sparge. You could also cold steep some and make a color extract, then add however much gets you to the darker color that you want.

[killer]

Even as little as 70g of Black Malt will add a roasted/ toasty flavour to a pale beer. If you don't want any at all maybe don't add it.

[PhilB]

Hi marcarm

Regarding the colour problem ... I think you may be suffering from the fact that Wheeler is specifying the colour of the beer as 30 EBC, calculated by the (linear) Malt Colour Units method, whereas Beersmith uses (at least by default, I don't know if you can change that in its settings) the (non-linear) Morey formula ... and 30 EBC is in the zone where the colours calculated by the two methods diverge quite a bit (see that thread over there for a discussion about the pros/come of the two(link)) ... have you tried putting your grainbill into Graham's Beer Engine tool?

Cheers, PhilB

[marcarm]

I made this yesterday, looks good so far. Not much roasted flavour in the wort but a bit darker than I wanted.

I use yeast from Wibblers brewery where i get my ingredients from.

I BIAB and from the 25l recipe in the book at 1042 (I think) I got 29l at 1044 so very happy with that. Had to put some in a dj as not enough room in the fv!

[pete69]

Thanks to a tip from a fellow member, last time I cold steeped my dark malts and got a pitch black beer with very little malt astringency. Will be doing this from now onwards!