This post is one in a series of making small adjustments to a single recipe in order to improve it, learn more about the impact each ingredient has on the finished product, and the art of recipe creation. The rest of the series can be found here.

Author: C. McKenzie

An Ode to Brown Ale

I’m probably somewhat of an outlier in the beer and brewing community. I didn’t actually have my first drink until some months after my 21st birthday. I remember very well what my first beers and my opinions of them were. That very first beer was a Yuengling, sipped slowly from the green bottle over the course of about an hour as I cautiously began figuring out what to expect from alcohol. That timeline to drink that first beer was probably equal parts caution and not particularly loving that lager. Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t suffering through that first beer. I didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t love at first beer. Honestly, I’m still not the biggest fan of lagers as a whole, though there are some notable exceptions.

That second beer, though—oh, that second beer was what convinced me to keep giving beer a chance. The second bottle I popped that night was a Newcastle. Though not my first beer, it was the first beer I liked, and for that reason it still holds a special place in my heart. It became my go-to for quite some time while I was still exploring the world of beer and the flavors that were possible. And so began my love for brown ales.

I wish I saw more brown ales. In a climate where IPA is king, the malty complexity of a brown ale is often underrated, or at least overlooked. I can’t name a time when I last heard someone say that a brown ale was their favorite beer or when a brown ale showed up on a top 10 or even top 100 list of beers. It just doesn’t happen, and for all that lack of notoriety and never showing up in the spotlight, brown ale has always been there lurking in the shadows, still being delicious. Honestly, when it comes down to it, if for some reason I were forced to choose one style to drink for the rest of my life, I would certainly choose brown ale.

I could continue my declaration of love for a style that is not mentioned as much as I think it deserves, but I’ll spare you. I’ve probably brewed more brown ale than any other style; in fact, the first beer I ever brewed was a brown ale. Ultimately, when I was considering what style to approach next as an iterative brewing project, brown ale just seemed right to me for all of the reasons above.

Brew Day

Having the day off work, I took a leisurely approach to brew day and let it fall as it would around what my kids were doing at the time. This meant that by the time I got my strike water heated and stirred it into my grains to get the mash started, it was an awkward interval between the one-hour mark and the time my kids normally eat lunch. Having seen no ill effects from a slightly extended mash in the past, I let life happen and waited until nap time to start lautering. This ended up giving me a mash length of right at 2 hours.

Once I gathered roughly 6.75 gallons, I brought the wort to a boil and added hops at the times noted in the recipe below.

Upon completing the boil, I chilled the wort using my immersion chiller, stirring vigorously to cool down the wort as quickly as possible, and then let my kettle sit for about 20 minutes to let the trub settle to the bottom.

I then transferred the wort into my carboy, stealing about half a gallon to add to my rehydrated yeast while I let the rest of the wort chill in my fermentation chamber. Once the wort had reached 71°F, which was slightly over my desired fermentation temperature, I pitched my vitality starter from earlier in the day. By the following morning, there was visible fermentation activity.

Recipe

Because I’ve brewed so much brown ale over the course of my years homebrewing, it was hard for me to find a starting place for this recipe. That seems counterintuitive, but I’ve honestly been pretty happy with most of the brown ales I’ve brewed, so I knew I had a challenge ahead of me to actually continue improving a recipe.

Instead of starting with a recipe I’ve used before, I took what I thought were the best elements from several recipes I’ve previously brewed. I had a few flavors in mind as goals for this beer, and I hoped that these borrowed elements would come together to create those flavors.

I like a little bit of chocolate/coffee flavor in a brown ale, but I’m not the biggest fan of brown ales where that flavor dominates. In my opinion, those beers almost stray into the realm of porter. To achieve that flavor and get a majority of my color contribution, I chose to use a small portion of chocolate malt (350°L). I also wanted some the caramel sweetness in this beer, so I opted to use a decent amount of Crystal 60. Lastly, one of my favorite pieces of the brown ale puzzle is the toasty, nutty, and biscuity flavors in the malt. I used a small portion of biscuit malt (kept small in order to avoid this malt overwhelming the beer) to add those nutty and biscuit flavors, and I added some Victory malt to get some of the more toasted bread notes.

As for hops in brown ales, I enjoy more of the earthy hops rather than the strongly citrus American hops—though a little citrus character can be nice. I did want some hop aroma in this beer, but not much, so I opted to use a minimal charge of Nugget to bitter and another smaller charge as a later kettle addition. I hoped that some of the earthy character from the Nugget would come through. Though not a common descriptor for Nugget, I tend to get some fruitiness from it, and I hoped that that would also come through to a small extent. Other than that, I was mostly looking for bitterness with this hop choice.

Though I like for my brown ales (actually, most dark ales) to have more of an English level of malt intensity and more English-style hops, I also like for them to be more of an American-style strength and without too much ester character. To that end, I decided to use US-05 as my yeast. With all of these considerations in place, I was left with the following recipe:

Mashed at 152°F 75% 2-row [8.25 lbs.] 9% Crystal 60 [1 lb.] 7% Victory [0.75 lb.] 4.5% Biscuit [0.5 lb.] 4.5% Chocolate [0.5 lb.]

Boiled for 1 hr. 32 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) [0.75 oz. at 13.3% AA] 7 IBUs Nugget (20 min.) [0.25 oz. at 13.3% AA]

Pitched US-05 Fermented at 68°F Raised to 69°F on Day 3 Raised to 70°F on Day 5

OG: 1.063

FG: 1.013

ABV: 6.6%

Tasting

This beer was a very dark brown with a firm white head with good retention.

The aroma had notes of toast and dark bread crust. There was also a hint of chocolate and a little less of a hint of coffee. I also perceived what reminded me of damp earth, in a positive way—like the smell of digging in a garden after a recent rain.

The dark bread crust flavor of this beer was strong, though not overwhelming or stealing the show. There was also some chocolate balanced with caramel sweetness along with some alcohol warmth.

Goals for the Next Brew

Overall, the biggest issue I had with this beer was the alcohol warmth. I’m not entirely sure where that was coming from since I didn’t ferment this beer at a temperature range outside of the ideal for the yeast strain I used—though I won’t discount the possibility that the heating pad I use to warm my fermentation chamber warmed the fermenting beer unevenly and impacted the beer despite having a temp probe taped to the side of my carboy. Perhaps I’ll both ferment slightly cooler next time and also lower my OG—or maybe I’ll wait to see if the problem replicates itself since I’ll next be brewing this beer again when it’s warmer out and I won’t need the heating pad in my fermentation chamber.

I also wanted a little more bitterness in this beer. I could achieve this two ways: more hops or lowering the OG. I imagine that the dark color of this beer (slightly darker than I intended) was due to the OG being slightly higher than intended. Going that route would be killing two birds with one stone. However, I also wouldn’t mind a little more hop character in this beer. There definitely was a minimal amount of hops used in this beer, so adding another late kettle addition might help balance this beer a little more. Or alternatively, I could get more character by using a more expressive yeast. I mentioned above that I like my brown ales to be fairly clean, but as I drank this, I did end up thinking that a little ester character might be nice.

Lastly, though I like a bit of chocolate character in a brown ale, there was just a little too much in the beer for my taste—at least with the other aspects of the beer as it stood when I tasted it. That perception might change when other characteristics are modified, so I doubt this would be my first change to the recipe.