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

Brew Day

With an empty space in my keezer and two days before our family left town for most of the week, I decided to sneak a brew day in so that I could return to a fully fermented beer ready to keg. After getting home from work the Friday before we left town, I gathered my volume of strike water and lit the flame under the kettle. Just before my water reached my calculated temperature to mash in at, my propane ran out. Since I was just a few degrees below where I wanted to be, I pulled a small amount of water from my HLT and put it in a kettle on my stove. Once that water began to boil, I added that back to the water in my HLT and then mashed in.

While my attempt to bring my strike water up to the correct temperature without having to go buy more propane was mostly successful, I still landed one degree shy of my target mash temperature. Not the end of the world. I then let my mash rest for about two hours while I ate, got my kids ready for bed, and went to the store to exchange my propane tank.

Once I’d hooked the new propane tank up to my burner, I gathered some sparge water, began heating it, and drained the wort from my mash tun. Since I was sparging with my usual amount of water and knew what to expect volume-wise for the amount of wort gathered, I began getting some other things ready and wasn’t paying a large amount of attention to the wort or my kettle. As such, I ended up gathering about 0.25 gal. more pre-boil wort than I normally would and had to close the valve on my mash tun to avoid gathering more. I’m not sure exactly what happened with that unless I accidently heated more sparge water than I meant to. Either way, I knew this was going to impact my gravity some, both with having more volume in the kettle (therefore having a more dilute wort) and leaving wort behind in the mash tun.

To try to hit my target post-boil volume and counteract what I could with the gravity impact I knew was coming, I turned the burner up a little higher than normal and kept the wort at a much more vigorous boil than normal throughout most of the 60-minute boil.

After adding the hops as noted in the recipe below and reaching the end of my boil, I cut the flame and used my immersion chiller to cool the wort off as quickly as my groundwater would allow (which was not very quickly).

Once the wort was cool enough, I put the lid back on the kettle to let the trub settle out while I cleaned up. When I began transferring the wort into my carboy, I noticed that my post-boil volume was still a touch higher than I was shooting for. I transferred about half a gallon of wort into a small carboy to wake up my yeast while the bulk of the wort finished cooling in my fermentation chamber.

At this point, I also took a gravity reading and realized that despite my best efforts to counteract the extra wort in the kettle and the wort left behind in the mash tun, I ended up with an OG that was 11 points lower than Iteration 2. Granted, the previous version of this beer came in with a higher OG than expected and desired, but that large of a discrepancy was still not my favorite thing that happened that day.

Once my wort had finished chilling, I pitched my yeast. When I checked on the beer the next morning, I noted early signs of fermentation. The following day, as my family was packing up the car for our trip, I checked on the beer again and noticed that the krausen was rising a bit too high for my liking, so I quickly rigged up a blow-off tube before we got on the road.

When I returned home four days later, I tried to open the fridge I use as a fermentation chamber and found that it was stuck closed. Knowing I wasn’t going to like what I found when I got it opened, I pulled harder and the door unstuck.

Carnage. Dried krausen atop the carboy and on the top and sides of the fridge. A puddle of yeast and beer slowly beginning to drip outside the fridge and onto my garage floor. A soaked towel that had fortunately caught most of the mess, but by no means smelled pleasant. The bung and blow-off tube had clogged and popped off of the carboy. I had no way of knowing when this happened, but a quick visual inspection of the beer seemed to indicate that fermentation was complete (or very near to it). With no vigorous fermentation still happening, I couldn’t quite call this a successful (even if accidental) open-fermentation. The beer could have been sitting exposed to oxygen for any number of days.

But there was nothing I could do at that point except be grateful this wasn’t a hoppy beer. I quickly sanitized a new bung and airlock and put them in place. At this point I raised the temperature in my fermentation chamber a couple degrees to encourage fermentation to finish and ended up kegging the beer the following day.

Recipe

Too much coffee/roast in Iteration 1. Too much breadiness in Iteration 2. So far the changes to this recipe had been about dialing back flavors rather than trying to get “more” out of the ingredients. I honestly don’t think that’s a bad place to be.

I wanted to reduce the level of breadiness I was getting in Iteration 2, which added a quality of richness to the beer that made it less drinkable than I wanted it to be—by no means was it a sipper, but it was also not quite an easy-drinking beer. The obvious answer to reducing this flavor was to reduce or remove the Biscuit malt.

The thing that confused me about this is that I’ve used a similar level of Biscuit before in a rye brown ale that I made before, and that was an absolutely delicious beer. Perhaps the rye in that recipe was the difference-maker and either balanced or complemented the Biscuit malt in some way. I can’t be sure—this is speculation, as that beer is long gone and I have no way to do an honest comparison of the two. But for whatever reason, this amount of Biscuit malt worked in one of my previous brown ales, but was just not doing it for me in this recipe. Because of that, and because I was using such a small amount to start (0.5 lbs./4.5%), I decided to remove it altogether instead of reducing the amount.

However, I didn’t want to completely remove the bread/toast character from this beer. I wasn’t ready to commit to replacing the Biscuit with something with a similar, but less intense flavor like Munich, but removing it entirely felt like it left a gap in my recipe. Since I’m a big fan of Victory and the toasty character it adds, I decided that upping the amount of that malt might help fill in the gap left by removing the Biscuit. I didn’t want to overdo it, so I didn’t do a one-to-one replacement of malt, but I met in the middle and added another 0.25 lb. of Victory to the grist (half the weight of the Biscuit I had removed).

This removal/replacement left me with slightly less weight in my overall malt bill than the previous iteration, but it was a fairly small amount. That in addition to the fact that Iteration 2 came in at a higher OG than I was really shooting for made it an easy choice to not worry about dropping the gravity point or two I knew I would in this iteration (though I didn’t expect the brew day events that caused an even further gravity drop).

All of these choices left me with the following recipe:

Mashed at 151°F 77% 2-row [8.25 lbs.] 9% Crystal 60 [1 lb.] 9% Victory [1 lb.] 5% Chocolate [0.5 lb.]

Boiled for 1 hr. 23 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) [0.5 oz. at 13.3% AA] 16 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) [0.5 oz. at 13.3% AA] 3.5 IBUs Willamette (5 min.) [1 oz. at 5.1% AA]

Pitched US-05 Fermented at 68°F Raised to 70°F on Day 6

OG: 1.053

FG: 1.010

ABV: 5.6%

Tasting

This beer was light-medium brown and wonderfully clear. It poured with a moderate off-white head with medium retention.

The aroma was one of sweet chocolate and toasted bread from the malt. The hops added earthy and herbal notes.

This beer had toasty notes and a caramel sweetness. There was also a hint of chocolate roast and a slight herbal note.

Goals for the Next Brew

The rich bready character that made Iteration 2 less drinkable was successfully removed. The toasty character that came out in this iteration instead of the breadiness was a pleasant replacement. The absence of the bready flavor also allowed for the caramel flavors from the crystal malt to come through. I count this as a vast improvement. Overall, this beer was pretty solid.

That said, there were some things that I thought this recipe could improve upon. I couldn’t help but note that some added esters would be pleasant, which is something I noted when tasting Iteration 1 as well. There was also an element of harshness present—just barely there. It’s hard to describe what I was actually perceiving; it presented itself as harsher than an English brown, but maybe not outside the realm of an American brown. However, I only noticed it in this iteration, so I have to wonder if it’s a factor of the lower ABV—that the flavors already present need a little more alcohol to support them. Or perhaps it’s a matter of the earthy and herbal hops being used, in particular that these flavors are not as complementary of whatever is going on that I’m perceiving as harsh. And let me be clear: this flavor is only mildly present, but mild as it is, I think this beer would benefit from its absence.

Changing the hops or upping the ABV again might help balance out whatever is presenting itself as harsh. Changing the hops is not really high on my list of things I want to do though, as I think the hop character of this beer is pretty tasty. Other options include changing the malt bill (perhaps the chocolate malt is contributing to the element of harshness) or to see if a change in yeast could change the perception of this flavor. The more I thought about it, the more this characteristic began to remind me of a flavor that was present in the Collaborative Stout series when we were using US-05; I didn’t quite realize this flavor was there until we changed yeast strains. Changing the yeast made the beer much smoother, so I wonder if a similar thing is happening here. Maybe US-05 reacts somehow with roasted malts in a way that I don’t find pleasant. Maybe this is a different issue entirely. Though a yeast change could also add the esters that I mentioned might be a nice addition.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do a direct comparison of Iterations 2 & 3 like usual, because I frankly did a poor job of keeping track of how much beer I had in the keg with Iteration 2. I poured my last pints for me and a friend and tried my hardest not to show my disappointment when the line started to sputter near the end of my pour. I hadn’t bottled any off yet, and at that point there was no chance. Lesson learned. I’ve returned to tallying up my pours so that I know when I’m nearing the end of the keg so I can be sure this won’t happen again.

Recipe Comparison

Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3 2-row 75% 75% 77% Crystal 60 9% 9% 9% Victory 7% 7% 9% Chocolate 4.5% 4.5% 5% Biscuit 4.5% 4.5% N/A Hop Addition 1 32 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 23 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 23 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) Hop Addition 2 7 IBUs Nugget (20 min.) 16 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 16 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) Hop Addition 3 3.5 IBUs Willamette (5 min.) 3.5 IBUs Willamette (5 min.) Yeast US-05 US-05 US-05 OG 1.063 1.064 1.053 FG 1.013 1.011 1.010 ABV 6.6% 6.96% 5.6%