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

I’ve recently taken to brewing on Friday nights instead of my former usual of Saturday mornings—mostly at the behest of my wife so that my Saturdays are more freed up to help her with the kids. It actually works out really well in terms of our schedules, and this brew day was no exception. After work, I quickly gathered my volume of strike water, treated it with a campden tablet to remove any chlorine or chloramines, and lit the flame on my burner. While my strike water was heating, I put a kettle on the stove and, once that was an appropriate temperature, used that to preheat my mash tun.

Once my strike water had reached its desired temperature, I mixed my malt in with the water and left my mash to sit while I ate dinner with my family and got the kids ready for bed. Once my oldest was appeased with her seemingly infinite bedtime requests, I got started with the bulk of my brewing. I drained my first runnings into my kettle and proceeded to batch sparge until I’d reached my desired pre-boil volume.

I brought my wort to a boil and added hops at the times indicated in the recipe.

Once the boil was complete, I used my immersion chiller to cool down my wort as quickly as the groundwater temperature would allow. I then cleaned up everything else while I let the trub settle out of the wort, since I stir the wort during chilling.

I transferred the wort into my carboy and pulled about half of a gallon off to use as a vitality starter. I added my rehydrated yeast to this wort and let it get acclimated to the environment while my carboy sat in my fermentation chamber, cooling down to a few degrees above my desired pitching temperature.

Recipe

There were a few things I noted before that I wanted to change in this beer, but I stuck to picking just one thing to change to see what kind of difference the change was truly making. One item was the alcohol warmth I got in Iteration 1, but I suspected that since I hadn’t fermented overly warm, the issue was likely caused by way I heat my fermentation chamber in the winter. Ultimately, I decided not to change anything about my fermentation regimen to see if the problem cropped back up this time around.

Another item I considered changing was the level of chocolate/coffee/roast character. As I mentioned before, I like a little of that character in my brown ales, but it’s a delicate balance. Too much, and it begins to stray into the realm of porter/stout for my mental palate map. I thought about lowering the amount of chocolate malt being used; however, the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder if that character was being accented by the richness of the biscuit malt. I then considered lowering the amount of biscuit malt used or dropping it altogether for a simpler grain bill. The last thing that crossed my mind as a potential fix for the slightly-too-forward chocolate roasted character was to add something else to balance it—in this case, additional bitterness. This consideration came to mind due to the slightly higher than anticipated OG in Iteration 1, meaning that the beer didn’t achieve the maltiness/bitterness ratio I’d originally planned for it to have (of course I only tasted that planned beer mentally, so we would have to see if that was the right move).

Adding a bit more bitterness and hop character was another item I had wanted to improve upon from last time, so this seemed the route to go. In order to not go overboard on the bitterness but still add bitterness and hop character, I considered keeping the whole ounce of nugget in the boil and moving it all to the 60-minute addition; however, toying around with this in a recipe calculator gave me more IBUs than I thought made sense for the style. So, I split the ounce between 60 minute and 30 minute additions.

That helped with the bitterness some, but it didn’t help with the addition of hop character. As I was tasting Iteration 1 and noting that I wanted some more hop character, I made a note to myself to consider adding more nugget as a late addition, East Kent Goldings, or Willamette. While I thought some additional earthiness from Nugget might be nice, I didn’t want to have my hop character be too one-dimensional by only adding the single variety. EKG is also noted to be earthy, so I considered adding that as a way to bring out that earthiness while giving a slightly different character than the nugget. Ultimately though, I decided to add something that would be a little different. I’ve used Willamette as a late addition in some of my dark beers before and really liked the character. I get a little spicy note as well as some herbal notes that I thought might compliment this beer.

These choices left me 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. 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 69°F on Day 3 Raised to 70°F on Day 5

OG: 1.064

FG: 1.011

ABV: 6.96%

Tasting

This beer cleared up nicely with just a little time in my keezer, which is not something I’ve often experienced when using US-05. The color was a medium-brown with a white head and excellent head retention. In fact, I let the last few sips of a pint sit out for over an hour while I was attending to other things, and I came back to a beer with a small layer of foam still on top.

The aroma of this beer was like a sweet, nutty bread. There were also some earthiness and slight fruity notes.

The taste was toasted, dark bread. There was a slight earthiness present, along with a hint of cherry and the faintest whisper of coffee.

Goals for the Next Brew

I do believe that the chocolate/coffee notes are less than in Iteration 1, which was my main goal for this beer. It seems that the additional bitterness or the extra hop character did actually help balance the flavors in this beer like I had hoped. I also did not perceive any alcohol warmth in this iteration like I did in Iteration 1, even though this version has a higher ABV. So overall, I accomplished my goals for improving this beer.

That said, this beer is not where I want it to be. The breadiness in this iteration is too much—or at least the quality of breadiness is too much. There is, for lack of a better term, a richness in the flavor that makes it less drinkable than I want it to be. What I mean by less drinkable is not that this isn’t a good beer—it is, and I wouldn’t be mad if I’d ordered a pint of this out somewhere; however, I think there’s a little too much going on in the malt that gives the perception of being too rich (in that way some describe certain desserts as “rich”).

My goal for the next time I brew this beer will definitely be to reduce the rich breadiness that is present, while maintaining the lower levels of coffee/chocolate flavors.

Recipe Progression

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