Clean out my freezer Pale Ale

mattnaik · November 25, 2013, 8:21pm

So I decided that my next brew be one of those “use up spare ingredients” brews. Hoping someone could take a look at my recipe and tell me what they think. The goal is to make a tasty pale ale. Not over-the-top hoppy with a nice biscuity malt flavor. Looking for a dry finish with very little residual sweetness.

0.5# Caramel 40L
0.4# Biscuit malt
3# golden light DME
3# golden LME (added at 30 min)
0.60 oz Simcoe (60 min)
1 oz Cascade (10 min)
1 oz Cascade (0 min)
1# of sugar added at flameout to increase fermentability
WLP001 or WY1056

The only thing I would need to buy for this is the LME as I have everything else. I also have about 3 oz of Mosaic leaf hops. Not sure how that would work with a APA.

OG should be around 1.058 and hoping for a FG around 1.010

The color estimate on Beersmith has this looking pretty light. I also have some C80 i could add to darken it up.

What’s everyone think?

aussie · November 26, 2013, 7:26am

I would ditch the dme and sugar. All grain tastes better :cheers:

mattnaik · November 26, 2013, 1:11pm

So use 6lbs of LME at 30 minutes? Won’t that decrease the fermentability of the wort even more? I thought I read somewhere that LME is less fermentable than DME. The sugar is in there to increase the ABV and dry it out so I can achieve a lower FG.

Moving to all grain hopefully after the holidays (assuming my wife purchases the things on my wishlist). So if I haven’t brewed anything by then, this may actually become an all-grain recipe.

aussie · November 26, 2013, 1:32pm

Sorry Matt I thought you brewed all grain :oops:

beerme11 · November 27, 2013, 6:58am

Matt nothing wrong with that recipe looks good to me. Extracts like golden light have carapils or other crystal malts in them so its pretty counter productive to use them and then add sugar to dry the beer out. Going forward I’d scrap all extracts except muntons light or extra light and use specialty malt to adjust color. I found munton DME to be very fermentable when I was doing partial mashes and to the best of my knowledge neither contains any crystal malts so if you transition to partial mash or all grain converting your recipes will be a matter of subbing the extract for a base malt.