Stepping Out of the Security of a Kit

Hi All,

I’ve brewed a handful of batches o’ beer using different 5-gallon recipe kits–with varying degrees of success–and am ready for the challenge of brewing a batch with my own hand-picked ingredients. Below are the ingredients I’ve compiled for a West Coast-style IPA (5 gallon batch). I’d welcome comments/suggestions/glaring problems I may not be aware of:

Specialty Grains
1lb Malteurop American 2-row Pale Malt
1lb English Medium Crystal

Extract
6.6 NB Gold Malt Syrup
1 lb Muntons Light DME

Hops
Bittering: 1 oz Chinook @ 60 min
Flavoring: 1 oz Chinook @15 min
Aroma: 1 oz Willamette @ stop boil
Dry hop: 1 oz Willamette during secondary fermentation

Yeast
Wyeast 1272 American Ale II

Thanks!

With a lb of crystal and all that gold syrup, you’ve got a lot of unfermentables there - I would go with all light DME and cut the crystal to 0.5 - 0.75 lbs. Also, not enough IBUs IMO and Willamette seems a little subdued to me for a WC IPA - another C hop and more of it late would be more in line with the style. Plus at least 2x the dryhop.

Thanks for the tips; much appreciated. So what is the appropriate amount of DME if I’m canning (pun intended) LME altogether?

I’ve never brewed with extract, so not sure of the exact conversion (I think you multiply by 0.75 to convert), but you can slap the ingredients into an online calculator and dial in the gravity.

Gotcha, thx again. I just discovered beersmith. It is awesome.

Malteurop is not a specialty grain, it needs to be mashed, not steeped.

I’m confused by the comment on the Gold malt syrup…why would it be unfermentable?

I just noticed that too. Golden malt syrup is 97% fermentable.

[quote=“billy”]I just noticed that too. Golden malt syrup is 97% fermentable.[/quote]It’s 2-row and Carapils, so I assumed it had a fair amount of unfermentables in it. Is it really 97% fermentable?

I was verifying the analysis and product information from Briess and they said both LME and DME are 75% fermentable, so I was wrong, its not 97%.