No pictures yet since I’m not planning on starting this brew until the weekend, but I’m going to be brewing a dark ale style thing. I will post updates if I remember.
I’m Australian, and despite decades of making fun of macro lagers and the people who drink them, I have a soft spot for “Tooheys Old” and other’s like it a simple macro dark ale, theirs is fairly light in body and abv being a cost cut mass produced thing, but it has a nice roasty bready biscuity thing going on with a mild bitterness and a light malt sweetness but with a dry finish. similar (but better) beers aussies will recognise are white Rabbit Dark, Coopers Dark, and maybe Monteith’s Black for our NZ friends.
So my recipe that started as a straightforward clone but has morphed into a darker, bigger, richer brew, but still with some sugar added to keep the finish dry and stop it from getting too heavy. looks something like this:
21L batch, Brewzilla 35L, ~6.0% ABV , 1054 to 1008 expected.
- 3.5 kg (74.5%) — Barrett Burston Extra Pale Malt — Grain — 3.4 EBC
- 250 g (5.3%) — Voyager Craft Malt CHOCOLATE — Grain — 1150 EBC
- 250 g (5.3%) — Weyermann Caraamber — Grain — 71 EBC
- 250 g (5.3%) — Weyermann Caraaroma — Grain — 350 EBC
- 200 g (4.3%) — Simpsons Golden Naked Oats — Grain — 18 EBC
- 250 g (5.3%) — Brown Sugar, Light — Sugar — 15.8 EBC — Boil
lightly hopped just for bitterness and a tiny bit of all round hop character by using Pride of Ringwood, a classic aussie hop, a little bit spicy, herbal, but with balanced fruity characteristics , popular in our macro lagers and plenty of pale ales, and then Chinook for a bit of pine and resin.
- 5 g (6 IBU) — Pride of Ringwood 9.75% — Boil — 60 min
- 5 g (4 IBU) — Pride of Ringwood 9.75% — Boil — 30 min
- 20 g (11 IBU) — Chinook 13% — Boil — 10 min
- 15 g (6 IBU) — Pride of Ringwood 9.75% — Boil — 10 min
- 5 g — Chinook 13% — Boil — 0 min
I usually just lump all boil additions into one that matches the target IBU, since I generally brew a lot of IPAs and NEIPAs where most of the hops are post boil. I guess this is just to give me something to do during the boil.
Lutra to keep things quick since i’m almost out of my last brew, a slightly more old school WCIPA, before we turned them into bitter pine monsters.
Hoping for a 1 week ferment and keg, I used to use Kvieks like Voss a lot before I invested in a full temperature control setup, especially in Aussie summers where my fermenter would be in a room that could be 27-30c during the day. I’m quite fond of Voss but it’s orange peel flavours would be out of place in a dark ale, so I’m trying Lutra for the first time for something more neutral. If I were brewing this again in less of a rush i’d try something like London Fog or a similar English ale style.
Planning a WC-TIPA / Barleywine thing next after this, will be doing two mashes to get the gravity up on that one, I’ve done high gravity before with a very successful belgian quad, but that used a lot of adjunct sugars so it was just one big mash that just barely fit the brewzilla with extra sugars added at the boil. this will be a proper double mash, efficiency be damned.
Just rolling back to this one in case anyone sees it.
I’ve not practically finished drinking this brew, it turned out very well, but dryer, lighter on the palate than i had hoped. so I’ve adjusted the recipe for next time to skip the extra sugar, cut the chocolate malt back 50% and increased the oats and base malt to compensate, adjusted the mash up a couple of degrees to leave some dextrins and a target FG closer to ~1012 rather than the 1007 I ended at here. The beer I was basing it on is quite light and dry but I wanted a bit more body. I’d also swap to a traditional yeast for some more ester prescence, though the lutra did a fantastic job of fermenting quick and clean.
Flavour wise, it’s a touch darker and more roasted than I had hoped, not overboard though, but the use of cararoma (basically Special B) really added a nice raisin, dried fruit thing that works really well with the coffee and toasty flavors from the chocolate. the CaraAmber isnt doing much but I needed something to fill in the middle without using too much CaraAroma, so I’m keeping it in the recipe.
hops-wise, it was spot on, lightly hoppy balanced with the malts. I’ve added an extra couple of IBUs to account for some lost apparent bitterness I’ll get from reducing the chocolate malts and increased the whirlpool hops slightly for a tiny bit more fruityness in the middle.
It was a bit harsh and “black” at first since it has a very light dry finish it came through a bit more aggressively than it would in a sweeter beer, but after a couple of weeks in the keg it calmed down and was extremely drinkable. not my best work but it’s most of the way to a good dark ale.
Wow what a plan! Lots of hops. I’m also a fan of Amber/dark homebrews. I got to start my brewery up again.
My current ferment right now started more along the lines of: “what a shit week! I’m grabbing a bucket, dusting off an airlock, and making some happy bubbles!” I had no idea what direction to follow, but raided the fridge/freezer and, magically, I have a blueberry cider at 1.04 (from 1.106) and still falling. Can’t wait!
Looking forward to it, 50 grams is a tiny amount of hops for my usual brews, last one was 250grams, my NEIPAs are usually around 250-300 and heavily reliant on cryo/lupo hops too.
1.106 is going to be a lot of booze! be careful with that.
Brew day went very smoothly, first solo brew day in a while, changed the recipe up slightly because I found I was short on golden naked oats (I put them in bloody everything, they are magic) so instead of 200g golden oats, I had 150g golden oats and then threw in 100g of quick oats. adjusted OG of ~1.056 due to slightly higher efficiency than expected and slightly more oats, so I might end up with 6.3 if it goes to 1008, happy with anything below 1015 for this brew but I want it to be moderately dry to avoid it being too heavy.
after tasting the wort, it was more bitter than expected so i re-timed the hops slightly to bring the IBU down a bit. minor change but should balance out well.
pitched yeast at 2pm @ ~30c with lots of oxygen, by 5pm it was starting to take off already. now less than 24 hours later its already shot past 50% attenuated. forgot how fast Kviek’s can be, haven’t used them since I got the fermentation chamber setup. should be keggable after just 5 days or so and on tap a couple of days after that, doing 2 days at 27, 2 days at 30 to finish it off, then cold crash as hard as possible. decided against any dry hopping on this one, since its a malt forward brew and I dont want to overcomplicate it and risk muddying the flavours.
colour is as expected, still black and murky since I didn’t take the time to really clarify the wort in any way, but should be a deep red by the time it has flocced out and cold crashed.
Even managed to clean up the brewery on the same day this time… instead of taking a week to do it!
