Hoppy Brewing

So this next batch will be my first batch of all-grain beer. I though it fitting to pull out a batch I already did and try to improve it.

The original Recipe:

3 ½ lb light malt extract
3 ½ lb amber malt extract
1 lb crystal malt (60L)
½ lb. chocolate malt
¼ lb. Black Patent Malt
½ cup blackstrap molasses
2 cups dark brown sugar
1 tsp gypsum
½ tsp Irish Moss
Hops:
1 oz. liberty (pellets) @ 60 min
½ oz. Cascade (pellets) @ 0 min
Yeast:
American Ale Yeast (Dry)

The biggest question is how I will replace the amber extract. I think I want a little more of a chocolatey note in the beer, so I’ll make up lost color with more chocolate malt (1 lb).

So on to creating my recipe:
I want to match the OG of the original, 1060. To do this, I’ll find the number of total gravity units I need to create the desired OG. First, I need to convert the extract potential of my fermentables into Gravity Units (GU’s). All a GU is is subtracting 1 from the number and then multiplying by 1000. Thus, 1.030 becomes 30 GU’s.

next I multiply by gallons of the wort of the final batch:
5.5 gal of final volume after boil * 60 GU desired OG = 330 TGU (total gravity units)
What this means is that I need to get 330 TGU’s from all of the combined fermentable ingredients.

Now that I know how many TGU’s I need, I’ll work backwards a bit to find how many GU’s the specialty grains will cover:
[eq: lbs of malt = GU's contributed by this malt / (extract potential of malt GU's * mash efficiency %)]

• 1 lb crystal: 1 = x / (34 * 0.68) = 23.1
• 1 lb chocolate: 1 = x / (30 * 0.68) = 20.4
• .25 lb black: 0.25 = x / (27 * 0.68) = 4.6

These add up to a total of 48 GU’s of the total 330. That means I want to add 282 more GU’s worth of base malt.

• Pale Malt: x=282 / (36 * 0.68) = 11.5 lbs of pale malt

So here is my revised recipe:

11 ½ lbs. pale malt
1 lb crystal malt (60L)
1 lb. chocolate malt
¼ lb. black patent malt
1 ½ cups blackstrap molasses
1 tsp gypsum
½ tsp Irish Moss
Hops:
1 oz. liberty (pellets) @ 60 min
½ oz. Cascade (pellets) @ 0 min
Yeast:
American Ale Yeast (Dry)

You may have noticed I got rid of the brown sugar. This is because sucrose (table sugar) does not add any desirable qualities to a beer, and the flavor that I want from brown sugar is actually just the molasses. I could boil the brown sugar and add it for some caramel/molasses flavoring, but I’ll just take it out and add more molasses. I am also going to try using molasses as priming sugar for half the batch (assuming preliminary tastings go well), just to see how that turns out. I want this to be MOLASSES porter. but not overly so.

The BU’s of the last batch were around 20, and I liked where it was or perhaps a little higher (~25 IBU). I am going to switch the bittering hops to an English variety however. I’ll go with golding, challenger, fuggle, or maybe go with northern brewer. We’ll see what I can find down at Hops and Berries.

I’ll boil for 90 minutes, to get some more caramelization going.

I’m not going to brew this for a week or two. I’ll try to have some camera action so I can well document my first all-grain attempt though.