Australian Bitter Recipe

[bowie in space]

Hey folks, been real slack over the summer with my brewing. Done 2 kits in the last 2 months, i know, slack. At least it's given me time to sample the bottles i'd brewed late last year, and most have been quite good. I wouldn't say outstanding, but drinkable stuff. One or two that didn't come up too well, but overall pretty good. I just wanna make sure I am doing the right things and hope some more experienced brewers can comment on my technique.

Stock I have at the moment I have;
1 kit of Premium Coopers Australian Bitter
200g Crystal Grains (crushed)
Lots of Light Dry Malt
Lots of Dextrose
40g Saaz (chech)
US 05 yeast
This is what I plan to do;

Bring 1L of cold water up to boil, add grains, flameout and steep for 15 mins.
Strain liquid into bigger pot and boil liquid for 20 mins. (i've heard it's necessary to boil this liquid to drive away contamination)
Add 3L and 300g of LME and 40g hops (4% AA reading) and boil 15 mins.
Flameout and add 700g LME and 200g Dextrose and mix well.
Pour kit into mixture, stir and pour whole lot into fermenter.
Top up, cool down and pitch with a yeast starter of a teaspoon of LME, 100ml water and dry yeast. Store at 18-20C.

I've been reading a bit about boiling the hops with a small amount of LME (roughly 100g per 1L of water to balance the level of bitterness with sweetness of the malt). I also don't want a huge amount of dex as i'm not too fussed about the high level of alc%. I did a very similar brew last week without dextrose and the gravity read 1032, which is too light. I want an OG of about 1040-1045. I guess I could just add more malt. I wanted POR hops, but the LHBS was out of stock so I settled on the Saaz.

Does this look like a good kits n bits recipe? I'd appreciate any feedback and alterations to my method. Hopefully this can also help others who are tweaking kits to enhance their brews.

Cheers
Bowie

 

[rclemmett]

Bring 1L of cold water up to boil, add grains, flameout and steep for 15 mins.

If you put the grains in water at boiling temps you will extract tannins. Hot water straight out of the tap will probably be hot enough to steep the grains.

 

[mwd]

700ml boiling water + 300ml cold tap water should give you ideal steeping temp of 65-70C.

After steeping use the boil to do your hop utilization easy peazy one less saucepan to dirty.

No need to boil up LME just dissolve in warm water.

 

[bowie in space]

No need to boil up LME just dissolve in warm water.

I was under the impression you needed to boil your hops with a small portion of the LME you normally use (say 300g of 1KG) with about 3L so that you balance the bitterness of the hops with the sweetness of the LME. I read a post a while back from a new brewer and this was the advice given to him from an experienced brewer on this site.

Thanks for the advice, but i guess when you ask different ppl you'll get different answers.

Bowie

 

[Bribie G]

The reason for adding some LDME or dex or any sugar in with the hop boil is to improve the extraction of the hop oils etc.
A 'balance' of LDME and dex that I found effective was 500g of dex and 750 of LDME which gives about a VB strength brew. If you are looking for more of a commercial style beer remember that the mega breweries add up to 30 percent sugars to their mainstream beers.

I've always found that all-LDME brews tend to be less "refreshing", have more of a home brew 'twang' and can have shocking chill haze if the LDME wasn't a good batch. LDME is actually made principally for putting into TIM TAMS, Mars bars, Big Sister cakes etc and home brewers are just 'blow ins' as far as the manufacturers are concerned.

You can fix most of this by doing a substantial mini-mash using a kilo or more of light grain such as Galaxy or a Pilsener malt, boil the runnings with the hop additions and replace the LDME with this wort into the final mix. If you intend to go in the direction of partials and AG, that is :icon_cheers:

US-05 is brilliant B)

 

[mwd]

Your crystal steeped liquor is "malt extract" you have to boil it anyway.
So you can do the hops at the same time.

Or dissolve 100g of LME in 1L water and do a hop boil in that.

You get poorer hop utilization if you boil them in a highly concentrated malt solution.

I think the ideal is 1.040 SG from what I recall.

300g in 3L is about right. ( just reread that post ).

 

[bowie in space]

Ok, so i just put down the brew. Hopefully it goes well. I ended up steeping grains in 1L water for 15 mins then boiled the jug with about 1.5L water. Strained the grains liquid into the big pot, poured the jug water through the strainer into the big pot. Got all the extracted sugars into the pot, added the hops and boiled for 15 minutes.

So i didn't ended up boiling hops in LME, instead i boiled hops in the extract from the grains. I hope i'm getting this right, because i seem to change my method for every brew :huh: .

I then added sugars and tin of goo and stirred in the big pot. I gave it all a great big stir after i topped to 23L. It's now cooling before i pitch.
Fingers crossed.

Bowie

 

[mwd]

Exactly the way I do it here. Never had a problem with lack of hop flavour coming through.

If its the wrong method you can be sure somebody will put us on the correct road.

Also did that with the Amber FWK . ( 150g crystal with 15g Amarillo@15mins + 15g Amarillo dryhopped after 5 days. ).

Just bottled but tastes superb on a quick little sample.