Dr. Smurto's Golden Ale

[Wobbly1]

I'm keen to try brewing Dr. Smurto's Ale, compromised for kit form. The recipe I found calls for TC Sparkling Ale which, as I believe, hasn't been available for some years'. Can anyone suggest a Coopers can that would be a suitable substitute? The Innkeepers Daughter Sparkling Ale perhaps?
Cheers
Mark

 

[hoppy2B]

The Australian Pale Ale should have close to the right amount of IBU. Steep 250 gams of light crystal, add the above can and a can of light wheat malt, and you should be pretty close.

An alternative to steeping the light crystal would be to steep the Munich and Caramunich listed in the all grain recipe.

 

[hoppy2B]

Actually, I just had another look at the recipe. I'd recommend just using an original series lager can and a can of wheat extract with steeping grains as above, and doing all but the 60 minute hop addition. That should give you the right IBUs.

 

[Wobbly1]

Actually, I just had another look at the recipe. I'd recommend just using an original series lager can and a can of wheat extract with steeping grains as above, and doing all but the 60 minute hop addition. That should give you the right IBUs.

Thanks very much, I'll give it a try!
Cheers.

 

[MHB]

hoppy2B
You have some interesting ideas about brewing (have to have a chat about why anyone would want to steep hops at 67oC as you proposed in the Spitfire recipe thread).
Steeping grain rather than mashing can be useful, but you have to pick your malts carefully. In most cases if you are trying to convert an AG recipe to an extract version its smart to do a mini mash if you are looking for much from specialty malts.
Some modified malts do yield a fair amount of colour and flavour from a steep, often quite different from what you would get from a mash.
There is little if any point in steeping Base Malts and remember that Munich is a base malt. Most of the information available on cold steeping is in the home brew literature, rather than in professional publications. There are used for cold extraction in malt quality analysis but the closest I can find to anything well quantified is some work done at Briess (well worth a read).
Based on what it shows to get an equivalent amount of extract from Munich you need to use 4 times as much to get the expected mass of extract, but that would give you roughly 4 times the colour... for light crystal it about double for the same outcomes.

Steeping grain is potentially a useful technique but I would want to see people put a fair amount of thought into just what they are doing and trying to get from the process.

Note that the results above are from a 24hour steep at 20oC, if you are steeping for a short time I doubt anyone is getting anything like the yields above.

Doing a hot steep (hot enough to gelatinise the starch) without mashing will put a lot of unfermentable starch into solution inevitably adding haze to the beer, cold steeping will give most of the colour but who knows what else.
For mine much better to do a mini mash.
Mark

 

[hoppy2B]

Thanks for that Mark. When I say steep I usually mean to heat the water to 70 degrees Celsius and put the bag of grain in. Mashing is essentially steeping at a specific temperature. If I had meant cold steep I would have said so.

It's difficult to know what sort of detail to go into for people. I think the main thing Wobbly was after was information re the correct can of extract to go to. I definitely think the lager can has the right level of bitterness to start with (something like 22 IBU). Following the recipe should result in some more IBU added to the wort.

Oh, and steeping hops at 67 degrees as proposed in the Spitfire recipe, is to reduce the amount of heat the hops are subject to while providing just enough heat for pasteurisation. Once upon a time hops were added at flameout, nowadays folk are getting onto the idea of adding hops after the wort has cooled a bit. It should result in better flavour.