Question On Brown Sugar In Porter

[Silo Ted]

Will soon be making a mighty choc porter at around 10% alc, something designed to let age until late winter 2011 before I crack a bottle. Haven't quite formalised the recipe, but have 500g brown sugar that might make it into the mix. Can someone give me an idea of how much residual sweetness might remain from this after fermentation ?

The recipe base before adjuncts will be something as follows

6kg Ale/Choc/Brown/Cara AG to around 1.060
1.5kg Can of Caramel Liquid malt that I have laying around

Then the sugar, some cocoa and maybe dextrose to pump the SG up to my target if required

As this is my first high alcohol beer, there's some other considerations as well, so I don't screw it up and effectively put 24 crownies out of circulation for nothing. No doubt I will pitch a large volume of yeast, and will likely use WLP001, and about 300-400ml. Should this be a step-feeding, or OK for the lot to go in at the start ?

Do attenuation levels suffer in a big beer, or can I expect similar results out of the yeast as from a standard ABV beer?

And finally, for a beer designed with ageing in mind, what can be expected from the hops backing off, in bittering, flavour and aroma, is there a typical % to plan for ? Beers around here dont often make it past a few months so I have no idea what to expect.

Cheers & Beers,

Ted

 

[felten]

Brown sugar is basically plain old white sugar with molasses added back in. So its my understanding that it's essentially completely fermentable and there won't be any residual sugar per se, but you may be left with some molasses flavour.

The hop character is going to fade out over time, aroma, flavour and bitterness; so if you want a lot of hop character in the future, maybe you should think about overdoing it at first. Just my 2c anyway.