Recipe Help.

[chemacky]

G'day, I'm thinking about this recipe I stumbled across some time ago, but I need a bit of help.


1 can Coopers Canadian Blonde
1kg Coopers Brew Enhancer #2 (500g Dextrose, 250g Light dried malt, 250g Maltodextrin)
300g Honey
250g Light Dried Malt
12g Pride of Ringwood hops
100g Carapils grain

I'm thinking that since POR hops is out at craftbrewer that it might be easy to change that to another hop. Any suggestions? I have little to no experience with hops, so any advice along with a suggestion is more than welcome (encouraged even!!).

And secondly, I am assuming that this recipe uses the kit yeast, since it says nothing else. I'm looking at using something other thna the included kit yeast for once, and again was looking for a suggestion!

Other than that, I think I've got the rest of it down. But just to make sure - here is the description of steeping grain I found, and I feel i could follow fairly easily. Is this accurately what I should be doing with the carapils grain? (I realise it's in stupid measurements.)

IF USING A SAUCEPAN AND COLANDER OR STRAINER:

1. Put 3 quarts of water in a large saucepan and add all of the grains to the water.

2. Place the pot on your stove and turn the heat on medium. Stir the grain mixture occasionally as it heats.

3. When the grain mixture has barely started to simmer, immediately turn the heat off. DO NOT BOIL the grain mixture- it will detract from the quality of your beer (boiling will release excess tannins from the grains which will give the finished beer an astringent aftertaste). If you have a thermometer, it is best to heat the grain mixture to just 160 oF and then turn off the heat.

4. Strain the grain mixture through a colander or large strainer into your brew kettle. Discard the grains (or they can be used as compost, animal feed, for making bread, or granola) Add enough water to make a total of 5 gallons* of liquid.

5. Place your brew kettle on your stove and heat until just below boiling, then turn the heat off.

Cheers!

Chemacky.

 

[chemacky]

Bump! -_-

 

[Fatgodzilla]

Bump! -_-

Recipe is fine, but what you expecting beer to be like. The POR hops will add a little bitterness and not much else.

The steeping system is simple but you'll get benefits by ignoring the last bits and boilling the liquid

1. Put 3 quarts of water in a large saucepan and add all of the grains to the water.

2. Place the pot on your stove and turn the heat on medium. Stir the grain mixture occasionally as it heats.
3. When the grain mixture has barely started to simmer, immediately turn the heat off. DO NOT BOIL the grain mixture- it will detract from the quality of your beer (boiling will release excess tannins from the grains which will give the finished beer an astringent aftertaste). If you have a thermometer, it is best to heat the grain mixture to just 160 oF and then turn off the heat.

4. Strain the grain mixture through a colander or large strainer into your brew kettle. Discard the grains (or they can be used as compost, animal feed, for making bread, or granola) Add enough water to make a total of 5 gallons* of liquid.

5. Place your brew kettle on your stove and heat until just below boiling, then turn the heat off.

Ignore the instructions in red. For 100ml of carapils, about 2 litres of water is sufficient. Heat water to about 68C (if you have a thermometer) or until the simmer as stated, then take off heat. The aim is to hold that temperature constant for an hour if possible to extract maximum benefit from grain. Another method is to wrap the warm pot of water in a couple of towels to insulate the pot. Don't panic too much about this step - any extraction is good extraction for your first go.

After the hour, drain the grains and add the 250g of light dry malt. Bring to the boil (adding more water if need be - just don't overfill your pot). This will sterilise the carapils water in case they harbour any nasties and by adding the malt you aid the extraction of essentials from the hop bags. Add the POR teabag and let everything boil for (say) half an hour. My suggestion is throw in a second teabag of hops (Hallertau, Tett, Perle .. Saaz) whatever you can find, to add aroma and a little flavour as well.

After half an hour, throw this water into your fermenter, add the kit and boosters as per normal, seal up your fermenter untik it cools down enough to add the yeast (20C-22C) - overnight is fine - just put the airlock on the lid and in the morning, pitch the yeast. Want a different yeast, try a simple dry yeast - US-05 or Safale S-04.

Best of luck.

 

[chemacky]

Sounds excellent, thank you!

Will let you know how it goes!

 

[tyoung]

Hi,

I made this brew (or something very similar) as one of my early brews. It came out very honey-ey but that might be because I primed the bottles with honey too.... It was enjoyable nonetheless.

Cheers,

Tim

 

[itguy1953]

G'day, I'm thinking about this recipe I stumbled across some time ago, but I need a bit of help.


1 can Coopers Canadian Blonde
1kg Coopers Brew Enhancer #2 (500g Dextrose, 250g Light dried malt, 250g Maltodextrin)
300g Honey
250g Light Dried Malt
12g Pride of Ringwood hops
100g Carapils grain

I'm thinking that since POR hops is out at craftbrewer that it might be easy to change that to another hop. Any suggestions? I have little to no experience with hops, so any advice along with a suggestion is more than welcome (encouraged even!!).

And secondly, I am assuming that this recipe uses the kit yeast, since it says nothing else. I'm looking at using something other thna the included kit yeast for once, and again was looking for a suggestion!

Other than that, I think I've got the rest of it down. But just to make sure - here is the description of steeping grain I found, and I feel i could follow fairly easily. Is this accurately what I should be doing with the carapils grain? (I realise it's in stupid measurements.)



Cheers!

Chemacky.

Late last year I brewed up the Coopers Canadian Blonde with Coopers BE2. Coopers BE1 is recommended on the can. The result was a sweet beer, with the residual sugar from the malt in the BE2 (BE1 has no malt, just Dextrose and Maltodextrin). It drunk well, but it would have been better with some extra bitterness. I did not know about isohops at the time, so I just drank it up. It would have been a great chick beer, but not bitter enough for me.

As well as malt in the BE2, you also propose adding additional LME and Carapils grain, which will add residual sweetness. All of the sugars in the honey will be fermented, but only approx 80% of the malt sugar will ferment. Probably the POR hops is in there for extra bitterness, although to extract the bitterness you will need to boil it in the wort for an hour or so.

You could ask your local HBS for a replacement high alpha acid hop, something like cluster or colombus would be ok, as they do not add any flavour just bitterness. All of the flavour and aroma oils are boiled off after 15 minutes.

Another alternative is to make up the brew and see how it turns out. If it is to sweet, you can add isohops to your keg. I recently did this to some hopped extract brews when I added 1.2Kg of LME instead of dextrose. The brews firstly turned out way to sweet, so I added 12 drops of isohops to 18 litres (a keg full) to add approx 7 IBU. I tasted the brews tonight after dosing the isohops 5 days ago, and the brews are well balanced now.

Isohops are a cheap way to add bitterness to your brews. I paid approx $7 for a small bottle, and I have used less than 20% of the bottle, having added 12 drops to 3 kegs.

Barry