Lowering the OG of a recipe

[injac]

Hi All,

If I wanted to lower the OG of a recipe...can I just dial in my desired OG and go with the new grainbill or would I need to consider altering the IBU of the recipe?

I'm wanting to do a clone of Summer Lightning but pull it back to about 4% rather than 5%.

[basswulf]

Is the tweaked recipe going to have less grain or more water? For a ballpark answer, I would imagine that the former would need less tweaking as the hops wouldn't be any more diluted. However, I expect that other factors come into play - for example, if you start with a lower OG, will the yeast going on working longer until it produces the level of alcohol that stops it working? Will the same level of hops be too bitter without such a sweet residual malt flavour to balance it?

Beer is a balance of all the elements so a clone recipe with lower ABV (ie. not a true clone) is quite likely not to taste the same as following the recipe exactly. If you lower your goal a bit - a golden ale based on Summer Lightning - you should be able to produce a decent result although you might have to tweak through a few batches to fine tune it.

Wulf

[Kev888]

As you are altering the OG then you are inevitably departing from the taste of the original recipe and creating something slightly different. It may seem that leaving everything else the same would keep it more faithful, however that will then change the balance between bitterness and body/maltiness etc. which is likely to be undesirable - so there are conflicting requirements.

Its down to your personal taste as its now your recipe, but FWIW I'd normally reduce the bittering hops in order to keep the bitterness-units-to-OG ratio roughly similar to the original. Ditto for the late hops unless I specifically wanted to make it more hop-forward.

If the aim is to reduce ABV, you could also consider mashing slightly warmer if its an AG recipe and/or using less attenuative yeast in order to tackle things with the Final Gravity as well. Simply reducing the OG is fine but (IMO) it gets progressively harder to get flavour into the beer as the OG reduces so some balance in approach there can be helpful too.

[orlando]

If you have a copy, or get one, BeerSmith will calculate it for you. There is a specific button to press, it will reduce both grain and hops in an effort to proportion the change and its affect. But as others have said it will be different to Summer Lightning, but I would argue it would be if you did the same recipe.