my second all grain brew (easy drinking honey ale)

[bs3mdp]

hey guys!

first post here but i have been a lurker for a couple of months in this forum, trying to learn about this whole all grain brew thing

i got my mash tun/boiler for xmas so started my first brew on boxing day. i tried "orfys hobgoblin clone" which seemed to have a lot of praise all over the net so i gave it a go and it is now conditioning in my corny keg. i had a taste as i was putting it in and while i think i may have overdone the chocolate malt a little it tastes pretty damn good!!


so for my 2nd brew i wanted to do a more pale, easy drinking, honey beer that is heavy on the late hops. But to get the honey taste i wanted to use at least 800g of honey, so to do this and still keep the abv down i decided to decrease the amount of pale malt, but now im having second thoughts that this might have left my beer a little thin...


here is my recipe for a 5 gallon batch:

grain
2.4kg marris otter
200g crystal malt
150g wheat malt

hops
50g fuggles
50g cascade

i also intend to dry hop for 1 week in a secondary fermenter with another 50g of cascade. The initial gravity was 1036 and a brew caculator told me i would get a 3.9% beer (which is about what i was aiming for)

what do you guys think? Is my beer lacking grain or does it have any other obvious problems?

[Garth]

looks like a nice idea, I like honey beers, when you can actually taste the honey.

but I think you may be right about the thin tasting beer, honey is pretty fermentable, also the amount of Cascade, although I love the hop, might be a bit much for a beer of that gravity, it may altogether blank out the honey taste in a wave of uncontrollable citrus.......

[bs3mdp]

hmm..... in that case i may just forget the dry hopping and leave it as is... will that maybe result in a decent drinkable beer, if a little thin? is there anything else i can do with it at this stage?


in that case, how does one make a nice honey tasting ale without it racking up to 6-7%?

[floydmeddler]

hmm..... in that case i may just forget the dry hopping and leave it as is... will that maybe result in a decent drinkable beer, if a little thin? is there anything else i can do with it at this stage?

Not sure if you can add dry malt extract at this stage. Sure someone will jump in if you can or can't?

[Garth]

I know what you mean, the amount of honey needed to get a 'honey' taste gives so much sugar points as well, maybe up the pale malt to 3.5kg, then add your 800g of honey 15 mins from the end of boil, or to the barrel.

this should roughly give you a 1048 wort, and with a less attentive yeast this should give much lower than 6-7%, more like 5% at the very most.

[bs3mdp]

would a less attentive yeast not leave a sweet end product by not fermenting all the sugar?

in this brew i decided to add the honey to the wort when it had cooled most of the way, i have made a lot of wine in the past and from making mead i know that honey doesnt really like being heated. it ruins the esters and complex tasty molecules in the honey.


so will this beer be drinkable or will it be like alcoholic water? will adding extra malt extract at this point ruin it?

[Garth]

sorry I didn't realise you'd already brewed this.

what yeast did you use then?

[bs3mdp]

yeh, i did it yesterday but it didnt really hit me that reducing the amount of pale malt would decrease the amount of beer flavour until this morning. i used an S-04 yeast.

it looks, smells and tastes like beer wort, from the colour of it now it looks like it will end up at about the same colour as an abbot ale, or a standard run of the mill best bitter.... i just hope the end product is reasonably pleasant.....

[Garth]

I wouldn't worry about it, there's a good chance it'll be still drinkable. I've done beers over and over again to get the closest I can to what I want, notably SNPA and Hobgoblin, I must have done those 4 times each. Each time you get a bit closer, tweaking it here and there. Using S-04 will leave slightly more body/less alcohol than some yeasts.

When this is finally ready, if it isn't what you want, just use it as a starting place. Can you smell the honey much?

[bs3mdp]

alright then, il see what happens and adjust the recipe for next time!

iv used honey in a beer kit before, for that i used a pale "summer ale" kit with 1 jar of honey (450g) instead of some of the white sugar the can suggested and the end product had a faint background aroma of honey, so for this beer i decided to use 2 jars to bring the honey flavours to the front a bit more (so i ended up tossing 900g of tesco runny honey into the fermenter).

so far it smells quite strongly of honey and im looking forward to trying it no matter how it turns out

[Garth]

nice one, I reckon I'll have a go at a honey beer for the summer, so you'll have to keep us posted on your progress. Most of the commercially available stuff is poor, I can barely taste honey in any of them claiming to have it in.

you said you'd made mead, you may be able to help me then. I made my first gallon of it a while back, it's still in the demijohn, will it still be ok, it's been in there a good 3 months? should I bottle it as normal and then store it away, should I prime, or bottle it flat? it's very clear, I think I used GV-10, the champagne yeast. cheers

[floydmeddler]

My advice for honey brews is to add 650g of good quality honey to secondary. It REALLY keeps the natural honey flavour. Have done around 5 honey brews and did this last time with amazing results. I brought the honey to 100c for 1 min, cooled quickly, then added to secondary. May only bring it to 80c next time and hold it for around 15 mins. Reckon this should pasteurise it.

[bs3mdp]

nice one, I reckon I'll have a go at a honey beer for the summer, so you'll have to keep us posted on your progress. Most of the commercially available stuff is poor, I can barely taste honey in any of them claiming to have it in.

you said you'd made mead, you may be able to help me then. I made my first gallon of it a while back, it's still in the demijohn, will it still be ok, it's been in there a good 3 months? should I bottle it as normal and then store it away, should I prime, or bottle it flat? it's very clear, I think I used GV-10, the champagne yeast. cheers

well my beer has finished fermenting, the gravity went right down to 1008 so i have racked it off to a secondary to clear because i want to keg it and gas it up with 70/30.

it smells and tastes slightly of honey and seems quite nicely "hoppy" since i decided to dry hop it after all. I am much more confident in this beer than i was a few days ago i think the next time i make it i will use a more expensive honey like orange blossom or eucalyptus to get a bit more taste, i went for tesco value runny honey this time because i didnt want to waste the expensive stuff on a beer that may go wrong because im still new to all grain brewing.



as for your mead garth... what was the final gravity? you probably know this already but mead is notorious for sticking while it is fermenting, yeast doesnt really like too much honey
if it has fermented all the way and been left in the demijohn for three months then id say it will be nice and clear and ready for bottling! the fact that it has been undisturbed with an airlock for three months will have helped it rather than hurt it.
you cant prime it for carbonation if is is clear though since there is no more active yeast in suspension, mead is normally drunk still anyway but if you really want it sparkling you could try making up a new starter using more yeast, your priming sugar and a solution made up of warm water and your finished mead (about half and half)

does this make sense?

on a related note i made a sparkling strawberry mead that went down a storm with my family and friends at christmas

[Garth]

that's great info there mate, cheers

yeah, I thought I'd read it was usually drunk flat, I'll check the gravity tomorrow, I think it was about the 1068-70 mark when I set it away, so what FG should I expect?

I used Asda finest Orange blossom honey, I think I used just over 1 kg

It might have been there under airlock for even longer, maybe 5 months

I'm going to bottle it into small 330ml Duvel etc bottles, might make it last a bit longer as well.......

Should I be leaving it for another 6 - 7 months or longer?

[bs3mdp]

yeh, a standard all honey mead is normally served as a still wine, but when i add fruit to my mead (making it into what is called a "melomel") i like to have it fizzy

from experience a wine that uses mostly honey as the fermentable sugar needs 6 months to taste good and 12-18 months to really taste excellent, but since your mead had a fairly low starting gravity with only 1kg of honey (which being honey wasnt quite 1kg of fermentable material) your final alcohol level will probably be something like 9% which is on the lower end of the spectrum and will require less aging time to taste good.

my advice is to bottle it whenever you find the time and taste it when you do and decide where to go from there.