Is this porter recipe any good?

[Jerry]

I've made 5 AG brews, and have decided that it's time to have a go at a custom recipe. I want to make a well balanced, slightly smokey porter, not one of those that tastes like drinking an expresso out of a dirty ashtray. Can anyone tell me if this will work, or does it need adjusting?

4kg Pale malt
325g Brown malt
250g Smoked Rauchmalz
250g Dark Crystal
250g Crystal
100g Chocolate malt
75g Fuggles (3.8% aa) 90mins
25g Fuggles 10mins
WYeast 1968 London ESB - got to use this yeast, the starter's already on the go!

23 litres at 80% efficiency, 1.053 - 1.014, EBU 34

Cheers

[Rookie]

I've made 5 AG brews, and have decided that it's time to have a go at a custom recipe. I want to make a well balanced, slightly smokey porter, not one of those that tastes like drinking an expresso out of a dirty ashtray. Can anyone tell me if this will work, or does it need adjusting?

4kg Pale malt
325g Brown malt
250g Smoked Rauchmalz
250g Dark Crystal
250g Crystal
100g Chocolate malt
75g Fuggles (3.8% aa) 90mins
25g Fuggles 10mins
WYeast 1968 London ESB - got to use this yeast, the starter's already on the go!

23 litres at 80% efficiency, 1.053 - 1.014, EBU 34

Cheers

It looks like your percentage of rauchmalt is about 5% of your total; I recently brewed a smoked porter with about 13% being rauch and the smoke flavor was very faint. My rauch was awhile in storage so it may have faded a bit.
I ended up adding a couple of cups of STRONG smoked tea as I racked to secondary and got it how I wanted.
Your taste buds may be better than mine and your recipe could turn out exactly like you want.
One last point: too faint of smoke could still be very good and too much can't be removed.

[Rookie]

And another thing.
It looks like a good recipe to me.

[Jerry]

Nice one Rookie, thanks for the suggestion. I read about using 10% rauch somewhere, but didn't want to over do it. Like you said, you can't take the smoke out, but if it's not smokey enough I'll adjust the quantity next time. If I think on, I'll do a post on how it turns out.

[critch]

outstanding brewery do a smoked ale called smoked out. 90% of the grain bill is smoked malt!

its a real marmite beer........

had many a customer wanting to know when its next on though.