Beer Forum

I have brewed a Alesmith IPA clone recipe twice now. It comes out really tasty, but too malty for my wife. She says,"too much caramel taste"... The recipe is listed below, can you help me dry it out a bit. There was also a honey malt addition that I took out for this last batch:

6gallon boil, only 4.25 gallon avail to bottle

Extract and grain[

2 row 1#
Munich 2oz
Wheat 2 oz
[bmini-]mash the above grains 152F x 45min[/b]
Light Gold DME 4 1/2 cup 90 min boil added with the above wort
Light Gold LME 6# added 10 min before boil end

Hops
Simcoe 0.5oz 90min
Columbus 0.5oz 90min
Columbus 0.25oz 60min
Centennial 0.25oz 60min
Centennial 0.25oz 30min
Columbus 1oz dry hop
Simcoe 0.25oz dry hop
Cascade 10z dry hop
Chinook 1oz dry hop
Centennial 0.5oz dry hop

OG 1.070
FG 1.010

Yeast WLP 001

I'd simply swap the gold lme for pale dme (but use less because LME doesn't have as much sugar in it)

the ratio to use is 36/44 because 1 lb of LME packs 36 points per lb per gallon, while DME packs 44 points per lb per gallon.

So, for each addition of gold lme above, use .8 lbs of pale DME

Oh, and use them all up front. DME has not been boiled so you need to boil it all. You can't add it late like you can with LME.

HTH-

What brand of LME?

It's all that damned extract. Use more real grain and do a bigger mini-mash, and use all light DME and zero LME, and that will help a lot. Another thing that would help is swapping out a pound of the extract for plain ordinary everyday cane sugar. Ignore everything you might have read about "cidery" flavors -- it is a farce. A little cane sugar will do you good. Just ask the Belgians -- they use it in everything, pretty much, and they make some of the best beer on the planet.

Yep ... too malty, extract batch at 1.070 OG ...you don't have the controls that all-grain would make possible, so best option is to take 10% equivalent of the extract and replace with simple sugars added at the end of the boil or better yet a day or two into fermentation. Push it to 15 or 20% if it is really really malty, but be careful going much over that.

Can you swap the wife?

BDawg wrote:Oh, and use them all up front. DME has not been boiled so you need to boil it all. You can't add it late like you can with LME.

Actually you can do a late addition of DME at 15 minutes & be completely fine.

Take an all dme batch through hot break and you'll see a shit ton of protein coagulating. That stuff really needs more than a 15 min boil to get it all to precipitate out.