English Style Brown Ale

Grains, malts, hops, yeast, water and other ingredients used to brew. Recipe reviews and suggestions.

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HardcoreLegend
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English Style Brown Ale

Post by HardcoreLegend »

English style Brown ales, I love em'! I realize this site has many brown ale recipes. I am hoping someone can reccommend a tried and true extract style recipe for me to make some. For reference, I like Newcastle, and I recently fell in love with the Nut Brown ale from RedHook brewery. Also ,for our southeast US friends, I tried some Charleston Brown ale from the Carolina Beer Co. this past summer when I visited Myrtle Beach and it was perfectly to my taste preferences. These brown ales are mostly on the sweeter, milder, lighter side. Let me know if you have an absolutely killer extract based English Style Brown ale recipe for me to try. Thanks!
Gravity Thrills
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Newkie Nose Polish

Post by Gravity Thrills »

...That's what my Brit friends call Newcastle. I have a book that has a good extract Newcastle clone that I used as the basis for an AG version. I'll shoot you the specifics when I get home tonight. As far as modifying this into a southern style English brown (the variant I am most partial to), you'll need to ease up on the hops in favor of a malt accent and also shoot for a slightly lower gravity.

The supposed trick to getting a flavor profile most like Newcastle is to conduct primary fermentation by splitting the batch into two separate carboys. In one carboy you ferment a high gravity wort with about 2/3 of the total fermentables in it; in the other carboy you ferment a low gravity wort containing the remaining 1/3 of fermentables. Supposedly this is the strategy Scottish and Newcastle uses. The strategy lends itself to all grain brewing with a batch sparge since your first runnings will contain about 2/3 of your fermentables and the second runnings will be of the same liquid volume but will only contain 1/3 of the total fermentables. You could easily replicated this in an extract version by putting 2/3 of your concentrated wort boil into one fermenter, 1/3 into another, and topping both off with water to an equal level that will yield your entire target batch size when combined into a single secondary fermenter.

I have not yet done this split-wort fermentation on my Newkie clone yet but I will sometime this brew season. If you give it a shot, tell us how it turns out.

Cheers,
Jim
jayhawk
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Shirley's Nut Brown

Post by jayhawk »

This was my second brew ever, and it rocked. This recipe sold me on homebrewing, and it always comes out great. The description at my HBS website says "This is a full bodied, chewy, complex ale, conservatively hopped in order to let the malt flavours come through."

I am not sure exactly how it lines up style wise, but who cares about style...the beer tastes !@#$ good. It has great malt character, slighlty nutty, and exactly the right amount of hop. To see the recipe go to my HBS website www.beermaking.ca Follow the links to "extract/grain" recipes (the 2nd recipe page) and click on "Shirleys Nutbrown Ale". Great brew.
Git brewin
Chris
HardcoreLegend
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Sounds great!

Post by HardcoreLegend »

Thanks Chris! I like the formula of that recipe. I especially like the unusual addition of a small amount of Roasted barley, which I brew with alot. I will probably make this one in December. By the way, the directions on the website for brewing this beer had some humor to it that made me laugh out loud when i read them. So, thanks for a good laugh too!
Gravity Thrills
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brown ale spicing...

Post by Gravity Thrills »

here's Mosher's spicing on the Gingerbread Brown. I'm going to brew this and a Fat Tire clone up this weekend.

To 5 gallons of souft (lightly hopped) brown ale at end of boil:
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 tsp cloves

Cheers,
Jim
jayhawk
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Good call

Post by jayhawk »

I just brewed a gingerbread brown on Friday, using the spices you posted earlier. Spiced the mash too. It is very promising. Good luck.
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