Amber Ale - Your thoughts?

[Bardur]

G'day

I've not tried a Rogers Amber Ale so can't comment there. However I made an amber ale last April using:
1.7kg Morgans Red Oak Amber Ale kit
1.5kg tin of Coopers amber malt,
450g dextrose
250g corn syrup
12g Fuggles
12g Goldoings
Kit yeast

It turned out so sweet as to be virtually un-drinkable for about the first six months, and even now only good in small doses. My thoughts are that you'd want to drop the crystal and maybe look at doing a sixty minute boil with the chinook to help balance it out. Perhaps even swap the amber malt for a tin of pale malt and add some chocolate malt, say 100g, to get the colour a bit darker, if necessary.

Won't hurt to chuck in the extra yeast or if possible make a starter as I think the Morgans yeasts are only 7g packs to begin with.

More learned folk than I may be able to offer a better suggestion and help you get close to a Rogers Amber.

Cheers
Paul

Edit: The Morgans website claims "a high hop level". I found this not to be the case. It could definitely accomodate more bitterness IMO.

Hello's to the forum, this is my first post

Me too are looking at making an amber ale, for my 2nd. brew.
Earlier posts in this thread indicate that :
1.7kg Morgans Red Oak Amber Ale kit
+ 1.5kg tin of Coopers amber malt
might result in a very sweet ale.

I've got 2 x 1,5kg Coopers Amber liquid malt extract
and some bags of Muntons light spraymalt (ldm).

Any opinions whether using both tins of the Coopers extract would be too sweet
for a batch of 23l ?

Looking for quite noticable biscuity flavour, but not overwhelming

[Oliver]

Hello and welcome, Bardur.

Let me clarify: you are asking if it'd be OK to use the can of Morgans PLUS 3kg of extract (or similar amount of dried malt)?

If so, my advice is to not do this. You'll end up with a sickly sweet beer that will be undrinkable.

What is your reasoning for wanting to add the two tins? Do you want to boost the alcohol or add "biscuity notes"?

If it's the former, then add a kilo of dextrose to the brew but only one of the tins (1.5kg of malt) plus the Morgans kit. the dextrose will add alcohol but little, if anything, else.

If you want some extra flavour, grab some crystal grain and steep for 15 minutes in warm water (about 70c) and drain and rinse lightly with a little warm water. Boil the liquid for 10 minutes, then use it to dissolve the concentrate. This will add some nuttiness without adding a huge amount of extra fermentables and thus create an overly sweet beer.

The alternative is to add some hops to balance out the sweetness, but given this is your second brew, I'd keep it simple.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Oliver

[Bardur]

Thanks for your help, Oliver.

I should have made clear that I do not own the Morgans kit, and that the plan is to add hops on my own
(I've got Fuggles,Target and Amarillo - all pellets,atm. -Yeasts at hand are safale us-05 and danstar nottingham. -mixing u.s. and u.k. styles is o.k. by me)

Although I got four speciality grains at the moment, I wanted to wait for my third brew to try and steep them. Partly because the shop have marked the bags badly, I need to mail a bit back and forth to be 100% certain which is which

I want to boost both alcohol and flavour, not doing a clone or a kit - but attempting a brew with distinct flavours from the amber extract (to get an fair idea how it inflences brews) and mild bitterness and hop aroma added on my own.
So the main question is - would 3kgs of amber extract + 1kg of ldm be sickly sweet ? (ca. 5,5% before bottle conditioning and perhaps some extra cane sugar)
I'm aiming at a brew around 5-7% abv.

The dextrose I've found here in Norway are quite expensive compared to spraymalt , using more dried malt and small amounts of white cane sugar would be good too ?

Off topic : first brew is getting ready for bottling, inspired by recipies at the coopers forum, looks something like this, made on the english bitter kit :
http://haandbryg.dk/cgi-bin/beercalc.cg ... wersearch=

I'm sorry for the messy post, it is actually a bit hot up here in the north right now :O
Skål !

[Oliver]

OK, I understand now

I plugged a few numbers into BeerSmith and came up with this:

American Amber Ale
For 23.00L

3.00 kg Amber Liquid Extract (24.6 EBC) 85.7 %
0.50 kg Sugar, Table (Sucrose) (2.0 EBC) 14.3 %
15.00 g Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] - Boil 10.0 min 3.7 IBUs
15.00 g Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] - Dry Hop 5.0 Days 0.0 IBUs
30.00 g Target [11.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min 26.7 IBUs
1.0 pkg Safale American US-05

OG: 1.047. Style: 1.045-1.060
IBU: 30.4. Style: 25.0-40.0
EBC colour: 17.8. Style: 19.7-33.5
Est ABV: 5.3. Style: 4.50-6.20 %

I added the sugar to boost alcohol and not add sweetness. I would rather have used dex but it seems like that won't be possible for you.

The colour is a bit of a guess because I don't know the EBC of the Coopers tins so I just used the default BeerSmith value.

As a result the colour may be a little on the low side and I would err on the side of caution and not add any more malt extract (particularly light, which won't have much effect).

So either made do with the recipe as it is, or add about 300g crystal malt, which would bring it up to 24.1 EBC.

Oh, and the bitterness of the hops you have may be wildly different from what's assumed above, and you'll need to take that into account.

I just bunged this together quickly, so someone is sure to point out a flaw in it (plus I was using the new BeerSmith 2.0 for the first time).

Hope it helps.

Cheers,

Oliver

[emnpaul]

G'day Bardur,

I remember when I made this post,

It turned out so sweet as to be virtually un-drinkable for about the first six months, and even now only good in small doses.

and it still is too sweet. To my taste anyway. Although others have commented that they have made similar beers and liked them straight out of the fermenter! Some find amber and crystal malts a bit sickly, some like them in large doses. It all comes down to the individual.

As it is still only your second beer I'd be inclined to take Olivers advice and err on the side of caution, at least until you figure out what your tolerance for crystal malts is.

That's my 2c worth anyway.

Cheers
Paul

[Sonny]

Yeh, my Morgans Amber is ok & the guests sure like it. Too sweet for me to love, so they can have it.

I got better stuff for myself to drink.