Experimental Recipe Selection

I did in fact end up brewing last night, which worked out quite well. Hence, I'll explain my experimental recipe and thought process.

The ingredients: 3 lbs dark malt, 5 lbs amber malt, 1 oz Chinook hops, 1 cinnamon stick,  and standard ale yeast

Most of the beers I've brewed in the past have used about 5 or 6 lbs of malt (for 5 gallon batches), which is pretty normal for beer and leads to a fairly standard alcohol content level. However, this time I wanted something stronger, so I hopped on a cool tool called BrewLab (I wish I had discovered this earlier) and started trying out different mixes.

Anyways, I went with an amber/dark mix, since I've had good results with ambers previously. In all a total of 8 lbs of malt. Malt is essentially sugar which the yeast consumes and converts into alcohol, so the more malt the higher alcohol content up to a point. Using the brewlab calculator, this should be about 5.7% or so, which is higher than any of my previous creations.

In terms of yeast, a basic ale yeast would suffice as it's quite cheap and I haven't worked with other yeasts too much yet. I'll have to start experimenting with them in the future. However, a beer is not necessarily complete with just malt and yeast! One time I brewed with no hops, which was still quite good, but tasted more like a cider than a beer almost.

With my last few batches, I've picked fairly bitter hops and over-boiled them leading to very bitter beers. This time I wanted to balance it with hops aroma more as well, so I took a look at the following hops chart and decided on Chinook hops, which I haven't worked with before; but seemed aromatic and still quite bitter. I also decided to reduce the amount of time I'd boil the hops in order to lower the impact of them.

However, a recipe is not 'experimental' until you throw something random in there, which is where the cinnamon stick comes in!  Reading up on it, too much cinnamon can destroy a batch.  Some people seemed to use cinnamon powder, while some just left the stick in for a few weeks during fermentation. I however, decided to boil 1 cinnamon for the last 15 minutes, then remove it; hoping it will add a really mild touch to a darker/amber beer.

The brew process ended up going smoothly, so I'll keep you updated!  Haven't thought of the perfect name yet, but it will come in time.