Bitter Recipe Critique Please

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Wilfy

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Got the chance of a brewday on Saturday as the missus is going to the races. Any thoughts on this recipe?

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Looks good. The only thing I would may be change is using EKG as a bittering hop.

Although I'm not that good on receipe creation and would wait until someone who is better at it than me to check that 'pearl of wisdom'
 
Personally I would just drop the crystal and torrified wheat down to about 5% each. To reduce their flavours and focus more on the hops. But nothing wrong with your recipe.
 
Thanks for the input.

Hoping to do a Jaipur on Sunday if I'm not dragged to a garden centre or something similar.
 
You can use any hop for bittering. I think a good idea would be to use a mix of all three hops for both bittering and aroma. So use maybe 10g of each hop st 5 mins rather than 20g EKG at 10 mins.
 
Looks a sound recipe to me. I might be slightly concerned about 38IBU of bitterness being a tad high but this is a very personal thing (if you're an American brewer you might say its a bit low!). And the "efficiency" at 70%; is that your input? I know I started using software a bit back and accepted the default of 75% for making a strong bitter - actually got 85% (apparently not unusual for fly-sparging); and SG 1066 is not really a bitter! I've still got about 3/4 of it (I'm not so good handling strong sweet beers anymore).
 
I don't see why you should have to tone down the Torrified Wheat and Crystal, it doesn't always have to be about the hop aroma. This is my go to Bitter, much better than just a hop focused beer.

Session Bitter: O.G 1.035
Grist: 78% Pale Malt, 10.5% Crystal Malt, 10.5% Torrified Wheat, 1% Black Malt.
Sugar: 8.5% Brewers Invert No. 3.
Hops: Styrian Goldings.
Late Hops: Fuggles, Goldings.
Dry Hop: Fuggles, Goldings.
IBU/EBC: 30/30
ABV: 3.5%

Mash Temp: 68°C
Sparge Temp: 75.5°C

Yeast:

Whitelabs – WLP022 Essex Ale.
 
EKG is nice as a bittering hop. But it can be wasteful if its AA is on the low side. Challenger is my main bittering hop for British ales. It's fantastic on its own for bittering.
 
Quick check: Last bitter I made had an IBU/SG ratio of 0.685. This seemed a bit more pronounced bitterness than a pub might serve. Your recipe is showing 0.87 as a ratio! But then your hops will have lost some IBUs this late in the year, so...
 
If you shift the aroma hops from 10 mins to 5 the IBUs will drop a bit. If 38 is too high for you.

Using Challenger alone for bittering would be fine, it's great for bittering. And aroma. But someone once recommended blending two or three hops and using the blend at all stages to me, and I sometimes do this. Makes a change.
 
Always a personal preference thing but I'm not a fan of Fuggles in biter. I think they add bitterness but don't do anything good for the "nose".
 
I'm not a fuggles fan either. But many people love them, especially with EKG.
 
Many commercial ales use Fuggles and EKG together, it's the classic English hop combo.
 
I like fuggles. I think they are under-rated as they are traditional/old fashioned.

In fact I have a project at the moment to come up with an English lager and I'm thinking of using fuggles in it. I'd like to use a single hop (like using Saaz for both bittering and aroma). Open to suggestions but it must be English hops. Any thoughts ?
 
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