Hobgoblin Ruby Ale modification

[darkbright]

I've just bought a grainfather and as part of the deal I got a free AG Hobgoblin Ruby Ale kit. Great I thought, however I better actually taste the beer I will be brewing. I bought a bottle yesterday and found it to be a bit sweet for my liking.

So I was wondwering, what modifications to the recipe could I do?

The original recipe is attached.

I have the following grain available to use - 500g Pale Malt, 800g Carafe Special III, and 700g Chocolate malt.

and the following hops 70g Citra, 50g Amarillo and and 70g Apollo.

Would it be better to modify the grain bill or temp of the mash or add some hops to the boil or dry hop?

Thanks in advance!

 

[darkbright]

I have no idea either. Will just go with it and see how it turns out.

 

[cheapbrew]

I'm probably wrong but I would have thought cutting down, or replacing the crystal would reduce sweetness.

 

[Covrich]

You could reduce the crystal and or possibly change teh yeast for something like Nottingham or US05.. this should make it drier..

It does say hobgoblin style anyway, when I did a Clone recipe or someones effort at a clone it came out very different.

 

[HisDudeness]

Also could lower mash temp to 65 for a drier final product

 

[darkbright]

Thanks all. I'll have a think - I don't want to make it too complicated - think lowering mash temp might be easiest.

 

[TartanSpecial]

I'd go with the 65deg C mash since Mangrove Jack M79 is meant to be pretty high attenuation. (meant to be.. i haven't used it myself so far) unless you have a pack of saf 05 or Nottingham(Gervin) to hand...both of them are normally ultra reliable with decent attenuation.

 

[Hoppy]

If you really want a red/ruby colour, 7% crystal, leave the chocolate, and add 0.2% (by weight of final volume), caramel (E150) gravy browning!

As others have said, the levels of un-fermentables seems high!

Home brew recipes always seem to do this, you guys spot this, these recipe formulations assume all the colour must come from malt and it's adjucts and add more burnt/roasted malt to accomodate this!

I once saw a printed home brew recipe for a product (my commercial recipe) that had 24% crystal to give the colour of the beer i produced, it was 5-6%!

Use your Apollo for bittering (low CoH) Citra for flavour 10 mins (not a fan myself). Amarillo during you conditioning.

BR

Hoppy

 

[simon12]

As already stated lowering the mash temp or the amount of crystal malt will lower the sweetness. Alternatively you could add a bit more high alpha hops at the start of the boil to offset the sweetness with more bitterness.