Smoked MIld Review

Hoping for a flavorful but low-alcohol beer, I made a Smoked Mild a few weeks ago using Breiss cherry-smoked malt. The results, I am happy to report, have been pretty good. Some people at the local homebrewers club liked it, including the guy who works at the LHBS that sold me the grains. Woohoo!

Appearance: Deep brown or mahogany in color. Appears very dark in the glass with brown highlights around the edges. A decent tan foam appears at the initial pour although is fades fairly quickly to a ring of bubbles where the surface of the beer meets the glass. I wish this beer were a little lighter in color.


Aroma: It has a reasonably strong smokiness, but not in a bacon or ham-like way. There's a hint of the roastiness as well, so the smoke isn't overwhelming.

Taste: Smoke up front, but a sweeter taste combined with some roasty character after the first impression. Again, the smokiness is neither overwhelming nor meaty, but noticeable. No hop aroma, little if any noticeable bitterness.

Mouthfeel: Low carbonation. The beer is low in body but the low level of carbonation prevents it from feeling spritzy. Leaves a sweet and roasty aftertaste.

Overall: A drinkable, low alcohol beer with an assertive but not overwhelming smoke character, balanced by a sweet and roasty quality. Low in body, but low in carbonation. Good complexity without being overwhelming.

For Next Time: The only thing I would change is the color. Currently I think it's too dark for the Mild style. Perhaps instead of 4oz Black Patent Malt I could use 2oz chocolate and 2oz black patent. That might also give the taste some added complexity. I definitely want to brew this one again.

Smoked Mild Brewday

I like smoky beers. The first one I ever consumed, before I was 21 and before I knew much about beer, was the Alaskan Smoked Porter. That was more than ten years ago. What recently got me started on smoked beer was of course the Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier, an intensely smoky Märzen-style lager from Bamberg, Germany. That beer almost has an overwhelming smokiness that makes it hard to drink more than a pint. The smoked porters, a couple of smoked brown ales, and a few other smoky beers that I have sampled were less ham-like in taste, but nonetheless feature a prominent smokiness.

So for this recipe I am going for a beer with a prominent but not overwhelming smokiness, combined with a relatively low alcohol content. The recipe is based on one found in Smoked Beers, with a few modifications. The original recipe calls for all Weyerman malts, but the LHBS didn't have them all, so I made some substitutions. Also the smoked malt is cherry-smoked, which is supposed to have a less bacon-like and more rounded flavor.

Smoked Mild - 3.25gal
3# 4oz Munich Light
1# 6oz Cherry Smoked Malt
0# 7oz Crystal 60L
0# 4oz Black Patent

5/8oz Willamette, 4.2%AA, 60 min
3/8oz Willamette, 4.2%AA, 15 min

Safale S-04 Dry Yeast, fermented at 62F.

Mash at 152F for 60 mins

Expected OG/ FG at 70% efficiency: 1.039 / 1.011 / 3.7%ABV
Expected IBUs: 23

9/24/12
Hit my mash temps OK, with a degree or two of variation between the top of the mash and the bottom of the mash. Stirred it a little to even things out. At the end of the mash the temps looked about right.

Recirculated a few quarts and collected about 2.3 of first running, more than target. Reduced my sparge water from 2 gal to about 1.75 gal to compensate, and ended up with almost exactly 4 gallons of pre-boil wort, if the numbers on the side of my bottling bucket are correct.

Pre-boil OG was pretty high: 1.036. Zowie, that was around 83% efficiency. How did that happen? Perhaps my system is more efficient at small beer volume. It's also possible that I mismeasured the amount of grain and ended up with more than needed, but I weighed the grain on my kitchen scale and it looked correct. In any case, the actual OG for 3.25 gallons of wort will be around 1.047. Meh! Perhaps I could dilute the beer a little?

Cooled beer to 100F using the IC, then placed the covered brew kettle in a tub of 66F water to cool it down to pitching temps. I'll only need to pitch 1/2 of the dry yeast package to get the right number of yeast cells.

Transferred, aerated and pitched 1/2 of the yeast packet into a 3 gal Better Bottle about three hours later when the beer was 70F.  Placed the better in a tub of 62F water which I will cool with ice. I got almost exactly three gallons of beer and 1/4 gallon of trub left in the pot. So, it appears that my system boils off about .75 gal / hr. Awesome!

9/24/12 - 11am. The bottle was sitting in 60F water. The krausen was starting to form with slow airlock activity.  The beer appears as dark as a porter or stout but I hope by the time it gets to my glass it will be a nice brown or reddish color.

10/3/12 - Bottled today with 1.3oz sugar, aiming for about 1.85 volumes of CO2. I got 27 x 12oz bottles, or about 2.6 gallons. Less that I was hoping for but the gravity was higher than expected. The FG was 1.017.  If my measurements of volume are correct that equals 3.9% ABV.