Low Alcohol-High Crystal, Big Flavour

[Crusader-Rob]

I'm looking at Session ales and learning a bit more, from what I've read, they tend to have higher Crystal and caramal malts added, to give it mor emalt backbone. Am I right?

and does anyone have a good low alcohol one, with high crystal, and plenty of hop flavour? recdipes welcome.

I'm thinking along the lines of 20%?

any good recipes out there?

[jt]

II started off my lower gravity brewing with Stu's Kid Chocolate recipe
That's good if you like a malt balanced beer, lots of character to it
Something like 10% pale Crystal, 5% brown 2.5% pale choc 1.3% black
Bitter to 50% of OG and maybe add some hops at 10 or so.
Depending what you're after you can play with the hops

I like pales in the 1034 region.
10 to 12% each caramalt and Munich or you can just go 20% cara
IBU to about 75% of OG with most of them at 10 & 1 minute to get more flavour opposed to straight out bitterness

[Ralph]

Yup, and I did a 2.5% weemix... which is basically a Pot Kettle Black with the same amount of crystal etc as usual, but the pale malt turned right down. Was super yummy.

[Chris Banks]

I can assure you JT really knows what he is talking about when it comes to low abv/big flavour beers...

Off on a bit of a tangent but Paul Wicksteed did a Melanoiden malt SMASH beer which came in at around 2% I think haven't tried it myself but from his comments on the vid sounds pretty good - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj4uARL5dng

[jt]

I can't claim credit mate, it's mostly down to some good advice and great pointers from Stu, Jo, the North Welly Crew and many others here
Credit to the wider brewing community I think

[Chris Banks]

Did I mention he was quite modest too......;-)

Sorry back to subject was someone on here discussing brewing very  high % crystal low abv beer at one stage quite a while back Mr Cherry perhaps?

[jt]

Yes, Mr Cherry did one at 100% specialty malt from memory ...

[Tilt]

Aye I think it was Mr Cherry - and IIRC he did a nice write up of the results of his experiments.

Also the Limbo comp group could lend some useful info as they hold a low gravity competition every now and then.

[jt]

There's Minimus too, Banksy did a great tasting take on that.
There, now it's a North Welly appreciation thread...sorry

If you get a good mat base, you can heap in the hops

[Crusader-Rob]

Sounds good, Hopefully Mr Cherry, shows up here soon. 100% Specialty, any idea what the specialist was?

I've got a Low ABV Old School Classic Porter, MO &Brown Malt 50/50 and Black Patent at around 4-5%, nice and simple. low Hopped.

Wheres the Limbo Comp group? can anyone post a link?

[Tilt]

Check out the limbo group here.

[MrC]

Ahh, the old "How Low Can you Go" conversation.  

Here's what I did

From what I remember it was not very nice at all and tasted like unfermented wort.  Since then I have brewed a 2.9% Mild which was average. Not something I'm pursuing.

[MrC]

Here's a link to the Mild that I brewed.  

The recipe indicates 3.4% but my notes and gravity readings indicate that it was actually 2.9% ABV.