Baltic Porter Question

[JAMC]

Brewery still out of action (waiting on replacement parts), but to pass the time I've tried to devise a couple of recipes to brew over the winter months.

One of the recipes I'm creating is a Baltic Porter. I'm not obsessed with sticking to the style guidance, but I'm told a Baltic Porter should have a certain roasted character to it - but I want any roasted flavour to be present, but well restrained and intermingled with the richer caramel malts.

Would pale chocolate malt be the way to go for this? Other recipes I've seen tend to use either brown malt or chocolate malt.

I'm also toying with the idea of rye, as liquorice is mentioned in the style guidelines too. Rye + pale chocolate + crystal = overload?

 

[BrewHop]

I haven't used pale chocolate malt personally but that would probably be a good idea. You could also just use less roasted malt (eg brown or chocolate) and use one of the carafa's to darken the beer a bit. The carafa's are dehusked so they add mostly color and a very mild roasted flavor. They are often used to "black" a beer.

In general, however, I find that chocolate gives the beer a chocolate flavor and not much roast.

Here is an imperial porter I made that you could check out:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/r ... ial-porter

It for sure has some roasted flavor but you could, for example, cut out the black patent and the brown, and use a lighter crystal or something like that...

 

[JAMC]

That recipe looks like a stronger, darker version of the sort of thing I'm thinking about. At 10% and 62 IBU there must be steam coming out of your ears when you take a sip of that stuff!

SRM for Baltic Porter says 17 - 30, meaning brown to dark brown in my book. I've thrown something together which should give a fair level of flavour complexity and comes out at 23.5 SRM.

Here's what I'm thinking for the grain bill (for a 5 gallon batch);
- 4kg 2-row pale
- 500g Crystal
- 500g Pale Chocolate
- 500g Flaked Barley (popular in stouts but not seen this in porter recipes, wondering what it would be like)
- 500g Dark Muscovado (Barbados) Sugar
- 250g Rye Malt

Other assumptions;
- Danstar Nottingham yeast
- 90% mash efficiency

This should give about 7.1% abv. Havent decided on hops yet but I'd be shooting much lower than your recipe at about 20-25 IBU.

 

[BrewHop]

Looks good. I did make this one a bit stronger in general because I was putting it into a barrel. Yours looks good. Happy brewing.