First attempt at a brown ale

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I agree 2 pounds is a little too much 10 to 15% max is what I go by
 
During my first all-grain experiments I did a couple of batches of a bitter using a lot of Crystal 20 and a normal amount (~10%) of Crystal 60. Those beers were okay, but using Dark Munich instead of the Crystal 20 would have made them a lot better. I haven't revisited that recipe, but I'll definitely make that change.
Big, sweet base malts and relatively low percentages of Crystal are what I'm finding to be a pretty solid approach for brown and amber beers.
 
Thanks for the tips! I've made some changes. :)
7.5lb Maris Otter
2lb dark Munich
8 oz chocolate
8 oz carapils
 
Can't argue with that too much, but I'd use a little dark Crystal for some caramel. Also, that 8 oz of chocolate might be too roasty. You might consider cutting back on that and the carapils and adding some Crystal 120 in it's place.
Others with more specific experience may have better ideas. :)
 
Great! Updated:
7.5 lbs Maris Otter
2 lbs Dark Munich
8 oz Crystal 120L
4 oz chocolate malt
4 oz carapils.
 
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just a tip when using mostly dark and chocolate grains it sometime needs more time to condition blending all those flavors together so let it age and it will taste great , my process for dark beers is at least 30 days
 
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I am mostly an all grain BIAB brewer and I love brown ale .. American, English, north or south. But I have yet to make a good one :-( So I use Midwest's 20 minute kit :) It's quite good ! Maybe I'll try Yooper's recipe .. and credit her!
 
I am mostly an all grain BIAB brewer and I love brown ale .. American, English, north or south. But I have yet to make a good one :-( So I use Midwest's 20 minute kit :) It's quite good ! Maybe I'll try Yooper's recipe .. and credit her!

You don't have to credit me- I was just so shocked that someone would copy it exactly and post it as their very own.

It really is quite good. If I was doing it again right now, I'd probably switch up the yeast strain and go with WLP002 but otherwise it's very good as is.
 
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unfortunately I'm one of those guys :D but theres a story behind that for me anyway, in the beginning of me using this site, my quest was to have a place to save every good recipe I could find, I tend to lose things in my pc, hard drives go bad, you switch to another one and so on, so this seemed like a good place to start, didn't even think about who created it or not I just wanted to save them, and then came the sharing feature and completely forgot that some of these were created by others so once I realized this needed to be done I tried to put links to other web sites where I got them and at that time I was getting involved with helping improve the site and lost track of my project to track down credit to a lot of recipes, now that I've started looking, most of the popular ones are copied several times already on many different sites so this might be kind of tough "But still trying" ;)
 
There is a back story with that particular person, and some other stolen materials. It's not just a copy of a recipe from a site that irritated me. It was the final straw after a particularly nasty experience.

Sorry to go off-topic on your recipe thread!

Brown ale. It's so versatile, from dry nutty flavors to Southern English sweet style, to hoppy American brown. I like all of those styles, and you can't go wrong with just about any of them.
 
I brewed up a batch. It's in the fermenter now, and will rack to secondary soon. I used Imperial Yeast's "Pub" strain, which apparently came from Fuller's of London. I'll let you all know how this turns out!
 

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