# 🍺 Top-down Brew: Copper Diamond Belgian Pale Ale

Recipe Values name: Copper Diamond og: 1.055 malt: American two-row, 75, 2, 80 malt: Aromatic Malt, 4, 23, 78 malt: Caramunich Malt, 5, 56, 72 malt: CaraAroma, 1, 150, 74 sugar: Piloncillo, 15, 60, 1.042 lateboil: Orange peel zest, .211 lateboil: Coriander, .01 lateboil: Allspice, .09 ibu: 30 hop: Magnum, 85, 14, 60 hop: Cascade, 15, 5.75, 0 yeast: ale eff: 75 vol: 5.5 system: US prime: 2.7, 72

## Variations

Steeped specialty grains plus malt extract:

- Delete the two-row and aromatic malt lines.
- For liquid malt extract, add sugar: Liquid light malt extract, 79, 5, 76
- For dry malt extract, add sugar: Dry light malt extract, 79, 3.5, 96
- Set the mash efficiency variable to 55% for steeping.

Metric spice doses: Orange peel: 1.6 g/l, Coriander: .7, Allspice, .7

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## Results

*** Waiting for results. ***

## Notes

Sometimes homebrew recipes start out in one direction, then end up taking a different direction. This is one of those stories. I started out inspired by Mosher's (2004) Yellow Diamond Belgian Pale Ale. The competing intention though was to brew with what I have on hand, including a large amount of specialty grains that a friend gave to me. There's no Munich malt, but I had Caramunich. There's some aromatic malt, but not as much as the recipe needs. And on it goes, with hop substitutions and more. Tim Gunn used to say "make it work!" to contestants on Project Runway that were stretching to reach their goals. That seems like a fitting name for this effort.

The original recipe calls for the zest of one to two oranges. The zest of one orange is about 15 g. The present recipe used two oranges. This 30 g works out to about 1.6 g/l.

The spice possibilities are a bit open ended beyond the orange and coriander: "1 whole star anise, .5 tsp of grains of paradise, or your secret spice of choice."

A technical note is that the percentages in Mosher's recipe have a typo. Belgian medium crystal malt is 0.5%, but probably should be 5%.

For Mosher's Yellow Diamond recipe, replace the malt lines (malt:) with ...

    malt: Belgian pale ale malt, 40, 2.2, 83
    malt: Belgian Munich malt, 30, 10, 74
    malt: Belgian aromatic Malt, 10, 23, 78
    malt: Belgian medium crystal malt, 5, 60, 74

Replace the hop lines (hop:) with...

    hop: Northern brewer, 65, 6.5, 90
    hop: Saaz, 20, 3, 90
    hop: Saaz, 15, 3, 15

Replace the spice lines (for US or metric - use only the value):

    lateboil: Orange peel zest, .211 (metric: 1.6)
    lateboil: Coriander, .1 (metric: .7)
    lateboil: Grains of paradise, .014 (metric: .11)

I felt like the piloncillo sugar didn't add anything particularly interesting. Dissolving this sugar was slow - it's rock hard. It could be replaced by another sugar.

## References

Randy Mosher's Yellow Diamond Belgian Pale Ale

Mosher, R. (2004). Radical Brewing, Brewer's Publications, p. 117.