I spent most of this evening brewing up a batch of brown ale.  I made my own recipe, partly by design and partly because the brewstore didn’t have the hops I wanted and I had to improvise on the fly.

The recipe is below the fold.
Ingredients

Two 3.3 cans of Muntons Dark Plain Malt Extract Syrup
0.5 lbs light Crystal Malt
0.25 lbs Briess Black Patent Malt
0.25 lbs Munton Chocolate Malt
2 oz. Sterling Hops (AA 6.0%)
1 oz. Centennial Hops (AA 8.5%)
4 tsp. Gypsum (calcium sulfate)
1 tsp. Irish Moss
White Labs London Style Yeast (WLP013)

Process

Put crystal, black patent, and chocolate malt into a steeping bag and immerse in 1.5 gallons of 150-160F water for 30 minutes.
Remove and discard grains.
Turn heat to high for boiling and add 6.6 lbs of Dark Malt Extract, the gypsum, and 1 oz. of Sterling Hops for bittering.
After 45 minutes, add the Irish Moss
After 50 minutes, add another 1 oz. of Sterling Hops for bittering and aroma
After 55 minutes, add 1 oz. Centennial Hops for aroma.
At 60 minutes, remove from heat and immerse pot in an ice bath for rapid cooling.
Cool wort to a temperature of 75F and strain into a plastic bucket containing 1 gallon of cool, sterilized water.  
Pour a gallon of hot sterilized water over the strainer to extract the maximum goodies
Add enough sterilized water to give a total of 5 gallons of liquid.
Make sure temperature is in the 70-75F range and close bucket.
Shake the hell out of it to aerate.
Shake liquid yeast and pitch into the bucket.
Seal lid and attach airlock with sanitized liquid.

Let it ferment for a week to ten days and then bottle it with 5 oz. of dissolved corn syrup added to the bucket for carbonation.

Observations

The hops choices are a little unusual.  Sterling Hops are more of an aroma hops than a bittering hops, and they are normally used in lagers and pilsners.  I was planning on using Fuggles or Glacier Hops, but the homebrew store didn’t have any.  I chose the Centennial Hops for aroma even though it is a supercharged bittering hop.  What it came down to was that a lot of American Brown Ales do use Centennial for aroma, while no one uses Sterling for that purpose in ales.  I also had a target of 35 International Bittering Units (IBU’s) for the batch, and my formula worked out perfectly for that.  

I basically made a hybrid between an American and an English Brown Ale.  I used a London Ale Yeast, but I used a finishing aroma hops more typical of American Brown Ales.  

This is a very fast fermenting beer than can literally be bottled in a week and carbonated to drink in two.  I may let it play out a little longer just because I have some beer to drink already.  The Original Gravity is about 1.040, and that’s lower than my target of 1.046.  I might have slightly more than 5 gallons which would explain the difference.

Give me two to three weeks and I’ll tell you how it turned out.