Drake's Expedition recipes?

[pfooti]

Hey BNA,

I've been challenged by a friend to try and brew up something that's similar to Drake's Expedition Ale. From their website:

Expedition Ale – 6.5% ABV
American style Red Ale. Drake’s popular Spring seasonal. This ale is loaded with Crystal malts for a ruby red color that is balanced by an onslaught of Cascade and Chinook hops. Think of it as a dark IPA.

Elsewhere (on a blog post from 2009), they mentioned oats and black malt.

I'm not attempting to clone this, in the least bit because I have never even tasted it before. I can see my way into the style, more-or-less, from descriptions and having had a lot of other Drake's beers. It will probably be available for purchase in a month or so, so I wanted to try and put my own take on the dark-american-red together. Any advice?

Right now, I'm thinking about something like:

80% base malt
5% crystal 60
5% crystal 90
4% victory
2.5% flaked oats
2.5% cara-pils
0.5% carafa III

Shooting for an OG in the 1.070 range. Put in a hopping schedule with the called-for chinook and cascade hops to hit 60 IBUs with fairly aggressive late/dry additions.

[pfooti]

Here's my latest recipe iteration. I'm sort of up in the air about the 2-row / munich ratio and the general use of specialty malts. It turns out that this ends up looking somewhat similar to another brown ale I brew a lot of, but this one has more crystal and has oats to add some kind of smoothness to the flava. Any advice is welcome, ESPECIALLY advice before tomorrow (wednesday) noon or so, as that's when I finalize the recipe and buy the grains.

Expedition to Planet Brasseur
23-A Specialty Beer



Size: 5.5 gal
Efficiency: 75.0%
Attenuation: 75.0%

Original Gravity: 1.067 (1.026 - 1.120)
Terminal Gravity: 1.017 (0.995 - 1.035)
Color: 18.53 (1.0 - 50.0)
Alcohol: 6.64% (2.5% - 14.5%)
Bitterness: 66.4 (0.0 - 100.0)

Ingredients:
7.0 lb American 2-row
5.0 lb Munich 10L Malt
12 oz Crystal Malt 40°L
8.0 oz Crystal Malt 120°L
4.0 oz Pale Chocolate
16.0 oz Oat Flakes


0.75 oz Warrior (16.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min
0.5 oz Centennial (10.0%) - added during boil, boiled 20 min
0.5 oz Simcoe (12.7%) - added during boil, boiled 20 min
0.25 oz Centennial (10.0%) - added during boil, boiled 5 min
0.25 oz Simcoe (12.7%) - added during boil, boiled 5 min
0.5 oz Amarillo (11.2%) - added dry to secondary fermenter
0.5 oz Citra (11.1%) - added dry to secondary fermenter

[devinjames]

I just bottled my interpretation of their 2010 jolly rodger imperial red, it tastes amazing.

http://hopville.com/recipe/494855/speci ... ia-red-ale

[pfooti]

Nice, thanks for the link. I ended up subbing the 12 oz of crystal 40 into 16 oz of carared (since I'm using pacman yeast, which kinda eats through crystal malts I wanted to get a bit more crystal in the recipe). It's my first real experiment with a substantial amount of munich in the grain bill, but I'm hopeful. Looks like a good brew, even if it does have a weird amount of oatmeal in it. Oatmeal India Red Ale. Friday is brewday, hopefully my beer will be ready by the time Drakes starts tapping their Expedition ale so I can see if I'm even in the neighborhood.