There is definitely a balance that you need in your beers.
The higher your alcohol level the higher your hopping rate should be. Alcohol will give a hot sweet bite to the beer when it is to high and needs to be toned down with hops.
Just try a few different strong ales and the alcohol and hop balance differences are easily perceived.

I wouldn't even be worried about this side of things on a 1.050 or 1.040 beer. I'm not the person to ask and Lylo might be able to give more info but I think the alcohol bite wouldn't even come into play until say beers of 1.065 and above.

Below that, I think you are really looking at your malt to bitterness ratio and your mash temperature. For example, I could make a beer at 1.040 that is almost identical to a 1.050 beer by just altering the mash temp. The warmth of alcohol would not play a part in that as I suspect it couldn't even be noticed???

Yngve,

I didn't word my last post here very well - it is quite ambiguous actually.

It might be easier to understand if I explain how I would make this low alcohol beer. This method can't be done with all beers but can be done with any that normally are mashed at say 66 C or less. For example, the Schwarzbier you just brewed can easily be made into a low alcohol beer. Here's how it is done...

Grain Bill and Mash - Reduce the grain bill accordingly and then mash it at 70 C. This gives extra body to the beer which otherwise would be just thin and watery. It will also attenuate slightly less (or you could even use a different low attenuating yeast such as Windsor but I just use the same yeast.)

Hop Bill - The hop bill remains the same as you use for the full-strength beer. What this does is balances out the sweetness of the lower attenuation etc.

As for your specialty grains, always keep them at the same percentage as the original recipe - don't mess with them. Some software does all sorts of specialty grain manipulations so as their colour formula (which is extremely primitive) stays the same. This is not correct. Specialty grains are flavour grains.

BIABacus does not adjust FG or anything else according to mash regimes as there are a lot more factors than just temperature that affect attenuation. For example a step mash will give a different result than a single infusion mash. pH can have a huge affect. THe list goes on.

Numbers can only take us so far and they can take us a long way, very well. However, at some point, we need to step away from the numbers, taste the beer and think, "Is it great or not great?" If it isn't great, then why not?

When starting out, you really shouldn't be picking a beer to pieces. It is much more important to get a few brews under way and take some measurements when and where you can. This does a lot of things and one of these things is to see if any patterns develop. For example, if you noticed all your beers were a bit thin, then you'll know this isn't a one off problem and is worth investigating.

Just keep things simple and don't do any tests for now. (Most beer tests to be done properly, especially an FG test, require side by side brews which most people are not in a position to do.) Testing one thing on batches brewed on different days can be very misleading.

Anyway, in the beginning try to look for the positives in your beers as much as the negatives. Sometimes we can read too much and get hooked up on very small things which can lead us to totally missing enjoying the beer and changing things that we shouldn't be changing.

Brewing a great beer is really simple - you only need to have the basics down. That and a great recipe is all you need. For example, that Schwartz recipe you brewed always gets a silver medal even when I have totally mis-treated it.

Brew on yeriksen ,
PP