Schlafly pale ale clone

First brew of the year. I’d been kicking around the idea of brewing an English bitter for awhile and settled on a Schlafly pale ale clone. Beer & Brewing had a post on the beer, but it had two different recipes. The original put out by the actual brewery would’ve put me way under the gravity I can achieve with my system. They anticipate 85% efficiency, 10 percentage points above what I get. 

Beer and brewing recommended more grain, so I did increase the malt to achieve the ideal gravity, but they also substantially increased the amount of hops too. More than would’ve been proportional to the amount of extra grain. Unfortunately I didn’t recognize this issue and in fact went above even the modified hop schedule. B&B advised about 2.5 Oz of hops but I had three since I bought three one ounce bags. I didn’t want to have a half ounce left over so I used it all. 

So the result is what I call a sort of hop saturation issue. It’s not overly bitter. It’s just that there’s a lot of hop flavor and not enough residual sweetness in this low gravity beer to support the amount of hops. In the end it leaves the beer tasting very dry, almost astringent. There’s really not any detectable malt flavor. 

Yet it’s a clean beer, no yeast defects. Pretty drinkable. If I were to make this again, I would substantially decrease the amount of hops. I also had to make substitutions based on hops that were available, so if I were able to find the specified varieties that would probably make it taste more like the real thing.