AB's Winter Cask Ale revisited

The Beer Advocate has some reviews of Winter Cask Ale up. With a score of 3.24 out of 5, it's firmly in the "doesn't suck, but ain't great" area. What interested me, though, was some of the descriptions of the appearance of the beer. I had assumed it might be a brown ale, but had dropped the black patent malt from Papazian's brown ale recipe and replaced it with 90L Crystal malt. Turns out, I might have been right. A lot of the reviews said it was amber colored. Hmmm. Interesting.

So, I've revised the recipe:

• 6 1/4 lb light malt extract
• 3/4 lb Crystal 90 malt
• 2 oz Cascade Hops (~6% AAU) 60 minutes
• 1 oz Cascade Hops 5 minutes
• 1/4 tsp Irish Moss (last 15 minutes for clarification)
• Wyeast 1056 American Ale/Chico yeast

This should result in a beer with about 6.3% ABV. Now for the interesting part.

Soak the oak chips with chopped vanilla beans while the beer ferments in primary. Then when transfeingr the beer to secondary, add the chips and vanilla beans. Age for one month in secondary, then keg and age another couple of weeks.

Notice that I've eliminated the chocolate malt, and bumped up the 90L Crystal. I'm going to try this one soon!