Alcohol Boost
What would be the best way to boost your %ABV without changing the flavor of the beer? Would plain old sugar work? Or do you really just need a larger grain bill?
any time you add ingredients you run the risk of changing the flavor profile of your beer. that said, corn sugar, light corn syrup, turbinado sugar, rice syrup; are all easy, mostly flavor neutral ways of boosting your gravity...
I wouldn't go more than 10% of your total gravity with any kind of sugar, but that's just me...
And it takes a LOT of sugar to raise your OG up. I put over a pound into my wort once and didn't get much of an increase.
Best way is to add DME, extract, or grain. As danno said, it will change the flavor a little. Sugar might be the easiest way. I read in Papazian's book that 1# is equal to like .06 OG or so. It's been a long time, but it was an outrageous amount of sugar for little gain.
I just use more grain.
I know you said you did not want to change the flavor much, but the title of this was Alcohol Boost, and if you already have some honey in your recipe, add some more.
Honey will impart some different flavors, but it is neat to experiment with and easy to obtain.
Thanks for the advice so far guys. I think I'll just up my grain bill. I'm not much of a fan of honey in beers.
Perhaps a good follow up question would be, which grains are best to use or add to a recipe in order to boost the alcohol content? Are the crystal malts going to produce more alcohol than, say, 2 row pale? Or Munich? And how about the dark grains, are they merely for flavor, or do they contribute a fair amount of fermentables?
you'd want to use base malts. all thoise other malts you mentioned will have a considerable impact on flavor, seriously changing your style... (or use more LME/DME if you're not into AG...)
danno wrote:
you'd want to use base malts. all thoise other malts you mentioned will have a considerable impact on flavor, seriously changing your style... (or use more LME/DME if you're not into AG...)
Agree with Danno on this one. If you want higher alcohol, add more base malts (or LME/DME). A lot of people that are going for a higher OG will keep a bag of LME on hand specifically for helping them hit their OG if they are low. At a certain point with high alcohol beers you start to lose some effieciency, so that needs to be factored into your grain bill.
DT
You say there is a point at which you start to lose efficiency with high alcohol beers. Could you please expand on this? What do you mean, and what is that point? I love to brew higher alcohol beers, and I am trying to learn all the little details like this.
Also, you say use base grains because of their impact on the flavor. If you were building a recipe from scratch, and could use any grain at all, how do the different grains relate to the amount of alcohol created? Again, does crystal malt produce more than 2 row (as one example), do dark grains have a lot of influence on the amount of alcohol, or are they all about the flavor?
Thank you for all your help! It is such a relief to finally have a place like this to ask questions.
When you are mashing the grains, you have to have a certain amount of base malt in order to get enough enzymes for the starch conversion. Any grain that can be steaped and not mashed will not have enough enzymes for this process and will not produce enough fermentable sugars. The base malts will produce most of your fermentable sugars.
There are a couple of issues with adding more base malt when mashing. First at a certain point, the minimum amount of water needed just to mash your grain is equal to the amount of runoff you need for your boil. At this point, you basically will not sparge, so you will leave a lot of sugars behind during this process. Essentially, your efficiency will get very poor. To get around this, it is usually best to add either LME or DME and cut back on the grain a bit. Another problem with high alcohol beers is that most yeast for beer cannot tolerate too much alcohol, so the yeast stops fermenting prior to completing all the sugars. If you are shooting for a high alcohol, you need to use a tolerate strain of yeast.
If you really want to add some alcohol, you could also try what the big boys do and use rice. This will certainly give you an alcohol kick, but it will make the body lighter.
I did see a recipe called Dema Goddess Ale that had the target alcohol at somewhere between 14 and 16%. The recipe was an extract recipe and used 3 different types of yeast, plus some non fermentable sugar to keep some body in the beer. The first yeast was a Belgian strain, the second was a distiller's yeast, and then champagne yeast was added at bottling time. I hope to give this recipe a shot sometime in the near future.