Pages: 1
Experimental brewing??
Whats all,
I'm new to brewing, I love to brew and I have a question. I know that the brewing process will take from one to two months and even more depending on what you are brewing. But is there a way to find out how your beer will taste like before you ferment it? Lets say I boil the wort add the hops and cool it and i dont add the yeast, will that give me an idea of how the beer ( malt and hop combo) will taste. Of course I would brew a small amount not the whole 5 gallons. So is this possible, I know that the yeast play a big role in the taste out come of the beer, so will this work? Please help?
Cheers.
It's hard to discern until it's done. But that doesn't have to be two months.
At any rate, you might try to plan a set of experiments and do them all in a row. Like vary one ingredient from one experiment to the next. Then take good notes from your initial tastings when each one is ready. Finally when the last one is ready, taste them all side by side. Take a lot of time and patience, and involves some risk, but I think it's what works best.
And by experiment is ok to extract sugars from the grain add hops and and then taste it that way?
Sure, the wort will taste different based on your recipe, and might give you a sense for the finished product, but it's just not quite the same. Yeast would probably be a big part of the experiment.
Now one more thing, if I were to brew less than 5 gallons, say 2.5 even 1 gallon wll the fermentation time still be the same (i would size the down the recipe for that of course)? Thanks alot for answering my questions bro.
The only thing is pitch rate for yeast. A whole vial of yeast in 1 gallon would technically be too much yeast, and wouldn't necessarily give a good representation of what would happen in a full batch (unless you overpitched the 5 gallon batch, too).
I would say why not make full-sized batches? I never had any problem having more beer around, and it takes just about as long to make a big one as it does to make a small one.
Assuming you are not making starters, you could maybe scale down to the perfect batch size for a vial of yeast with no starter. According to Jamil, that would be 2.5 gallons at 1.050.
You can actually make a really great beer in a week or two. if your kegging a week, if your bottling 2 weeks. (you would have to force carb your keg).
Use the S-04 baby, and you will be down to final gravity in 2-4 days. Let it fall out of suspension, a couple days more, then force keg or bottle. I week to carb the bottle, bammo great beer in a week or 2.
I've never force carbed a keg, I don't have a co2 hook up yet, but the bottle works.
I have always found my unfermented wort to be too sweet and too harshly bitter for me to really judge what the final product will be like. There is something about the fermentation that must smooth out the bitterness a bit, maybe yeast absorbing some Alpha as it floccs out (?).
Also the sweetness really tends to overwhelm the pallate and the subtle character of some of the malts and their interaction is hard to gauge.
That said if you were brewing the same recipe over and over (like in a commercial set up), I am sure tasting the wort would help identify issues prior to fermentation.
99% of the magic of beer is done by the yeast. So a ferment is vital.
I like this concept though as I am always trying to figure out how best to start comparing ingredients side by side without waiting 3 weeks for a complete batch to ferment out.
I think the best bet is to layout a plan with for how you want to compare a handful of things at once (say crystal 40, 60, 85 and special B) Then do 1 gallon pilots with a ferment. I'd actually propose making one base wort of 5 gallons, steep an appropriately scaled level of the 4 malts into the malt. Do 4 boils, keeping a 5th free of the malts being tested. Use the same simple bittering hop in all (magnum at 60min for example).
You could safely over pitch these with American Ale yeast using one vial in a short 8 hour starter, decanting a measured amount into each 1 gallon brew. Then you could be sampling the beers in two weeks....
That's probably the fastest and best way to start comparing ingredients at once.
I hope that helps Hopp-e
Pages: 1
Search Home Brewing Knowledge Base
Custom Search
|