Modern Homebrew Recipes (7 page)

Fig 1.4: Measuring starting gravity.

Fig 1.5: Measuring final gravity (note clarity).

If I’m making multiple batches, I perform some of these steps in parallel for the next batch. For instance, I’ll mash a second batch while boiling the first. I find that I can execute this process in 5 to 6 hours for one batch, adding 2 hours for each subsequent batch. Choice of techniques can affect those times considerably, as can batch size, since transfer times are doubled and a greater volume of liquid must be heated.

Remember to clean as you go, putting away unneeded equipment. I like to keep extra hot water around to aid in cleanup, and like to flush all lines that have touched wort with near-boiling water to dissolve and rinse away sugars. It’s much easier to clean equipment while it is still warm.

I do think about the key control points, and the overall management of the process. I think ahead about the long lead time steps, and try to not lose time waiting on something else. One of the most important
aspects of efficient brewing is to always keep your water hot. Reheating water is one of the biggest ways to lose time in the process. No one ever claimed brewing was easy, and it does take quite a bit of planning to brew 2 or 3 recipes on the same day.

KEY POINTS ABOUT MY PROCESS

While this process probably seems quite normal to experienced brewers, it has a few idiosyncrasies due to my equipment design and my water. The first is that I use what seem like oddly sized recipes. Most of my recipes are for 6.5 gallons (25 L), while you may see other recipes as 5 gallons (19 L). I size my recipes larger because I want to be sure I have 5 gallons finished beer in a keg at the end of the process. There is loss in wort transfer and racking when I move only the clearest, highest-quality wort or beer, so I scale my recipes larger to account for these losses. My recipes measure the volume of wort left in the kettle at the end of the boil, not the amount of beer in a keg when packaged.

The second idiosyncrasy is how my method is designed to work around my awful brewing water. In the course of seeking solutions, I settled on what I think has more general applicability due to its simplification and repeatability. When I was at Sierra Nevada’s Beer Camp, they told me that they treated their brewing liquor so that it was at pH 5.5. If they can do it, why can’t I? Starting with RO water is an obvious choice since my chalk-laden water takes too much effort to try to get into a usable state.

The goal of reducing harshness in my beer drove me to investigate various methods that could help. I determined that extended contact with grain husks and hop material was a bad thing, regardless of the pH. Sure, a higher pH will speed the extract of tannins, but they can still wind up in your beer if you leave them in contact long enough. That’s what happens when I try to use dry spices in the secondary, and that’s the same thing that happens with hops and grain.

I also try to reduce the contact time with compounds that contain tannins while maintaining an environment with less than a pH of 6. I do this by always just mashing what actually needs to be mashed: the base grains and specialty grains that have unconverted starches. This means that most of my mashes look identical regardless of the style of beer I’m making. This process is very repeatable and something I can optimize.

The dark grains and crystal malts steep at the end of the mash while I’m recirculating at mashout temperature and then again during the sparge to extract the desired color and flavor. This is similar to what extract brewers do when making their beer; the grains are steeped in hot water and then removed. The only difference is that extract brewers steep in plain water while I’m steeping in the recirculating mash water.

I find that I can further reduce harshness in my beers through the manipulation of the hop schedule. I use FWH, hop bursting, and hop stands frequently, as those tend to reduce the contact time of hops or the temperature where hops are exposed to the wort. The science behind FWH is not well understood, but the practical evaluation of the method shows that the quality of bitterness is smoother, and that more hop flavor survives than an equivalent amount of hops added to the boil.

Dry hopping can be a source of harshness and vegetal or grassy flavors. This can be minimized by keeping the overall contact time down, avoiding hop varieties with a grassy character, and sometimes by reducing the amount of pellet hops used. I don’t dry hop too often, but I’m not as against it as I once was. I think the complexity of hop character is improved when hop bursting, hop stands, and dry hopping are all used together. I tend to use the dry hopping technique after having used other techniques, so I only use it when it seems like the beer needs an extra boost of hop aroma.

I use relatively light water treatments. Since I don’t have to use salt additions to compensate for pH, I focus on what’s needed for optimal mash performance and final beer flavor. As long as the mash settles into a range of 5.2–5.3 pH, the conversion should be complete and the beer should taste good. The actual acceptable mash pH range is a bit broader (5.1–5.5) but I try to aim for the center. Note that when referenced in brewing, pH is always reported at room temperature (25°C/77°F) since the measurement of pH is temperature-dependent. Using a standard reference temperature by convention makes it much easier to compare values.

I like the flavor from calcium chloride better than calcium sulfate, so I tend to use that in beers unless there is a need for the extra dryness that gypsum contributes. I did the calculations on how many grams are in volume measurements of salts; now I just measure my additions with teaspoons rather than gram scales since it’s faster and has adequate precision for my needs.

I like this approach to water treatment since it’s easy, and allows me to
handle each beer in basically the same way. I’m also not sold on the various water calculators since they are simply models, and models aren’t always accurate; they make necessary assumptions, but those assumptions may not be in line with how I brew. The models also don’t really tell you anything about the flavor profile of the finished beer, either. I’d only be happy using models if I had taken the time to run extensive validation tests.

That’s my full method. I find that it works well for me, and might be of interest to you, particularly if you are vexed by some of the same issues. At the very least, it should help you understand and interpret my recipes. Even if you have a well-developed process, you may still benefit from incorporating aspects of my methods. After all, that’s what I do: continue to hone and refine my processes as I learn from other brewers.

¹
Note that professional breweries often use grist-to-liquor ratio instead, which is the ratio of the weight of grist to the weight of brewing liquor in the mash. It is a unitless measure that is easiest to calculate in metric units since one liter of water is defined as weighing one kilogram. You can calculate it as a ratio of kilograms of grist to liters of brewing liquor, and the result will be just a number without units. It can be a little confusing for homebrewers since the ratio is reversed (grist:liquor) from the typical homebrewer measure (liquor:grist).

2. WORKING WITH RECIPES

“Don’t let the secret recipe die with the inventor.”

—Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures, LLC

While many brewers may have spent years developing and honing their brewing processes, those skills are truly put to the test when trying to brew someone else’s recipes. Another brewer may have formulated it on a completely different brewing system, or made a number of assumptions regarding the specifics of the ingredients, timings, and methods. This chapter explores how to tweak any recipe to make it work on your system.

INTERPRETING RECIPES

Recipes are like stories; some are better written than others. Missing information in a recipe can be as infuriating as an obvious, glaring plot hole in a novel. While mistakes in the writing of a story might annoy you, they don’t really have important consequences on your life as a reader. Mistakes in the writing of homebrew recipes on the other hand, can have dire consequences on your life as a brewer (like a ruined batch of beer).

Have you ever looked at historical recipes? They can be frustratingly short on details. They usually only recorded the quantity of ingredients
and most basic of parameters. The usual procedures were often not written down (the recipe assumed the brewers knew them), so other sources that describe or speculate on a brewery’s legacy methods are used to make educated guesses. Similarly, the recipes of modern commercial breweries or homebrewers will probably lack details if the original author did not intentionally write them with other, external brewers in mind.

What at first glance may seem like missing information in a story may in fact just be a literary device. Maybe a detail was omitted because it wasn’t relevant to the main story, or because the author felt it was obvious and didn’t need to be explained. The reader sometimes needs to fill in the gaps to make the story complete. Recipes can have the same issue, because what is considered a
necessary
piece of information to one brewer might be obvious to another.

This section seeks to answer several important questions about the design and presentation of recipes:

• What are the main elements of a recipe?

• How are they structured, and what information do they convey?

• How should a brewer read, analyze, and understand a recipe?

• How can a brewer tell if a recipe is missing an important step or detail?

• Is it possible to determine or at least estimate any omitted details?

Recipe elements
– Each recipe should have three basic sections: the parameters, the ingredients, and the process. The parameters describe the characteristics of the batch (batch size, the target style, the vital statistics, etc.) as well as system-related information (mash efficiency, boiloff rate, etc.). The ingredients section includes the types and quantities of malt and grains, hops, yeast, and sometimes water. The process section usually includes the mash schedule, the hop schedule, the fermentation schedule, and any unusual or special notes (it may also include water treatment).

To be fair, not all recipe writers have the same goals. In personal logs (including those used for commercial brewing records, see
Chapter 1
brewing logs images), the author is the same as the reader (or at least trained the same way) and the recipes are more shorthand than anything. They are intended to remind the brewer of key details so they can replicate or troubleshoot a specific batch of beer. They aren’t designed to teach someone how to brew.

Analyzing a recipe
– Reading and understanding a recipe involves checking it for completeness. Your only goal is to identify whether or not you have enough information to brew the beer. If you have a standard template for your recipes, copying information from the recipe into your own format makes any gaps much more apparent.

What kind of information is typically missing from a recipe? Here are some of the more common problems I’ve seen, and how I typically handle the situations:

•
Mash efficiency missing
– Most recipes list a starting gravity, but not all provide the efficiency. This creates a problem, because you might not hit the target gravity if your system’s efficiency is different. I use the grain bill, batch size, and starting gravity to derive the missing efficiency, typically using recipe software. I enter the batch size and the grain bill, setting the efficiency to my system default (70%). I then compare the estimated gravity with the target gravity for the recipe. If they are significantly off, I adjust the efficiency in the software until the gravities match (or are close).