What are you brewing?

[nzbrewer]

Since this is the most popular thread on the RealBeer.co.nz forum I thought I would start it here just to see what happens

[Matthew Vincent]

Hi Everyone!

I'm keen on some comments (and/or constructive criticisms) regarding a brew I put down last night

Warning! - I'm just a novice who's still using 'kit' beers :)

My plan at this stage is dry hopping this (once it's finished fermenting) for a week or two with something like 100g Motueka and maybe 50 or 75g Nelson Sauvin.

I've got about 90g US Cascade that I'm tempted to throw (some of) into this 'dry hop mix' but probably won't until I've sampled an experiment I bottled only last Saturday ...

Thoughts/ideas on all or any aspects of this would be greatly appreciated

[Tilt]

Hey Matthew - nothing wrong with extract brewing - they make a damn good beer when done well.

Looking at your brewsheet two things stand out for me - first the calculated IBUs are very low for the hop additions you've used.  I get more like 50 IBU plugging your additions into Beersmith so you might want to look into that on your software.  I wouldn't worry about it though with an OG of 1050ish this will be a nice hoppy bitter (and fruity with the Nelson Sauvin) pale ale.

The other is your yeast choice.  T-58 isn't usually an IPA yeast.  Its a belgian ale strain which tends to give peppery flavours.  Having said that it'll still make a nice tasting beer - and along with your dry hopping and other ingredients should give you something pretty good.

Re your dry hopping.  This'll be a ballsy aroma bomb with 150g Mot and NS.  If thats what you're looking for then go for it.  Personally I'd dry hop with 15 - 25g each of your Motueka and Cascade for something a little more balanced.  A reasonable rule of thumb is 1g per litre dry hopping for a conservative amount.

Cheers and enjoy - this experimentation is what its all about.

[Mark Goodin]

Yip, agreed with above regarding your IBUs...what brewing software are you using? Whilst I dont use Beersmith, I have Brewmate, which is a free program, that, from experience, seems pretty good (search google for link) I would get around 35IBUs from 20g of NS for 60min alone.

If you want a clean yeast go for something like US-05, which will allow for your hops to shine...be careful with NS if you havent used it before, can be pretty full on. But used in the right mix with other hops, such as the Motueka, it can be great. Maybe 4:1 ratio

[Matthew Vincent]

Thanks for your replies Tilt, Kelly & Mark

It appears I somehow managed to stumble across a bullsh*t recipe calculator (aka brewersfriend.com). I've since checked out Beersmith and then eariler tonight had a play with Brewmate.

The T-58 was purely a (very uneducated) experiment. The 'peppery flavour' comment on their info sheet was what got me curious. I'll let you know what it tastes like :) I'm back to using Danstar's Nottingham Ale yeast now. A few months ago I got a William Warn EPA (OG 1050) down to 1006 with Nottingham. By the looks of it the US-05 is fairly similar to the Nottingham??

I took your comments into consideration re my rather high dry hopping quantities and I ended up throwing in 75g Mot & 25g NS last night. My ultimate goal is to reproduce something similar to the outstanding and flawless(imo) HopWired IPA.

 

A new query -

I brought a couple little 2nd hand 4 litre jars (carboys/demijohns??) a few months ago with the idea of using these as 'secondarys' from a fermented 23 litre brew and experimenting dryhopping with varying types & amounts. I put 3.5 litres in each jar and then had 16 litres left over in the barrel. After a week I bottled all 3 samples (teaspoon of white sugar per 750ml bottle method).

Testing the carbonation (after only being in the bottle for about 9 days - I know, way too early) it appeared to show that carbonation happens a lot faster when you don't use a secondary. Lack of left over yeast I'm guessing??

[Kelly Milligan]

No worries mate :) I think the Nottingham is still an english strain, however it's character is really neutral and consistent like the US-05. Clears out a little better too I think. 

Keep working on that HopWired clone, truly is a wonderful beer!

9 days is pretty standard for carbonation, you'll often hear 2 weeks thrown around but in the right conditions it could happen within as little as 5 days :) it depends on a bunch of factors though, mainly storage temperature during those first couple weeks (at least 20c). If the beer has been sitting in the secondary for quite a while - like upwards of a month - or if it's a super-duper flocculent yeast you may find it takes a bit longer to carbonate, but usually will still get there eventually. An option is sucking up a small amount with your syphon as you're transferring to a bottling bucket, just a tiny bit will do it, you only need about 1m cells per L or something like that for carbonation.

The sugar method works, I'd give the bottling bucket method a go if you're comfortable with it though. As long as you're careful at cleaning and sanitizing you'll be fine! :)

 

 

[Kelly Milligan]

Agree with what Tilt has said :) 

Nelson Sauvin is pretty intense! I'd recommend this first time cutting that back a little, otherwise all you'll get is the huge tropical punch from the NS and not much of the Motueka. Maybe look at 3:1 Motueka:NS. Then if you want more of that NS profile in the next beer it'll be easy to dial it up a bit.

[Matt]

Talk of black IPAs over on the 'recipe advice thread' reminded me I should post this monster of a beer we brewed Saturday. I wanted to brew something a bit crazy as a celebratory beer for my impending baby boy. The missus has also obviously been on alcohol hiatus and wanted me to make something low gravity so that she could have a drink again down the line, so decided to attempt a black IPA/mild partigyle:

Bairns head-wetter black IIPA (of doom)

44L batch, OG 1.090, target FG 1.015, 92IBU

81.9% 19.86 kg. Malteurop Mild Malt
7.0% 1.70 kg. Munich Malt
4.9% 1.20 kg. Crystal - Pale
2.1% 0.50 kg. Chocolate Malt - Pale
4.1% 1.00 kg. Carafa Special III

Hops

55.00 g. Simcoe 17.9 IBU 20 min.
35.00 g. Centennial 8.6 IBU 20 min.
20.00 g. Chinook 6.9 IBU 20 min.
55.00 g. Simcoe 14.6 IBU 15 min.
35.00 g. Centennial 7.0 IBU 15 min.
20.00 g. Chinook 5.7 IBU 15 min.
55.00 g. Simcoe 10.7 IBU 10 min.
35.00 g. Centennial 5.1 IBU 10 min.
20.00 g. Chinook 4.1 IBU 10 min.
55.00 g. Simcoe 5.9 IBU 5 min.
35.00 g. Centennial 2.8 IBU 5 min.
20.00 g. Chinook 2.3 IBU 5 min.
55.00 g. Simcoe 0 min.
35.00 g. Centennial 0 min.
20.00 g. Chinook 0 min.
120.00 g. Simcoe Dry Hop
60.00 g. Centennial Dry Hop

Mashed nice and low (64.5C) to hopefully attenuate to target, pitched onto 2nd gen US05 cake and now fermenting like a bastard at 20C.

Needless to say at 17g/L hops it smells incredible! It seems the trend for black IPAS in the US is to use zero roast and late steeping of dehusked Carafa to achieve a colour change, however I wanted at least some perceivable dark malt character hence the couple of percent chocolate and full mash Carafa.

Then with the second runnings from the same grain bill above:

Milk-aid Mild

44L bach, OG 1.034, target FG 1.012, 21 IBU

Hops

10.00 g. Pacific Jade 7.8 IBU 60 min.
30.00 g. Styrian Goldings - NZ 6.8 IBU 30 min.
30.00 g. Styrian Goldings - NZ 3.2 IBU 10 min.
30.00 g. Fuggles - NZ 3.6 IBU 10 min.

Same mash as above (obviously), fermented at 18C with 22g Danstar Windsor. Never used Windsor before and ferment was explosive to say the least, 48 hours after pitching and it was all over.

[Ralph]

Nice work! That looks like a ferocious Black and should be a nice mild!

[Tilt]

They're two good looking (and very different) brews. 

What a welcome to the outside world for your little tacker - the kick arse aromas of an American hop bomb will be hard wired from a young age! 

Any other tips on the partigyle process you can share?

Did you construct the grist based on what you wanted for the big beer and then whatever came as the small beer was an added bonus?  ... or was your recipe designed with both in mind and, if so, did you get close to what you expected for both?

Was there much need to blend between gyles to adjust gravities and flavours?

Did you use an "on the fly approach" to the second beer i.e adjust the hopping/ boil time to match the gravity you got from your second runnings?

Excuse the 100 questions but about to do a partigyle too and keen to learn.

[Matt]

Not sure Im in a position to give too much advice as have only done two partigyles, but have definitely learned a few things from those experiences.

I had read that you can get an increase in overall efficiency of about 15% for the total batch for what you usually get (which would be 90%), and if you aim for both batches to be the same volume (50:50 split), then you can expect to collect 60% of your points in the first runnings and 40% of your points for your second runnings. So for the first partigyle (1.122 barleywine/1.044 pale ale) I constructed a single recipe for the barleywine set at 55% efficiency (60% of 90% efficiency), and then just made another dummy recipe for the pale ale to calculate the hops. In practice this approach failed due to us seeing nowhere near the 15% increase in effiiciency, and we ended up just having to fly sparge and go way over volume then boil for hours to salvage the extra points.

The second attempt (above) worked much better, where I constructed three recipes in promash. The first was for the grain bill, based on the total number of points and total volume required for the two beers (88Ls at ~1.060), based on standard expected single batch efficiency. The other two recipes were hops only recipes to calculate the IBUs for each beer. Then we just collected to the first pot and kept fly sparging (and checking gravity) until we hit the total number of points required for the 44L batch, and then recalculated boil times on the fly to compensate for the volume. The mild batch got the rest of the points in the same way. 

You can spend hours fiddling with calculators on the net but I think there are too many variables for these to be very accurate (eg trying to calculate efficiency when your mashing bigger than you ever have before), so would recommend the above approach until you know what numbers your system will produce in these cacluators. I also built the recipe around the IIPA and a mild was the closest thing to the second runnings so thats what was made. The points split between the beers was much more skewed to the IIPA so this required more boiling than the mild, if you were willing to compromise and make two beers of more similar gravities there would be less faffing around boiling one or the other to compensate volumes...

Im sure the next one we do will be smoother!

[Matt]

p.s. check out this link as a guide:

http://morebeer.com/brewingtechniques/library/backissues/issue2.2/m...

[Tilt]

Thanks heaps - great tips! 

We're a few steps behind you fellas and glad of the chance to learn.

I like the sound of this more complex approach which could be termed "brew as you go" , or for the process minded "feedback loop" brewing. 

To me it seems like the partigyle method is less brew by numbers so you have to understand the process and your equipment as well as the outputs you're getting (volumes and gravities) and then what to do with them to get the end result you're looking for - all in real time. 

For me thats going to be a stretch of the skills but bring it on in the name of mastering more of this brewing lark!