This time I wanted to know how these brewers go about doing what they do...
Andrew Drinkwater
"What do you put your
brewing success down to? Is it being able to put together a good recipe? Is it
your brewing process (your equipment, your method of working, etc)? Is it your
overall understanding of what you are actually doing, which allows you to
problem solve by first principles as you go along (rather than just following
instructions by rote)? Or something else? How much have you changed your process since you first started brewing? Have you ever/would you consider brewing something solely to learn a particular
process/style of brewing?”
I think
any success is always relative... but it tends to come down to process and
refinement and repetition of that process. A lot of process is driven by your
equipment - working out what works with your kit, which elements require
particular thought and where you have weaknesses that you need to hide. I have
a three-vessel setup with a 25-litre Electrim boiler as an HLT, a converted 45l
Igloo cooler as a mashtun and a Brupaks boiler as my kettle, with a copper
immersion chiller to handle my chilling. That setup makes complicated mash
schedules a bit more difficult, and as I don't have a hopback or any way of
achieving a whirlpool, I've had to experiment with adding late hops at flameout
or during the chilling process to see what gets the best results.
The
brewday usually starts as early as I can wake up these days, after some
ill-advised late night brewdays that ended up finishing at 5am. The night
before, I'll weigh out the grist and keep it covered in a fermenting bucket.
I've started using Beersmith to calculate my strike and sparge water, so I'll
fill the HLT with whatever it tells me to and add CRS as required. In the past,
I didn't bother calculating the water, which has led to a lot of
over-collection of wort or efficiency issues. I've learned from those mistakes.
HLT goes
on while I make a bacon sandwich and a pot of coffee and review the hop
additions, then add the water and grain to the tun together, adjust the temp
with tap or boiling water as required, and set a timer (I usually do 90 minute
single infusion mashes). About 15 mins from the end, I'll refill the HLT and
set it to heat up, so that by the time I need to start sparging, I'm at about
75-80c as required. I vorlauf until I get bored of it, if I'm honest - I rarely
see clear wort even if I do this for half an hour, so I usually recirculate
about 20-25 litres and then start taking runnings slowly.
I don't
have any fancy equipment for distributing sparge water - I use a sheet of tin
foil with holes punched in it with my thermometer. Really rudimentary stuff.
I've always sparged very, very slowly, a relic of my first all-grain brew which
had loads of oats in it - on the plus side, I've had decent efficiency since.
Any time I've sparged quickly, I've ended up with disappointing efficiency, and
brewdays are far too much effort to ruin them for the sake of cutting 20
minutes off a sparge.
I collect
in a marked fermenting bin as my boiler doesn't have a sight glass, then I jug it
over, reserving a sample jar to test the pre-boil gravity once it's cooled to a
reasonable level. I don't have a pH meter or a refractometer, but those would
be my next investments - at the moment, I tend to repeat last-known-good
processes and malt bill, or try to correct the process based on identifiable
faults in the end product. The next investment will be in a pH meter,
definitely.
At the
end of the boil, I try to chill to 24c as quickly as possible using the coil,
then drain through a wire mesh hop filter inside the kettle and into an FV. The
drop into the FV and associated aeration usually takes the last couple of
degrees celsius out of the wort, ready for pitching. My fermentation room keeps
a constant 18c, even in summer, so I use a heatpad for driving up the
temperature for Belgian yeasts and a fridge for lagering. I rarely go straight
from primary to packaging - only with something like a Belgian witbier, where a
bit of yeastiness is acceptable and I'm not bothered about clarity too much.
A bit on
dry-hopping... almost everything I brew is dry-hopped, usually just dropping
pellets into the secondary. Occasionally they go into a muslin bag if I'm being
very cautious about clarity, but otherwise I just crash-cool to get rid of all
the pellets before bottling. That said, I remember one beer I bottled with lots
of matter still in suspension, and they were all horrific - gushing, infected,
nasty bitterness... grim.
One last
thing: record everything. If your brew goes well, you'll want to do everything
again in exactly the same way.
Andy Parker
"What
do you put your brewing success down to? Is it being able to put together a
good recipe? Is it your brewing process (your equipment, your method of
working, etc)? Is it your overall understanding of what you are actually doing,
which allows you to problem solve by first principles as you go along (rather
than just following instructions by rote)? Or something else?"
First and
foremost I put in down to a willingness to listen and learn. I started out with
no clue as to what I was doing and I’d assert that this is the same place all
brewers start so you’re not at a disadvantage. Some may have a natural flair
for recipes but without a grasp of the basic science behind it and the process
required they won’t be able to put those ideas into motion. I started out by
reading John Palmer’s How To Brew and found it completely overwhelming
at first, especially when it got into detail. So then I started reading blogs
such as David Bishop: broadfordbrewer to see how others were applying the theory in a
practical sense. This was an iterative thing before eventually plucking up the
courage to take the plunge. For me, the most important learning has been ‘on
the job’. Books get you to a point and often help provide answers when things
don’t turn out right but by far the best way to learn is to do. I’ve had some
disastrous brew days but you get through them and bring a bit more experience
to the fold each time you fire up your trusty HLT.
“How much have you changed your process since you first started brewing?”
The basic
process has remained the same but I’ve refined things in terms of approach and
equipment as I’ve progressed. My first brew was boiled up in a stainless pot on
our electric hob and cooled in a garden bucket. The brew day was very long
because everything took much longer than it needed to. I’ve invested in kit to
help improve the process and reduce the length of brew days especially. The
biggest win was an electric HLT/kettle that shaved off over 2 hours! Also worth
noting here is my approach to temperature control. Until very recently I didn’t
do anything here beyond wrapping blankets around the FV when it was cold and
finding a cool part of the house when it was warm. The key thing was to pick
yeasts that were happy with the temperatures within which they had to work.
Yeasts such as Wyeast 1056 (Chico - see also Fermentis US 05) and 3711 (French
Saison) work very well at room temperature. My first brews with specific yeast
strains that like to work at warmer temperatures dictated the need to buy a
heater plate more recently. My advice to home brewers starting out is to get
your basic process and especially sanitation sorted out before starting to
worry about complicated temperature controlled set ups. Don’t run before you
can walk. My second bit of advice when it comes to fermentation would be to
have patience!
“Have you ever/would you consider brewing something solely to learn a
particular process/style of brewing?”
I’ve done this once before with
an ESB. It’s not a style drink too much of but one I wanted to know how to
brew. I didn’t even bottle any - just tasted it, let it sit there for a while,
tasted it again then poured it away because I needed the fermenter back. That’s
not something I can see myself doing too often! I’d like to try a decoction
mash at some point and would also like to expand my knowledge of brewing with
wild yeast strains, even though the beers the styles of beers implied there are
not my favourites.
Alan Wall
"What do you put your
brewing success down to? Is it being able to put together a good recipe? Is it
your brewing process (your equipment, your method of working, etc)? Is it your
overall understanding of what you are actually doing, which allows you to
problem solve by first principles as you go along (rather than just following
instructions by rote)? Or something else? How much have you changed your process since you first started brewing? Have you ever/would you consider brewing something solely to learn a particular
process/style of brewing?”
Sometimes
my brewing is (in my opinion) pretty good, sometimes it’s not. It’s all because
I wish to experiment, and learn so quickly.
I started out having little clue as to what I was doing, using a brewing
application, and mashing in a bag, in a coolbox and boiling in 3 pans on the
stove. Very quickly I grew unhappy as I didn’t fully understand the things I
was doing. So I started to build my spreadsheet up and learn from first
principles how everything works. Most of my
understanding, and I suppose fun, comes from the equations and numbers. That’s
something that I spend more time working through.
Since
then I’ve moved to bigger cool boxes, and from there to a converted keg mash
tun/ kettle (this was meant to be a separate MT and kettle, but for now is a
single keg used to do both) that I made myself. I will be making a new keg MT
and kettle when I can either find another local brewer with damaged kegs, or I
can afford to buy some for use.
As long as I find
something interesting, I will put time and effort into it. That goes for my
brewing. It can be interest in a process, a method, or an ingredient. This has meant that I’ve gone through the
entire brew process, fermentation, bottling, conditioning, and then thrown
entire batches away because I found the beer to be not as I wanted it to be.
That’s not to say it was wasted though, doing this has allowed me to learn
about different methods that have only improved my brewing later down the line.
I assume that the
brewday for me is going to be the same as everyone else who’s been doing it for
about 18 months. I’ve tried to learn enough so that I can be fairly competent
with the process which makes the actual brew easier. I still have so much
learning and experimentation to do, and with the process understood I can spend
more time developing ideas and recipes, and I suppose styles.
One thing I like to do
now is to brew and split the batch, fermenting with different yeasts, that way
I get to do side by side comparisons of how something can affect the final
beer. I think this is something I’m going to do more of in the future. I think I will expand that out to also
include different methods of hopping as well.
Thanks again to our contributors. Look out for The Homebrew Sessions Vol. 3: Adjuncts coming soon.
