Increasing ABV

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madegret

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Ok guys, give me the "simple" answer to increasing the ABV of my beers. So far they have all tasted great but I don't want to "be able" to drink 12 of them. The whole point of homebrewing for me is to brew flavorful beers and just a couple fill me up (if you know what I mean).

I've toyed with just adding extract but want to know the proper way to do this ~ thanks in advance!
 
any kind of fermentable sugars will work. The most popular though would be malt extract like you stated above, but that will change the complexity of your beer. I like to use honey because it adds a little flavor as well. If you want the same body but higher abv go with corn sugar
 
Increasing the ABV means more than just boosting the fermentables, though. The beer still needs the correct amount of hops for balance, so it's best to start with the correct recipe.

Just adding more malt to a cream ale would be a higher ABV beer, but probably not going to be as enjoyable to drink as a beer that was meant to be "bigger" all along.

If you want to make a bigger beer, check out the recipes in the database and decide on the style you want to make and go from there.
 
So far they have all tasted great but I don't want to "be able" to drink 12 of them. The whole point of homebrewing for me is to brew flavorful beers and just a couple fill me up (if you know what I mean)

The easy answer is to look for a recipe that has more fermentables, so that it's easy (relatively) to get what you want.

You might also like to consider that other people might want to drink it as well. Still, it's your call.

Just a quick question for the more versed crowd here... are the recipes noted relatively easily to ABV?
 
+1 Yoop. Other than what she said I would add the easiest way to boost ABV and not affect the beer much beyond ABV would be to run the same recipe and decrease batch size slightly You will get slightly less hop utilization but it may not be noticable.
 
+1 Yoop. Other than what she said I would add the easiest way to boost ABV and not affect the beer much beyond ABV would be to run the same recipe and decrease batch size slightly You will get slightly less hop utilization but it may not be noticable.

Define "slightly" for me - 5 gallon batch to a 4 gallon batch?
 
what about the maltose+dextrose "Boost" pack that AHS sales, they claim it will increase ABV by 1% without affecting the beer. Planning on trying one with my Fat Tire clone this weekend.
 
I am wondering the same thing. I just order the midwest copper ale kit but it's a little one the light side. This will be my first kit so i figured i should start with something smaller. It seems like pulling a gallon of water out of the batch would be a good idea to keep everything balanced, however, this prevents the use of a secondary for me.


I was considering adding another 1lb of light dme and then dry hopping with an 1oz of hops to help balance it out and add a little more hoppiness. Or maybe perhaps add 0.5oz during the boil and dry hopping with the remaining 0.5oz. Can anybody give me their opinions on this strategy? Also I'm not sure if it's linear, but does anybody know how much adding a 1lb of dme will boost the O.G. ? The O.G. of the beer i'm going to be brewing is around 1.054 using 6lb gold lme and 1lb light dme.
 
brad97, are you familiar with BeerCalculus? It's a recipe site that allows you to plug in your recipe and it will give you the expected ABV, OG/FG, IBUs and what-have-you. I use to to tweak recipes and to see what will happen to the numbers.

It's free, and handy if you don't have software on your own computer to do the calculations.

Beer Calculus . homebrew recipe calculator
 
brad97, are you familiar with BeerCalculus? It's a recipe site that allows you to plug in your recipe and it will give you the expected ABV, OG/FG, IBUs and what-have-you. I use to to tweak recipes and to see what will happen to the numbers.

It's free, and handy if you don't have software on your own computer to do the calculations.

Beer Calculus . homebrew recipe calculator

Not until now, awesome site, thanks alot!
 
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