Grain Exchange

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Sir Humpsalot

Supporting Member
HBT Supporter
Joined
Nov 26, 2006
Messages
3,996
Reaction score
94
If I did this, I would be taking donations or exchanges.

I want to try all of the common base malts, side by side, back to back. My plan is to start with a simple malty yeast such as Nottingham. Mash 1 pound of each variety of base malt at 154, then boil for 30 minutes with a single 30 minute hop addition, add a half a packet of yeast to a single half gallon fermenter, let it sit for 4 weeks, bottle carb with carb tabs for consistency, wait 2 more, then sample.

However, 10 types of grain, plus 10 airlocks, plus another 6 half gallon fermenters, plus ten stoppers, plus the hops, etc, and this starts getting prohibitively expensive. Not to mention the work of doing ten mashes!!! So...

I don't have the spare funds, but I'm willing to do the work. So... I have a proposal. Send me a pound of grain and an airlock. I'll buy the growlers, the hops, do the work, and ship one of each type, coded with random numbers to assure a blind tasting, to another person, preferably a certified judge, who can then donate his time and write up a report on his opinions on all the grains.


Would anybody be interested in this or something like it? I'm open to different ideas. I'd just love to try all the base malts out...
 
I'd be interested...but what if we get 10 people who want to do it, and just have each of us brew a 5-gallon batch of the agreed-on recipe, but each using a different base malt. Then we could bottle-swap when finished.

I'm actually thinking about doing something similar, but with hops...one mash/sparge, split into 8-10 different single-hop boils. Adjust the hopping rates to get the same IBUs in each. I was going to use 1-gallon plastic milk jugs as fermenters...

But I have a bunch of other recipes I want to brew (I can't drink fast enough :drunk: ), so the hop-off may have to wait.
 
I'm open to a group exchange of an agreed recipe with alternate malts, I'm just a little concerned about recipe variations, unintentional ones. I'm thinking even if my boil isn't as vigorous as yours, at least it will be the same throughout. Ditto with the issue of crushing the grain. And what if my hops aren't the same AA as yours?

It would be cool to do it so everyone winds up with a bottle of each though... if more people chime in and would be interested, I guess it could work that way too. I'm flexible. Maybe we could all agree to use the same mash method at least. Maybe we could even do it by region so the bottles never have to travel too far (a concern, especially with the heat of summer coming upon us). 10 bottles of beer is only 1 gallon or so. There'd be no reason for someone to have to make 5 gallons unless they wanted to.
 
Back
Top