MagicSmoker
Well-Known Member
I'm a new brewer - only on batch 5 - and am just now transitioning to all-grain (or, I should say, "mostly grain"...).
I haven't been entirely happy with my results so far, though. In fact, out of the 4 beers I've tried, only one was really good (an extract-base clone of Bell's Two-Hearted Ale from a recipe found here).
Rather than stumble blindly from one 5gal disaster to the next, I'd like to take a more scientific approach to figuring out what I like in a beer (that is to say, I know what commercial beers I like, but I don't know what is *in* them that makes them so likable). So my plan is to employ Ye Olde Scientific Method and brew up a number of small test beers of around 1 quart to 1 gallon each in which only one ingredient is changed with the rest of the ingredients and process remaining the same.
What I could use some help with from HBT is how to go about this, particularly with testing different base malts. Like, should I use any hops at all? Will over-pitching the yeast speed things up (like, say, using a whole packet of US-05 for a quart of wort)?
Once I get a good idea of how different base malts taste, I'd like to next test different hops for flavor, doing a BIAB brew of around 2 gallons, let's say, with a single base malt and a fixed amount of bittering hops, then splitting the batch up into 4 equal portions and adding a different type of hops (same weight * alpha acid percentage to each) with 20 minutes remaining in the boil.
Has anyone else done such a series of experiments? If so, I'd sure appreciate some wisdom from you (or even some half-baked conjecture - why not, it's all beer, right?)
I haven't been entirely happy with my results so far, though. In fact, out of the 4 beers I've tried, only one was really good (an extract-base clone of Bell's Two-Hearted Ale from a recipe found here).
Rather than stumble blindly from one 5gal disaster to the next, I'd like to take a more scientific approach to figuring out what I like in a beer (that is to say, I know what commercial beers I like, but I don't know what is *in* them that makes them so likable). So my plan is to employ Ye Olde Scientific Method and brew up a number of small test beers of around 1 quart to 1 gallon each in which only one ingredient is changed with the rest of the ingredients and process remaining the same.
What I could use some help with from HBT is how to go about this, particularly with testing different base malts. Like, should I use any hops at all? Will over-pitching the yeast speed things up (like, say, using a whole packet of US-05 for a quart of wort)?
Once I get a good idea of how different base malts taste, I'd like to next test different hops for flavor, doing a BIAB brew of around 2 gallons, let's say, with a single base malt and a fixed amount of bittering hops, then splitting the batch up into 4 equal portions and adding a different type of hops (same weight * alpha acid percentage to each) with 20 minutes remaining in the boil.
Has anyone else done such a series of experiments? If so, I'd sure appreciate some wisdom from you (or even some half-baked conjecture - why not, it's all beer, right?)