SMaSH Experiment Pointers

Back during Christmas my brother bought me a $100 gift certificate to the wrong brewstore. My LHBS is excellent: carries everything I need, has good prices, and is the ONLY store in NYC. Unfortunately my brother bought me a gift card to an online shop, brooklynbrewshop.com, that his horrendous. They barely sell any equipment and have “all grian kits” for $40…. Since I can make delicious, personalized all grain IPA for about $25, I’m just buying loads of star san, caps, and four 1 gallon glass jugs/fomenters. Here’s an experiment I plan to do in the next few weeks to isolate hop flavors and learn their distinctive tastes quickly (or quicker than doing one 5 gallon SMaSH a weekend):

Mash 7.5# 2row @ 154 for 60 (my efficiency hasn’t been locked down but is usually less than 70%)
Sparge to get 4 gal preboil
*Siphon 2 gallons into two empty 1 gallon water jugs, put in fridge
Have 2 simultaneous 1 gallon boils going on the stove staggered 20 minutes apart
**Hop each 1 gallon boil with a unique hop for 1 hour boil
Chill first batch in sink with ice bath (should be chilled in 20 minutes)
Chill second batch in sink with ice bath
Rack to 1 gallon jugs/fermentors (aiming for .666 gallons each after evap loss to account for headspace)
Pitch ¼ of safale 05 rehydrated packet into each
Repeat with last 2 gallons, 2 more unique hops, and last 2 quarters of hydrated yeast

So aside from general feedback, glaring holes in my plan, and hop recommendations, what do people think of the starred items?

*what is the best way to store wort for about an hour and a half?
**what is the best hop schedule to really learn the flavor in a SMaSH?

I’m bored at work so I apologize if this is superfluous.

Last weekend I did something similar with extract and steeping grain. I steeped a pound of Crystal 60L in 2.5 gallons of water and put it in a spare pot. In my main brew pot, I added 3/4 of a gallon of regular water, half a gallon of the steeped grain water and brought it up to a boil and added 1.2 lbs of extract to each of these. I ended up doing 5 boils with a different hop in each and then put them into a fermenter.

I used a 15 minute boil and relatively large amounts of hops (inspired by Basic Brewing Radios 15 minute Amarillo ale) and everything seemed to work out great. I don't have Beersmith with me, but i did about 30 IBUs worth of hops at 15 minute, 15 IBUs at 10 minute and 5 and 5 minutes with the same amount at flame out.

I'd recommend considering it because over the course of several batches a 15 minute boil vs a 60 minute boil saves a considerable amount of time and would likely prevent the need to chill down the initial wort before the small batch boils.

Very good point on not needing a full 60 minute boil. I think I may do it now with only 30 minute boils so I can get a bit of bitterness into the beer. I do like the idea of hop bombing these since I'm looking to learn the flavor/aroma. Thanks for the help!

I live in NYC. Which homebrew shop is your local? Other than what's going on at whole foods bowery there isn't one I can find in manhattan.

sjjn said:

I live in NYC. Which homebrew shop is your local? Other than what's going on at whole foods bowery there isn't one I can find in manhattan.

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I was wondering the same thing

As far as where I've tried in/around Manhattan

This guy is in Astoria and is pretty good. Will order most stuff he doesn't carry.
http://www.goodbrewing.com/

A place by my folks called Karp's out in East Northport which is very good.
http://www.homebrewshop.com/

A place in Farmingdale conveniently located down the block from Black Forest Brewhaus.
KEDCO - http://bit.ly/i38755

There are these 2 out in Brooklyn:
http://www.brooklyn-homebrew.com/
http://www.partycreations.net/main.html

And a horrible place off the LIE in Flushing

Mostly I use Whole Foods Bowery for quick items or online. Anyone know any others?

I just use Brooklyn Homebrew, but since I'm on the UWS it takes me 3 hours round trip on the weekends. Does Whole Foods Bowery carry everything for a brewday (minus yeast since I wash)? I can't really mail order since my landlord would be pissed to find me brewing (I'm subletting a 1bed in a brownstone), and I don't own a grain mill...

Bowery just installed an entire grain wall recently, they have nearly every supply for a typical brew day but you have to ask the counter people to see the Hops and yeast lists. All in all not bad to have around. Sucks for me that i recently moved from around the corner to uptown. Plus they usually have a great on on tap selection so bring a growler when you go. Certainly recommend going to browse for yourself...

Oh, and your landlord will probably notice the increased gas or water bill anyway

I just did something like this brew myself, although I decided to do it with DME instead of grain because I'm doing a distributed experiment with some other friends brewing as well, and I wanted to eliminate that variability. My own setup was three staggered boils running at the same time, done twice (a total of six batches brewed up in a day).

Your basic setup seems sound, here's some specific tips.

1) Make a checklist with every step written out for each batch. Label the pots somehow. You don't want to mix things up, and things get hectic enough that you can forget. I almost hopped the wrong batch, but luckily I had two assistants and a habit of triple-checking.

2) If you have an ipod/phone/pad, get timer+. It's a free app (with ads, but they're not too intrusive) that can run multiple timers at the same time. So I had things like "1st batch 2nd hop addition" and "2nd batch grain steep" all counting down simultaneously. It was really good. If you don't have multiple timers, write actual times on your checklists, so when the first batch starts to boil at 1:22 PM you can write down exactly when the hop additions and knockout are.

3) Regular stovetop pots tend to boil off a much larger volume than brew kettles at full volume. I lost nearly a half-gallon in my boil, which led to a higher rate of maillard reactions than I was really looking for. If I were to do it again, I'd probably start at 1.5 gal or something. I diluted back up to proper batch volume in the fermenter (like doing a partial boil really).

4) Planning on fermenting 3L instead of 1 gallon is probably a good idea. I didn't have enough headspace in my setup, even with fermcap-S. I had blowoff problems, which were annoying with six simultaneous ferments. Mostly, I just kept emptying and resanitizing airlocks as they filled up on the first two days.

5) When it comes time to taste the beers, my plan is to do a blind double setup, with samples of the hops and beers both blinded. So people can smell (and taste if they're adventurous and haven't learned the lesson yet) the hops and taste the beers and see if they can draw connections.

On hop recommendations, with four I would suggest classics from each major brewing region. Something like German Hallertau (not US, go with german tettnang if you can't get the hallertau), czech saaz, uk fuggles, and us cascade. Alternatively, you could showcase hops from a specific country, like amarillo, centennial, chinook, and willamette or something like that.

When I did it, I used 5 AAUs of each hop split four ways- 1.25 AAU in each of 60, 15, 5 and dry additions. I didn't do it by weight because there's a huge variability in AA levels, and I want to compare tastes rather than overall bittering strength.

Pellet hops are clearly optimal here, you don't want to lose most of your batch to absorption in the whole leaf stuff. Also remember that you'll need probably 0.1 gram sensitivity on your scale to get the hop weights right, and most kitchen scales don't do this.

As an aside, timer+ is a great little app in general- I can pre-set a bunch of timers and start them all at once. So when my boil starts rolling well I can hit three different hop addition timers, the timers for whirlfloc and yeast nutrient, and the knockout timer all at once. I find I'm much less likely to do something like forget the whirlfloc that way, especially in the sorta-hectic closing minutes of the boil when I'm dealing with setting up the chiller, sanitizing the fermenting vessel, etc.

Thanks for all of the input!

I was planning Hallertau, saaz, and 2 Americans like chinook and centennial!

I guess my main concern, and only phantom variable, is evaporation loss during the boil. Still not sure how much preboil I should have if I'm going down to 3L. I assume there will be some trub loss, however small it may be.

Any disadvantages, aside from potentially low IBUs, to only doing a 30 minute boil?

When I did my 15 minute boils with relatively large amounts of hops, I started with a preboil volume of 1.25 gallons and this got me at least 3 liters of good wort for fermentation after boil off and loss due to hop crap (upwards of 2 cups with some of my batches).

Make sure to use Beersmith (or something else) to match the IBUs across hops so (theoretically) the only difference in the beers will be the differing hop character.

On the volume- you can always add more water back in the fermenter. Either use tap water (works for me usually) or boiled and cooled tap water (safer). If I were brewing beer that would last a long time, I'd do boiled and cooled. For something that's not likely to last more than a month, the chance of a small infection is pretty low anyway. Then again, having a big pot of boiled and cooled water ready early is easy, I just tend to forget that opening step.

You can also add more water during the boil, the only side effect is that you'll have to pause your boil timer.

As to the boil duration, there's a lot more going on in the boil than just hop utilization. You get maillard reactions (especially important in a 2-row only beer, which will taste very bland, possibly too bland as you still want the beer to turn out drinkable when you're tasting the hop influences), evaporation of SMM (a DMS precursor), and protein coagulation. Even when I do hop bursting with 15 minute additions and not much else, I still do a 60 minute boil, to get rid of the DMS if nothing else.

I'm going to go with the full 60 minute boil.