After initial fermentation - add more fermentables???

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staffVAJoe

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Sam Calagione (owner of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery) wrote a book called EXTREME BREWING.

The majority of his recipies have the directions "after initial fermentation takes off add ... (and has you add more fermentable sugar).:confused:

Anyone do this? Why and should I???

Good book BTW. The boys got it for me for fathers day.
 
I don't have a good answer for you but I just did this this morning & it's retaken off like gangbusters so...why not try it?!!
 
Def so the initial gravity isnt too high, however fermenting with sugars can add strange flavors to your beer. If your OG is too high you can inhibit your yeast or just cause it to ferment really slow. If you are going to do this I would defiantly recommend mixing up some concentrated stuff from dry extract.

The BEST way to do it, I have done this and it made some crazy high gravity stuff (13%) is to take your wort, make an 8 gallon batch and pull 3 gallons off to boil in a different brew kettle and boil the 5 gallons down to 4 gal. Ferment that batch (usually start around 1.07-1.08). Boil the 3 gallons down to 1 gallon, it will be crazy high OG, cool and refrigerate. Wait like 2 days, reboil the 1 gallon just to sanitize, cool and add to your beer making a total of 5 gallons, you will have insane beer. Also, make sure your yeast can handle the high levels of alcohol, some cant and will just die. Good times!

DISCLAIMER: Do not give this beer to your light weight friend, it will end in a very bad night for him and your living room floor (after like 2 pints). :)
 
Evidently there was a discussion about this (in terms of brewing saisons) on brewstrong...evidently if you are adding sugars, like you do in belgians (to dry the beer out and/or boost the abv-quite common in many styles of beers, not just belgians) adding your sugar after the krauzen falls allows the beer to more easlily reach their target gravity.... apparantly, rather than handing the yeasties a ton of sugars, both complex and simple ones, to yhe yeasties all at once and telling them to "eat it all at once" you are more apt to tire out those babies (resluting in stuck fermentations or high final gravities.)

By dosing it out, letting them tackle the more complex sugars like from the grain first, them letting the rest a bit, then adding the desert (nice simple sugars) they will get their second wind (and have reproduced from allthe happy food they at.) then they will dive back in with a gusto...

I did it with a belgian strong ale over the winter (before I heard of this podcast)...fed it two times after the first krauzen fell (a pound of cadi syrup at a time) it was actually fun whatching it build three krausens.

The beer came out great, I'm going to do it again with the saison I brewed yesterday...

(I didn't hear the podcast, this was just info I picked up over the last couple days when taliking to people at my LHBS and one of my brew buddies about the Saison I was planning on brewing...so I ams sure I over simplified it....but be assure that this is quite common...besides if Sam said it was a good process, the be assured it is...he has pushed the limits on brewing quite far.)
 

+1

It's quite common in several types of beer....usually stronger beers that need a higher alcohol boost WITHOUT and increase in body...like high grave belgians.

And different kinds of sugars, like turbinado, certain mexican ones, heck even brown sugar can add interesting flavors in beers, especially dark beers. (I like brown sugar in things like pumpkin ales...what gets left behind after the sugar ferments is the non fermentables that actually give each of those different sugars their unique flavors.)

It gets a bad rap because of it's connection to kit and kilo recipes that usually don't taste that good to begin with...also too much sugar can leave the beer too thin and "cidery" on occasion....like if your recipe calls for 4 pounds of sugar and 3 pounds of extract, that more than likely will NOT be a pleasant beer.

But in a lot of instances various sugars (even plain white) have their place.
 

Interesting, im not going on myths, just experience. However this calls for more playing around. Guess with my low production for a couple years I just stuck with what I knew I could brew well and didnt want to fubar a batch. I tried it twice a few years ago and just didnt get good results. Time to try again.

As mentioned above I totally agree that different sugars can add different flavors to your beer. This is what we do with our cider (one with honey, one with sugar and one with brown sugar).

However the technique listed above really does make some killer beer, just a little more time consuming (8 gallon mash, two boils.....).
 
Sam Calagione (owner of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery) wrote a book called EXTREME BREWING.

The majority of his recipies have the directions "after initial fermentation takes off add ... (and has you add more fermentable sugar).:confused:

Anyone do this? Why and should I???

Good book BTW. The boys got it for me for fathers day.

I got that book for xmas and have brewed several of the beers. The brown is really nice and adding the maple syrup about 2 days into fermentation added complexity to the beer that was evident when the beer was young but faded as it aged. The imperial pale ale used brown sugar instead and it came out great too. Keep in mind since you're extending fermentation you'll definitely need to keep tabs on the specific gravity to make sure its finished before bottling.
 
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