Small Beer

I was wondering if anybody has made an all grain small beer?

What do you mean by a small beer?

If it is a low OG, low alcohol beer like an English bitter or scottish 60/- then yes. Many gallons. Taste great...less filling and you can drink all night without getting drunk.

GT

define small...like a "light beer"? The lowest I have made is a 1045 beer, still working out what the FG will be...but I am purposefully adding extra sugars to bring down the FG due to a high mash so it isn't exactly correlative. the lowest I have seen for beers around here is a SG is 1038. What kind of beer are you looking to create? From what I understand, once outside most style guidelines, the % malt grain bills are not as useful as they are with-in the guidelines. For such a small grain bill a smaller amount goes a bit further than the same % does in a medium/large batch. Atleast, that is what I am seeing on a wheat I am making when trying to add a little red color with a bit of Crystal 120L.

for something really low, like a 3-4% beer, that gives you a starting gravity around 1.027-1.030, so what you can use is fairly limited. I am as much into specialty grains as the next guy, but when using such a low gravity I would recommend...restraint...on the specialty grains.

Small beer meaning around 3.3% alcohol. Anchor Brewing has a small beer and I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on the style as well as a recipe. Sorry if I left you in the dark with a lack of details.

I'm committed to (and damn near obsessed with) creating a spectacular low gravity, session beer. So far, I've made some good ones, but something great still eludes me. It is a real craft - the lower the gravity, the harder it is to hide the flaws. The malt and hops really have to work together well to not have one aspect blow the other away.

My recommendation would be to start with some of the recipes on the forum for English Pale Ales or Brown Ales - like Orfy's, for example - or Biermuncher's Centennial Blonde. Both have created some great tried and true session beers.

From there, work on the elements that you don't like and make tweaks to try and fix them up.

Good luck and don't keep your progress to yourself

Point of clarification...Orfy's Mild-Mannered is an English Brown/Mild

along the same vein as this...


has anyone tried fermenting their beer out completely, then bringing it back to 170*F for an hour or so to boil off the ethanol?

I read about this a while back to make NA beers. Obviously you'd need to repitch some yeast if you're bottling and you wouldn't have a completely NA beer, but you could probably take a 5-6% beer and knock it down to a very low alcohol content without taking away too much flavor. Hydro readings pretty much become useless at this point unfortunately.

A buddy of mine said that he was at a brewpub when some friends of his jokingly ordered him a craft NA beer while he was in the bathroom and he couldn't tell that it was non-alcoholic when he got back.



Related to the small beer comment....I recently did a partigyle with an IIPA and what will probably wind up to be a blonde ale (1040 OG, 1008 FG, ~25IBUs) that from the hydro sample seems like it will be a pretty easy drinker. I'll let you know in about a month once it's ready to go