Why do homebrewers seem to use carapils more than breweries?

Is this just a perception on my part? I see a lot of carapils in IPA and Pale Ale recipes (among others) here on the site, but rarely if ever see it when a brewery lists the grains they use. Do breweries use it more than they admit to, or are they using a different technique to add body? Is there some hidden secret, or are there perhaps benefits to larger scale (such as the feasibility of higher fermentation temps due to volume and pressure)?

I'd really like to understand the secret to having good body with only 2-row, munich and c120 (as an example....using Avery IPA's reported grains). No mention of flaked barley, carapils, wheat or mashing at 160F for an FG of 1.022. How are they doing it? Inquiring minds want to know

Im not sure why it seems to be in every recipe on here but I belive it also adds a slight sweetness as well as head to the brew, I never use it and I get really good head retention in all my pale ales and ipa's. I always mash at 154.

What can I say. We like head

I don't know. Maybe just because we can, or we feel we need to and really don't. I didn't use it for a long time and now I do. Jury's still out on how much it really contributes though.

Like so much of homebrewing, to learn everything we want to know about making the best beer possible, we'd have to brew a lifetime of beer (and I'm working on it). So we end up relying on what we have read or heard, and it's fairly common to see that head retention is improved by using CaraPils.

kevin476 said:

I never use it and I get really good head retention in all my pale ales and ipa's. I always mash at 154.

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A 154* mash will give you a decent amount of unfermentable sugars, which in turn leads to more head retention. If you are trying for a drier beer by using a more fermentable mash, head retention may suffer - hence using CaraPils.

As to the OPs original question, I'm not sure what tricks the pro's use to increase head retention, but I have noticed that several craft brews don't have great head formation or retention.

Actually, before we stray too far off course, I didn't mention head retention at all. That's pretty easy...I have no problems getting good head What I mentioned was using carapils for body, and why breweries seem to get exceptional body seemingly without adding half a pound or more of carapils (on a 5gal scale).

beowulf said:

Actually, before we stray too far off course, I didn't mention head retention at all. That's pretty easy...I have no problems getting good head What I mentioned was using carapils for body, and why breweries seem to get exceptional body seemingly without adding half a pound or more of carapils (on a 5gal scale).

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Maybe a different mash schedule? Most of us are limited to single infusion or at the best a step mash with water additions, unless you do a decoction. Maybe someone who has done the same beer several different ways can chime in on the body of the beer with their different rest zones?

I know at least when I went through the tours, both Avery and Great Divide both said they only did single-infusion mashes. I was thinking of decoction as well, but I'm not so sure now after going through the tours. I need to hit the Lucky Bucket tour here in town...I'll ask them if I can remember.

I've never used carapils, and only used carafoam once because I was following a recipe. I tend to agree that it is overused, and that many people may find it unnecessary if they tried the same recipe without using it. Proper mashing and boiling techniques make carapils unecessary in my opinion.

I think it's because homebrewers believe that since it's available that it should be used. I stopped using it and get fine stable foam. I use very little crystal malts and instead use a blend of base malts for my color, maltiness, and use mash temp for sweetness.

Look at any dark belgian beer recipes damn near every single person uses Special B. I've never used it in a single beer I've made. I make some pretty killer dark belgian beers and I just use a hybrid mash schedule along with dark candy syrup.

I think many homebrewers use ingredients as bandaids instead of figuring out what the ingredient is supposed to fix. For instance proper mash pH will net you good beer foam. Temperature control will give you the proper flavors associated with the yeast utilized. Some beers require high temps like Belgian yeasts, and some need lower temps.

Airborneguy said:

I've never used carapils, and only used carafoam once because I was following a recipe. I tend to agree that it is overused, and that many people may find it unnecessary if they tried the same recipe without using it. Proper mashing and boiling techniques make carapils unecessary in my opinion.

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Yup.

This, and, as with many things in homebrewing, it was written in books a long time ago, so it is canon. Kinda like bot squeezing the grain bag, moving beer off the yeast quickly to avoid autolysis, hot side aeration, etc...

That said, I still use it in certain styles on ocassion.

I think the big difference is that homebrewers usually ferment their beer until the yeast stops and commercial breweries crash their beer when it gets to the desired FG.

Cheers!
Kevin

I think it is because a brewery is a business. Grain is an expense. A grain that adds nothing to the product is not added.

beerandcoding said:

I think the big difference is that homebrewers usually ferment their beer until the yeast stops and commercial breweries crash their beer when it gets to the desired FG.

Cheers!
Kevin

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Interesting, I've read similar.

I've been disappointed with body and head on my beers and I'd like it if someone could give me some answers.

I've brewed a lot of beer, and I bottle carb half of it. One thing is that my bottled beers never seem to have much of a head. I started adding cara-pils, mashing higher, and adding a lot more priming sugar to fix this. I always add a half lb of cara-pils per five gallon batch, mash higher than normal for anything but tripels, and carb to 2.5 volumes or more CO2. Results have been better. I've still never had anything close to a beer with too much carb or body.

beerandcoding said:

I think the big difference is that homebrewers usually ferment their beer until the yeast stops and commercial breweries crash their beer when it gets to the desired FG.

Cheers!
Kevin

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I think this is most of it. Tightly controlling the amount of alcohol in the beer relative to the original gravity is the easiest way to control body. At home, without the ability to filter out the yeast, it is much more difficult to control body. So, we try to do it by manipulating the amount of unfermentable sugars by mashing at high temps. Breweries do this too, however, I know Avery mashes at extremely high temps.

Thanks for the responses...I appreciate the good, objective feedback. The comment on breweries crashing their beer when they choose makes sense to me, but if they crash it at 1.009, would you expect it to have really good body? Or is that a beer that would normally ferment out to 1.003 so they're retaining 0.006 gravity points worth of dextrins by crashing early?

Good discussion, folks...thanks.

rexbanner said:

Interesting, I've read similar.

I've been disappointed with body and head on my beers and I'd like it if someone could give me some answers.

I've brewed a lot of beer, and I bottle carb half of it. One thing is that my bottled beers never seem to have much of a head. I started adding cara-pils, mashing higher, and adding a lot more priming sugar to fix this. I always add a half lb of cara-pils per five gallon batch, mash higher than normal for anything but tripels, and carb to 2.5 volumes or more CO2. Results have been better. I've still never had anything close to a beer with too much carb or body.

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Have you looked into your mash pH? If so what's your water source? If you have not looked into mash pH just go in the brewing science section and click on the sticky for "brewing water chemistry primer". It gives you some general guidelines for adjusting very soft or RO water. Ever since I started with that and advanced a bit further on the water chemistry front, I've had great beer foam.

I have never heard of a brewery crash cooling to arrest fermentation. Sure they crash cool but in my experience doing lab work for a brewery, they only crash after it has attenuated. If the yeast is acting sluggish in a high gravity wort it takes longer till they crash it. Crashing is just to drop the yeast out of suspension as best they can prior to filtering. They do not do it to control attenuation. I know wine makers crash and that's how they get sweet wines. It was always my understanding that breweries would adjust how they brew based on the malt they got for each delivery. There will be fermentability variations from malt delivery to malt delivery which can be controlled with mashing procedures.

This is pure speculation, but I also think some breweries control attenuation through the use of specialty grains. Caramelized sugars are not readily fermentable so highly roasted, and caramel malts will not be as readily fermented like sugars from base malt.

beowulf said:

Thanks for the responses...I appreciate the good, objective feedback. The comment on breweries crashing their beer when they choose makes sense to me, but if they crash it at 1.009, would you expect it to have really good body? Or is that a beer that would normally ferment out to 1.003 so they're retaining 0.006 gravity points worth of dextrins by crashing early?

Good discussion, folks...thanks.

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1.009 is still pretty low. For example, Ninkasi crashes their Total Domination IPA at 1.016. And you will definitely notice a difference in body between a commercial IPA stopped at 1.016 and a home-brewed one than ferments out in the 1.005 area.

Cheers!
Kevin

Breweries have much better control of the mash temperature and timing, so they don't need to use dextrine malts.

Like most things, it's a recipe formulation decision. Should I adjust the grain bill or the mash to control wort fermentability? Or could I even add powder? Should I do a decoction or go with melanoidin malt? Do I forgo fining or filtering because it removes hop character riding on the yeast, or do I just add more hops?

There are so many ways to get to the same result. My guess is the old recipes were just more likely to add a bit more dextrine malt for body instead of doing it some other way.

smokinghole said:

I think it's because homebrewers believe that since it's available that it should be used. I stopped using it and get fine stable foam. I use very little crystal malts and instead use a blend of base malts for my color, maltiness, and use mash temp for sweetness.

Look at any dark belgian beer recipes damn near every single person uses Special B. I've never used it in a single beer I've made. I make some pretty killer dark belgian beers and I just use a hybrid mash schedule along with dark candy syrup.

I think many homebrewers use ingredients as bandaids instead of figuring out what the ingredient is supposed to fix. For instance proper mash pH will net you good beer foam. Temperature control will give you the proper flavors associated with the yeast utilized. Some beers require high temps like Belgian yeasts, and some need lower temps.

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I think you should try Special B before you kick it to the curb. I would much rather use that than the expensive candy sugar.
I love sp B in an irish red with some crystal 80.

I guarantee that there are commercial breweries using it, or else the maltsters wouldn't be making it.

As for the crashing at final gravity discussion, no (competent) commercial brewery is crashing the temp to halt fermentation on beers that aren't otherwise fermented out. This would lead to an unstable product. When they brew the same beer over and over with good consistent technique, they can crash by FG because they know that is when it is done.

Last, but not least, skilled and careful home brewers absolutely can control their mash temperatures and times as precisely as commercial brewers can. It takes more effort, but it can be done.

I agree that it is primarily a function of recipe formulation. A lot of specialty grains can be replaced with manipulation of technique, and were in fact created to eliminate certain techniques. This isn't cheating, it's a matter of practicality and producing the end product you want.

Adam

@Adam: not so sure you are correct there. Many commercial breweries halt fermentation at a certain point and either fine, filter or centrifuge out the remaining yeast.

Granted, they aren't stopping a yeast that can ferment down to zero at .030 or anything like that.

Hell doesn't Budweiser use beech shavings or something like that to force their yeast out of suspension, so they don't have to wait a full lagering period?

As for commercial use of carapils, sure, lots or breweries use it. Deschutes list carapils in all of their homebrew recipes. Not sure if that means they use it themselves though.

Cheers!
Kevin

iaefebs said:

I think it is because a brewery is a business. Grain is an expense. A grain that adds nothing to the product is not added.

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I'm going with this one. If a brewery can achieve the same effect as carapils (more body, better head retention, etc.) by controlling their mash temperature really well or some other technique that doesn't involve buying another specialty grain, then there's no reason to use carapils. I use it because my mash temperature stability is questionable - smaller grain bills especially will definitely drop in temp by a few degrees over an hour. A good brewery on the other hand has more precise control over their process and know exactly how the beer will turn out when they change different parameters.

So for me it's a crutch, but I don't care because my beer turns out the way I want it to and the extra $0.50 it adds to a batch doesn't bother me.

That said, lots of good breweries do use carapils. Maybe they want a higher FG but don't want any residual sweetness, or maybe they prefer to use a low mash temp for every beer and instead control fermentability with grain...?

Here are some professionals weighing in with a particularly helpful post from Cargill on page 2
http://www.probrewer.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=9557

beerandcoding said:

Hell doesn't Budweiser use beech shavings or something like that to force their yeast out of suspension, so they don't have to wait a full lagering period?

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The beechwood gives the yeast more surface area to latch onto, which does indeed speed up the lagering phase.

beerandcoding said:

@Adam: not so sure you are correct there. Many commercial breweries halt fermentation at a certain point and either fine, filter or centrifuge out the remaining yeast.

Granted, they aren't stopping a yeast that can ferment down to zero at .030 or anything like that.

Hell doesn't Budweiser use beech shavings or something like that to force their yeast out of suspension, so they don't have to wait a full lagering period?

Cheers!
Kevin

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I don't want to turn this into an off topic argument about fermentation practice, but the above is misleading. Finings, filtering, berchwood chips, centrifuging, etc are all indeed used to speed the clearing of beer, but I am quite sure there aren't "many" breweries using these techniques to halt incomplete fermentation.

There may be a handful of brew pubs doing so for novelty purposes, but no one is (or should be) packaging intentionally under attenuated beer. packaged beer cannot be sterilized and as such would be subject to re-fermentation in the package.

Do you have any examples of any that are?

Adam

On a tour of Ninkasi a while back, I was told that they take gravity readings every 8 hour or so and when the beer reaches their target gravity, they cold-crash the fermenter. It sits cold for a day before being sent off to a blending tank. Now, perhaps their target gravity is not so far off from the limits of the yeast they use, so extra fermentation in the bottle isn't a huge concern.

Maybe someone from a production brewery can chime in? And just from personal experience cellaring beer, I would say a lot is packaged before fully fermenting out. Open a three year old bottle of a higher gravity brew and it is noticeably thinner and more carbed than a fresh one.

Cheers!
Kevin

beerandcoding said:

On a tour of Ninkasi a while back, I was told that they take gravity readings every 8 hour or so and when the beer reaches their target gravity, they cold-crash the fermenter. It sits cold for a day before being sent off to a blending tank. Now, perhaps their target gravity is not so far off from the limits of the yeast they use, so extra fermentation in the bottle isn't a huge concern.

Maybe someone from a production brewery can chime in? And just from personal experience cellaring beer, I would say a lot is packaged before fully fermenting out. Open a three year old bottle of a higher gravity brew and it is noticeably thinner and more carbed than a fresh one.

Cheers!
Kevin

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We do an attenuation test, when it gets there we'll leave it for another day or so to get rid of diacetyl, sulphur etc then drop temp.

May it go a little further? Maybe but not much if anything.

beowulf said:

I know at least when I went through the tours, both Avery and Great Divide both said they only did single-infusion mashes. I was thinking of decoction as well, but I'm not so sure now after going through the tours. I need to hit the Lucky Bucket tour here in town...I'll ask them if I can remember.

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I had a few beers with the Lucky Bucket brewmaster about a year ago and I'm pretty sure he said he does a single infusion mash for all of his beers.

beerandcoding said:

I think the big difference is that homebrewers usually ferment their beer until the yeast stops and commercial breweries crash their beer when it gets to the desired FG.

Cheers!
Kevin

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No, not at all.

adamreef said:

I guarantee that there are commercial breweries using it, or else the maltsters wouldn't be making it.

As for the crashing at final gravity discussion, no (competent) commercial brewery is crashing the temp to halt fermentation on beers that aren't otherwise fermented out. This would lead to an unstable product. When they brew the same beer over and over with good consistent technique, they can crash by FG because they know that is when it is done.

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Correct.


No brewer worth his weight would crash at where he wants the beer to be. I dont the previous breweries I work with dont, nor does anyone in the business that I know does. If a brewer does that, then he should be looking at an other line of work. There's plenty of ways to get a beer to finish where you want and thats not one way to do it.




Also, to get back on topic. Quite a few breweries use it, its used at ours. And like stated if only home brewers used it, it wouldnt be made by maltsters.

OK, I checked with a couple breweries and I'm prepared to eat my words on this one.

Checked with a couple breweries and when they mention crashing at the desired FG, they are referring to the known FG of the beer, based on experience brewing the same recipe many times. Much like Adam stated. It may be a point or so off, but not enough to make a difference, especially after several tanks are blended prior to bottling.

So there we go. I have now learned that desired, in this sense, does not mean any ol' FG the brewer pleases. Please disregard all of my previous comments.

Now back on the topic of commercial breweries and carapils, not sure if Deschutes uses it, but they list it as an ingredient in almost all the homebrew recipes on their website. New Belgium also lists it I a few beers, including 1554 and Blue Paddle.

Cheers!
Kevin

beerandcoding said:

OK, I checked with a couple breweries and I'm prepared to eat my words on this one.

Checked with a couple breweries and when they mention crashing at the desired FG, they are referring to the known FG of the beer, based on experience brewing the same recipe many times. Much like Adam stated. It may be a point or so off, but not enough to make a difference, especially after several tanks are blended prior to bottling.

So there we go. I have now learned that desired, in this sense, does not mean any ol' FG the brewer pleases. Please disregard all of my previous comments.

Now back on the topic of commercial breweries and carapils, not sure if Deschutes uses it, but they list it as an ingredient in almost all the homebrew recipes on their website. New Belgium also lists it I a few beers, including 1554 and Blue Paddle.

Cheers!
Kevin

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That makes more sense.

adamreef said:

I guarantee that there are commercial breweries using it, or else the maltsters wouldn't be making it.

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Southern Tier Brewery. They use it in both their extra pale ale and their imperial ale (oaked age I believe.) There is no comparison in terms of the head on this beer to others, its so fluffy and lasting its insane. Go check it out. I believe the names are Hoppe and Unearthly if I am not mistaken. Not really my style of beer but its very cool they list all ingredients and processes on their bottle (kettle hops, flameout, dry hop, etc)

Again, no commercial beer comes close to this in terms of head retention so I can't really explain my "most" don't use it, but those who do seem to produce a fantastic beer IMO!

SwampassJ said:

Maybe someone who has done the same beer several different ways can chime in on the body of the beer with their different rest zones?

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Thats a really good idea, and i can't believe it's never occurred to me. Its a brilliant way to dial in the mash temp on a brew to get it 'just right!

I won't be able to do it for a while, but i'll definitely give it a shot. I've become a fan of not using caramel malts in my IPAs in the last year, and i think this'll give me a much better understanding of how to get the body and residual sweetness i want/need without the caramel malts.

beowulf said:

Actually, before we stray too far off course, I didn't mention head retention at all. That's pretty easy...I have no problems getting good head What I mentioned was using carapils for body, and why breweries seem to get exceptional body seemingly without adding half a pound or more of carapils (on a 5gal scale).

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You have to remember that big breweries are able to force carbonate with Co2 and Nitrogen which both add a much smoother mouthfeel and body. I'm assuming as a homebrewer that you bottle condition. Also, different styles of beer can get a smooth and great body from other grains (i.e. malted barley and rolled oats). The carbonation is the biggest variable that I have noticed in my experience as a homebrewer and as an employee at a craft brewery.

Herky21 said:

You have to remember that big breweries are able to force carbonate with Co2 and Nitrogen which both add a much smoother mouthfeel and body. I'm assuming as a homebrewer that you bottle condition. Also, different styles of beer can get a smooth and great body from other grains (i.e. malted barley and rolled oats). The carbonation is the biggest variable that I have noticed in my experience as a homebrewer and as an employee at a craft brewery.

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You actually get smoother carbonation from yeast as opposed to force carbonation.

I'd say that would depend on the yeast, the carb level, and for a few beers, nitrogen.

Herky21 said:

I'd say that would depend on the yeast, the carb level, and for a few beers, nitrogen.

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If you don't mind me asking, which craft brewery do you work in?