Bob
Well-Known Member
Bob, when it comes to extract I have to completely disagree with you here. 9.5 times out of 10 if you take your time and follow a set procedure of boil amounts, cooling, top off to the correct volume etc... and then give it 2-3 weeks in the primary and maybe some secondary time, your going to have exactly what the recipe called out. For extract brewers a hydrometer is still important, but its for that .5 times when you need to troubleshoot. If you don't have a good baseline of data you won't know what went wrong with that one batch, but that doesn't make the other 95+% of your beer mediocre.
Well...kinda. I submit that proper use of the instruments is part and parcel of "set procedure".
You are 100% correct that you need to have that "good baseline of data". How do you propose to do that without the instrument? Troubleshooting is impossible without data to analyze. If you don't, if you never use the instrument, what are you to do with that 0.5? Dump it? Dodge the exploding bottles?
There is no way to improve beer by taking a hydrometer reading after dumping in a bunch of sugar powder to say that you hit 100% efficiency and no hop alterations are required.
That's precisely what I said when I wrote, "A monkey could mix up a Cooper's kit and get bombed on the results". I suspect you're not mad enough to suggest that a tin of pre-hopped extract produces truly excellent beer.
Further, there is so a way to improve that sort of beer with a hydrometer - by tracking fermentation, by being able to spot the crappy yeast they leave in the lid of the tin pooping out at 50% attenuation. That has nothing to do with efficiency, everything to do with supervising your tiny workers.
There is however skill and patience in measuring out the proper amounts of ingredients and water and following the brewing process to a T every single time. That is what makes good extract beer, not taking 50 hydrometer samples.
Note I never said anything about hydrometer readings in a vacuum, outside of procedure. I maintain instrumental observations are part of a good extract-brewing procedure, part of the process.
Really, the hydrometer usage I've in mind transcends extract, all-grain or any other sort of brewing, because I'm not really talking about its use in the brewhouse; I'm talking about using the instrument to monitor fermentation.* I insist you cannot properly monitor fermentation without using a hydrometer to observe the metabolization of sugars to alcohols. I also maintain that arguing to the contrary is folly on a colossal scale; discrete data sets cannot be determined by looking at bubbles in an airlock! Or is there a unit of measurement of airlock bubbles which my Bamforth and Fix texts inadvertently omitted?
Cheers,
Bob
* I don't use a hydrometer in the brewhouse; I use a refractometer.