I thought I would share a rather enlightening exercise that I am going through. I have had a few mediocre batches lately and it is important to me that I understand what is going on with these batches and why. With brewing, it is sometimes hard to know what items of control are making a big difference and which aren't.
I have been keeping a spreadsheet of all of my brews since 2012. In the past two years, I've brewed 52 batches of beer.
I went through this spreadsheet and marked batches with green, yellow, or red. Green means the batch was good, yellow means it was okay, and red means it had significant issues. I have judges notes on some of these brews and they tend to correspond with my own critical tastings.
It is amazing what can be learned doing this.
When I look back at these batches, a few things have become apparent:
(1) I have much higher rates of mediocre or bad beer when I repitch yeast.
(2) I have noted several batches as unbalanced or where hops have a strong almost salty presence in the finished beer. These batches all had mash temps of 149 or below.
(3) I don't see any correlation to complicated mashing regimens and good batches.
(4) I don't see any correlation to complicated temperature control (beyond set-it-and-forget-it) and good batches.
(5) My BIAB batches were all terrible
(6) Wyeast 1028 produced the most good batches
Each of these points show me where to focus my time and attention.
This was a very good exercise.
I have been keeping a spreadsheet of all of my brews since 2012. In the past two years, I've brewed 52 batches of beer.
I went through this spreadsheet and marked batches with green, yellow, or red. Green means the batch was good, yellow means it was okay, and red means it had significant issues. I have judges notes on some of these brews and they tend to correspond with my own critical tastings.
It is amazing what can be learned doing this.
When I look back at these batches, a few things have become apparent:
(1) I have much higher rates of mediocre or bad beer when I repitch yeast.
(2) I have noted several batches as unbalanced or where hops have a strong almost salty presence in the finished beer. These batches all had mash temps of 149 or below.
(3) I don't see any correlation to complicated mashing regimens and good batches.
(4) I don't see any correlation to complicated temperature control (beyond set-it-and-forget-it) and good batches.
(5) My BIAB batches were all terrible
(6) Wyeast 1028 produced the most good batches
Each of these points show me where to focus my time and attention.
This was a very good exercise.