Long post from newish member warning.
I think generally there are a couple of goals that homebrewers aim for: 1) when given a goal for style, flavor, abv, mouthfeel, whatever else you look for in a brew, to be able to hit it consistently and 2) to intimately understand the contribution of each ingredient and brewing practice, eg temp and efficiency etc. These two goals feed in to each other naturally, but something I've seen lacking in recipes and discussions is side-by-side comparison.
What I mean is that there is a wealth of experience related through descriptions of beers and their making, on this board and others, where a recipe is written up and a description of the taste and overall impression of how good the final result is, but something that would be really valuable to the interested novice would be a bunch of split batches or identical but-for recipes. It's my impression that this happens a lot with a fairly low profile, and indeed SMASH brews are really getting to this. To be honest I'd be really surprised if this hasn't been done to some extent by most brewers, homebrew or commercial scale.
I've read discussion here where people have mentioned making a 10-gallon batch and then splitting it to get a sense of what a new strain of yeast might offer, for example. But having just finished reading Brew Like A Monk I am really struck by how it seems that so many of the Belgian breweries have very, very simple ingredients lists, and all the complexity is added by the yeast when allowed to run from a fairly cool to high temp. Meanwhile there has been a long history of small-scale brewers trying to capture the ineffable somethings of the Trappist brewers with more complicated recipes.
My thinking is that homebrewers, doing fairly small and cheap batches compared to commercial brewers, have a lot of freedom to do these kinds of experiments cheaply. We have the opportunty to really pin down what each change in recipe formulation and brewing temp, duration, etc etc etc might actually be able to do to make a really distinctive brew. And further, with the HBT wiki we have a really good platform for everyone to describe experiments of this type. What I'm proposing is a section of the HBT wiki where people do side-by-side comparisons of brews with small changes, hopefully with fairly careful documentation of the relevant parameters along the way, and a description of what changes might result.
What I'm envisioning would look like a series of links on the descriptions of each malt, hop, etc describing recipes where, for example, someone cooks up something basic, and then either splits the batch in to two smaller ones and changes one thing (yeast or hops are particularly easy for split batches), or perhaps starts two brews on the same day with identical recipes with one small change. If the conditions for submission to the wiki were such that you had to also submit fermentation temperature, efficiency, recipe, and other important measurements to the description then we could potentially build toward a pretty comprehensive and fairly rigorous data set that could be a huge boon to brewers at novice and advanced hobbyist levels. I don't think it would take anything away from the more advanced brewers because 1) the pros probably already have something like this from experience and 2) the hobbyists will want to go through it all to experience it all firsthand anyway.
This all suffers from the issue that the end product is going to be described in the same relative terms as ever. What I usually tell people who ask what a beer is like is "It's good! You should try it," and that's probably never going to change since people's preference can't really be predicted in any quantifyable way. But given that limitation I think it could be a really fun kind of crowdsourcing project that encourages everyone to do what they wanted to do already. It will ultimately have to be a community effort, but some coordinated documentation with a standardized vocabulary could really be fun and helpful.
What are your thoughts?
I think generally there are a couple of goals that homebrewers aim for: 1) when given a goal for style, flavor, abv, mouthfeel, whatever else you look for in a brew, to be able to hit it consistently and 2) to intimately understand the contribution of each ingredient and brewing practice, eg temp and efficiency etc. These two goals feed in to each other naturally, but something I've seen lacking in recipes and discussions is side-by-side comparison.
What I mean is that there is a wealth of experience related through descriptions of beers and their making, on this board and others, where a recipe is written up and a description of the taste and overall impression of how good the final result is, but something that would be really valuable to the interested novice would be a bunch of split batches or identical but-for recipes. It's my impression that this happens a lot with a fairly low profile, and indeed SMASH brews are really getting to this. To be honest I'd be really surprised if this hasn't been done to some extent by most brewers, homebrew or commercial scale.
I've read discussion here where people have mentioned making a 10-gallon batch and then splitting it to get a sense of what a new strain of yeast might offer, for example. But having just finished reading Brew Like A Monk I am really struck by how it seems that so many of the Belgian breweries have very, very simple ingredients lists, and all the complexity is added by the yeast when allowed to run from a fairly cool to high temp. Meanwhile there has been a long history of small-scale brewers trying to capture the ineffable somethings of the Trappist brewers with more complicated recipes.
My thinking is that homebrewers, doing fairly small and cheap batches compared to commercial brewers, have a lot of freedom to do these kinds of experiments cheaply. We have the opportunty to really pin down what each change in recipe formulation and brewing temp, duration, etc etc etc might actually be able to do to make a really distinctive brew. And further, with the HBT wiki we have a really good platform for everyone to describe experiments of this type. What I'm proposing is a section of the HBT wiki where people do side-by-side comparisons of brews with small changes, hopefully with fairly careful documentation of the relevant parameters along the way, and a description of what changes might result.
What I'm envisioning would look like a series of links on the descriptions of each malt, hop, etc describing recipes where, for example, someone cooks up something basic, and then either splits the batch in to two smaller ones and changes one thing (yeast or hops are particularly easy for split batches), or perhaps starts two brews on the same day with identical recipes with one small change. If the conditions for submission to the wiki were such that you had to also submit fermentation temperature, efficiency, recipe, and other important measurements to the description then we could potentially build toward a pretty comprehensive and fairly rigorous data set that could be a huge boon to brewers at novice and advanced hobbyist levels. I don't think it would take anything away from the more advanced brewers because 1) the pros probably already have something like this from experience and 2) the hobbyists will want to go through it all to experience it all firsthand anyway.
This all suffers from the issue that the end product is going to be described in the same relative terms as ever. What I usually tell people who ask what a beer is like is "It's good! You should try it," and that's probably never going to change since people's preference can't really be predicted in any quantifyable way. But given that limitation I think it could be a really fun kind of crowdsourcing project that encourages everyone to do what they wanted to do already. It will ultimately have to be a community effort, but some coordinated documentation with a standardized vocabulary could really be fun and helpful.
What are your thoughts?