Brewing Self-Education

For my first post, I decided to share my plans to educate myself. I've brewed 20 something beers, and I enjoy it immensely. However, I feel that I have little grasp of what different ingredients or other brewing variables actually do to finished beer. I have of course read most anything I can get find on the subject, but I would like to experience these differences myself.

I therefore decided that instead of just brewing whatever style beer I felt like(or others requested) all the time, I would start also brewing some batches purely for the sake of learning what effects these different things had. My thought is to start with a very simple recipe, brew it a couple times to try and get a fairly consistant result, and then change one single thing at a time to learn what the effect is. Keep in mind that my primary goal here isn't to make great beers(although I'm hoping they are still enjoyable), but rather find out how different things effect beer. I chose a very basic blonde ale as my starting point:

8# 2-row
.5oz Centennial 10%
WYeast 1056 with 1000ml starter
60 minute Single infusion mash at 152* with mashout

According to Beer Smith, with 80% efficiency I get:

OG: 1047
SRM: 3.3
IBU: 18.7

Here then are some of the ideas I've thought of to try:

Adding different specialty grains one at a time(not literally individual grains obviosly)
Adding late hop additions of various variaties
Using a different bittering hop at the same est. IBU
Different yeast
Changing the base malt
Fermenting at different temperatures

I understand that the base beer I've chosen limits what all I can reasonably expect to learn, but I think it's a good starting point for experimentation.

Why am I sharing this? I guess I'm just curious what others think about it, what they've tried and maybe what other ideas they have. Any comments, experiences, recommendations, rants or other input most welcome.

Thanks.

 

Looks like you're going the route I am right now, basically Single Malt and Single Hops (SMaSH) recipes. You can look some up as well, but it's pretty easy to come up with some with such few ingredients. I used 2-row and Sterling hops in the batch I have fermenting now. I added some hops for 60 minutes, a bit more at 20 and another bit at 10 minutes. I also just dry hopped today after a week with the same hop. Next up for me is Maris Otter and Glacier hop.
I'm taking very detailed notes as I go so that I can have all my information recorded. I'm thinking these simple recipe and experiments will give much more insight to all individual ingredients I use.
As you'll see once you start coming up with recipes, with all the malts, hops, and yeasts available, these batches will be very numerous lol, so take good notes.

 

I'm thinking of building a 2-gallon brew system for just this reason...

 

Yea, I'm using my 2 mr. Beer fermentors for these batches. Let's me do about 2-2.5 gallon batches, well, just a little under 2.5

 

I've been doing 2 1/2 gallon batched in my 6 1/2 gallon fermenter. Before the yeast get started, they need all the oxygen I can get dissolved into the wort so that extra space above is no detriment. Once the yeast start reproducing and excreting CO2, the CO2 blankets my wort so I don't have to worry about oxidation as the CO2 pushes air out the airlock. Works fine and I didn't have to buy any more equipment to do it.

 

I'd been planning on doing this with 5 gallon batches, but it may be worth it to scale down. I'll have to look at what equipment is available for sub 5 gallon batches. I'm also in the process of building a fermentation chamber, so maybe I can include some extra space for small fermentors alongside my main fermentor. For the small batches, do you guys use your same mash tun?

 

I'm interested in doing this also and would like to get a few different options before I choose my equipment. Let me know what you use for your 2 gallon set up. Much Appreciated.

 

I was just thinking of using a couple of these:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00002ND6U/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

one for the MLT and one for the HLT.

My LHBS has 3 gallon carboys in as well, but I have a couple of those one gallon wine jugs I might use for fermenting. I also have a 20-quart stainless kettle leftover from my extract days that I can use right on my stovetop...

 

I usually do 10 gallons, but I've been doing 1.25 gallon batches lately to experiment with. I use 2 gallon Home Depot buckets as fermentors and a 2 gallon cooler as MLT. The 1.25 gallons gives me enough for a 12 pack which is enough for sampling and sharing. I've also thought about making a 5 gallon batch and splitting it into 4 fermentors and using a different yeast in each.

 

Ran across this on BYO: http://www.byo.com/stories/techniques/article/indices/19-brewing-tips/1410-small-scale-brewing Looks like some usefull info.