Advice on a small extract batch?

[Crashman06]

Hello,

This is my first post here, but I've been brewing for about 2 years now, and have made about a dozen different brews, so I do have a little experience.

My brother is about to head to get a post-graduate degree overseas. The program will last for about three years, and he'll probably only come back to visit once or twice during that time. I wanted to brew up something that we could taste on his first trip back (maybe a year from now) and then when he's back for good in about three years. Because of space issues, though, I want to keep the batch quite small: a gallon ideally. So my questions are:

1. What kind of brew would be good for this sort of extended aging? A barley wine? Mead maybe? I don't have the space or equipment for all all-grain, so it would have to be an extract. How would I scale down a 5 gallon recipe for a 1 gallon batch? Cut everything by 4/5ths?

2. What could I ferment such a small batch in? I think I probably shouldn't put it in my regular fermentation bucket, since there'd be too much air in there with it. I think my local homebrew shop sells 1 gallon glass jugs. Would that work?

Any suggestions or advice from you experts out there would be really helpful!

 

[WVBeerBaron]

definately brew something strong 8+ abv so it will age nicely. You can really brew any style you want and make it that strength. I would avoid beer where hops are the main staple (IPA and IIPA...the hop flavors will fade).

glass jug is the way to go, buy a cheap gallon of wine, drink it and use the jug.

i wouldn't cut the recipe by 4/5ths because the ratios of IBU's and gravity will flux. instead use a brew software like, beer calculus (it's free, just google it). it will help you sight in the specifics.

 

[bovinejony]

1. Higher gravity beers, such as imperial stouts/IPA's or barleywines, require longer aging/conditioning times to fully develop a balanced flavor, but there's no reason why you couldn't make an equally tasty beer a few months before he arrives. As for scaling a recipe down, it is better to tweak recipe conditions using a program like Beersmith, or the free BrewTarget, since recipe builds tend not to follow a linear trend (can't just cut it 4/5ths). Use the program to tweak the ingredients to fit your desired OG/FG, IBU and ABV.

2. You could construct your own primary fermentation vessel out of any kind of food-grade bucket, so long as it can be properly sanitized and sealed airtight. Drill a hole for an airlock/ blow-off tube and you're set. Using a glass jug that can be fitted with an airlock works as well, though you ideally would want at least the volume of the container to be 1.25x than that of the wort volume. Alternatively, You could use the larger bucket so long as you had a CO2 tank to blow off the oxygen.

My only personal suggestions to you would be to skip the 1gallon philosophy, it's just not enough beer. Also, if your brew space is limited I wouldn't take it up with just one beer that you have to sit on for a year. Instead, make 8 beers.

 

[Crashman06]

Thanks for the advice! I just downloaded BrewTarget to play around with. I'm thinking about doing an Old Ale, though I'll probably still stick with the one gallon plan. It's not so much my brew space that's limited, but my space for storing the bottles that I make. I think it'd be easier to store 7-10 bottles for a couple of years than anything larger.

 

[Calder]

Make a 5 gallon batch and drink the rest ....... taste it and see how it improves.

BarleyWine, Imperial Stout, or other high gravity beer

 

[mojo_wire]

Get the Dogfish Head book Extreme Brewing and check the recipe for the Dema-Goddess Ale. It's an extract but a pretty involved recipe. it's 14-16% alcohol, so it needs about a year before it's ready and would still likely be good to go after 3 years.

But it's a lot of work so the risk of infection is a little high and it seems pointless to do anything but a 5 gallon batch.

If you want something for a 1 gallon batch, your Lhbs should have 2 gallon buckets for a couple of bucks.