Condensed Beer??

[Raffie]

Anyone use the regular amount of ingrediants in brewing but only use 1/2 the amount of water?

How would that turn out??

 

[RichBrewer]

You would be brewing something close to a barley wine. You will want to use a different strain of yeast that is alcohol tolerant and the beer will take a long time to be ready. Maybe a year or more.
I say give it a shot!

 

[Raffie]

I would think if its a reg ale you should beable to use regular yeast for this.

Might be interesting to try it out and see how it ends up.

 

[Moonpile]

What recipe/kit are you considering doing this with?

 

[the_bird]

The better alternative is to use the same amount of water, but twice the ingredients

Are you an AG or extract brewer? With AG, cutting back on the amount of water will result in medicore efficiency. With extract, you need to be careful about hops utilization when you have a really, really concentrated wort (assuming partial boils). As Rich noted, some yeasts are designed for very high-gravity worts; use one of those instead of something like a champagne yeast. And yeah, look at some barleywine and Imperial IPA recipes for suggestions.

For REALLY big beers, you may even - GASP! - want to use a little corn sugar (a pound or so, 10% of the total sugars) so that it doesn't end up way too thick and sweet.

 

[DraconianHand]

I would imagine it would produce a much stronger version of what the original recipe was for. It might be ok depending on the style.

It isn't any different (except for cost) than making a 5 gallon batch, but using double the ingredients.

I would recommend punching your recipe into the Beer Tools calculators and then punching it in again with twice the grain (or 1/2 the water).

The only true way to know if it will be "good" is to do it.

 

[Richard]

What if I was to mix a 3.75 lbs Coopers Stout mix with a 3.3 lbs LME mix in only 4 gallons of water? Would the Coopers yeast be able to handle it?

 

[Moonpile]

With 3.75 lbs of Dark LME and 3.3 lbs Amber LME, I get a starting gravity of 1.046 (using ProMash to calculate).

I've never used Cooper's yeast before, but that should be well within the range of any ale yeast.

 

[stout55]

I have used Coopers before and yes it will work just fine..

 

[fezzman]

What if I was to mix a 3.75 lbs Coopers Stout mix with a 3.3 lbs LME mix in only 4 gallons of water? Would the Coopers yeast be able to handle it?

I made a Brewer's Best Russian Imperial Stout with only 4 gallons once. I also added some corn sugar and lactose to the recipe. The shortage wasn't on purpose though, just drunken carelessness. :cross: It was definitely thick and was most excellent after about 3 months aging. Some of my friends compared those to an unmodified BBRIS batch and most of them preferred the thicker batch.

 

[Richard]

Great. Thanks for the responses guys.