Do you experiment?

[joshesmusica]

If so, what kind of things are you experimenting with? I hope it goes without saying this is a topic about beer, not any other kinds of home experiments you might be in to.

 

[unionrdr]

Well, early on, I experimented with adding different DME's & hops to Cooper's cans to make different, or at least, better beers out of them. I then tried steeping grains with them. But moved on to adding PM's to them. Then went pb/pm biab to re-create past beers. I'm waiting for 2 more ingredients to come in to safely recreate the German mumme' gruit ale. It's been educational to try & figure out what modern herbs, spices & plants to use in recreating it. An educated experiment if ever there was one. Gruits can be dangerous if the wrong amount, wrong plant or seasonal growth stage of the plant is used.

 

[Revvy]

I usually have at least one experimental batch or process or project going at any given time. My last experimental batch was a mesquite smoked pineapple blonde, which was based of my Leffe Blonde Clone recipe on here, but swapping the yeast for one that research said at a certain temp produced pineapple notes, and swapping the hops for citra for the same reason. Then I sliced and smoked 2 pineapples with mesquite and threw those in primary for the last week before kegging it. The served it with a mixture of fresh and roasted pineapple in my randall.

My next experiment will be fermenting a rye ale with Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Culture. I'm restarting a batch of sourdough, and plan on making a DME starter with some of it (probably the "hooch" that grows on top.) Then I'm going to brew a rye red ale...and probably bake a loaf of rye sourdough with the spent grain.

I also experiment with processes and gear. Especially ways to get unique flavors into my beers, meads, etc. I borrow a lot of ideas and techniques from cooking, especially molecular gastronomy. One of the things I've done is using a process called "nitrogen cavitation" using a whipped cream dispenser to extract flavors into liquid (or in cooking to impart a liquid flavor into a solid ingredient.) I demonstrate it in this Brew Bubbas Podcast, from a few years back. Making a Bochette & Using Nitrogen Cavitation

 

[Nagorg]

My experiments so far are just around trying to build my own recipe from scratch and using different yeasts. I've tried things like using debittered black malt for color instead of crystal malt and using WLP029 (a kolsh yeast) in an IPA.

I've had mixed results but I'm glad I do these things. So, nothing as far out there as Revvy's smoked pineapple venture for sure. I need to set myself up for smaller batches before trying things like that. Not sure I'd want 10 gallons of a blueberry pancake wit gone south!

 

[ghohn]

Sexually? Yeah but not as much as I'd like to.

These days I've been experimenting by making raw ale, berliner weisse and no hops in the boil (hefty whirlpool additions).


Sent from my iPod touch using Home Brew

 

[losMythos]

Thought about boiling Wort under Vacuum at room temp and seeing if you get any Hop Bitterness. But Heat is necessary to kill bacteria and for Hop utilization so It's most likely a bad idea.

 

[kh54s10]

Not too crazy. My most ambitious were a pepper ale using crushed red pepper flakes in the last 5 minutes of the boil. And substituting spaghetti squash in an ale instead of pumpkin. Both were excellent.

 

[MrFancyPlants]

Thought about boiling Wort under Vacuum at room temp and seeing if you get any Hop Bitterness. But Heat is necessary to kill bacteria and for Hop utilization so It's most likely a bad idea.

I've seen this one come up before put what if you could put it under just enough of a vacuum that you could mash and boil at the same time?

 

[Billy-Klubb]

one of my favorites was the Horehound Belgian Strong. 1 lb of horehound candy in the boil. it was a nasty sticky mess until it all dissolved. I want to grow some horehound and experiment more with it.

 

[dmtaylor]

Many years ago I experimented a lot with mash temperatures AND times. Based on those experiments, for the past 7 or 8 years I've been mashing most beers for just 40 minutes at about 150 F. Works great for almost every style.

Next set of experimental batches will be to determine the effect of the crush on malt flavor. I've gained enough experience over the years to be able to dial in my efficiency to an exact amount anywhere from about 60 to 90% based on crush alone, such that I can keep the original gravity and remainder of the process identical with the only variables being crush & efficiency. My theory is that less crush and thus lower efficiency improves malt flavor while a hard crush and high efficiency >=90% has a detrimental effect on flavor, and my desire is to prove this through this experiment. I've been talking about such an experiment for many years on many forums, and it is now high time for me to get off my duff and just run it. I'm the right person to run it because I know how to dial in my efficiency to hit a constant specific gravity based on quality of crush alone. So.... we'll soon see. I think I'm going to do several small 1.3 or 1.5-gallon batches of a low hopped amber ale. I'm still himming & hawing a bit but will run this soon.

 

[schatzke]

Split a batch in half and pitch 2 different yeasts. Split a batch and dry hop half. Split a porter and pumpkin pie spice half. Nothing too crazy but its fun to see the differences and fine tune what you do/don't like.

 

[m00ps]

Yes, yes I do. Every other beer I make tends to be some crapshoot of an experiment

 

[Rhetorik]

Not really. I'm still far too much of a rookie. I've switched to 10gal batches now though, so I will be dry-hopping the 2 carboys differently (in this case, Galaxy in one and Simcoe in the other).

A couple things I would like to try soon though:
- Next pale ale I make I might use good ol' US-05 in one carboy and a saison yeast in the other.

- Make a saison, split batch. One batch from primary into bottles with no aging; second batch into secondary with fruit/herb/spice additions and aged for a month or two

 

[TexasDroughtBrewery]

I only experiment with one gallon batches, and its usually styles I've never made before. It's too expensive and time consuming to experiment with 5+ gallon batches.

 

[oceanic_brew]

I just made an earl grey IPA

Love it

 

[Sailingeric]

Yes, yes I do. Every other beer I make tends to be some crapshoot of an experiment

Same here to some degree. I do my own recipes but I do research a lot on here first. But have made good beer and next time around have used different yeast and it will be totally different flavor profile. That is what is fun about this hobby, one little thing and it is something totally different

 

[cilestiok]

Inline carbonation is my latest experiment.

 

[joshesmusica]

Inline carbonation is my latest experiment.

What do you mean by inline? As in fermenting in a keg and then closing it up at the end?

 

[slym2none]

Nope.

 

[Kent88]

I had an experiment in class a few years ago where I would "forget" to add +C at the end to see if it would be ok, but @m00ps is right...

I have been experimenting with re-using yeast I "wash" from the yeast cake at the end of primary. Actually I had an emergency bottle shortage when I bottled a mild about a year ago and I bottled directly into a small growler and a lot of yeast settled out so I was able to keep that going for another round. Right now I'm doing 2 experiments in 1, I made a SMaSH with Kolsh Malt and I split it into 2 fermenters and pitched Saflager in one and "2nd generation" wyeast 2124 in the other.

That is also my 3rd SMaSH, I have also done Vienna (oh my...) and Munich (very good!), and I want to try MCI stout malt soon, too.

I've also been experimenting with making bread using dried spent grains and troob that I don't want to harvest yeast from. So far Wyeast 1007 did a decent job rising a loaf, but nothing I make with a significant amount of spent grain is turning out very well.

 

[CA_Mouse]

Constantly! I don't take everything as gospel with brewing. I think outside the box and try different things all the time. Different mash techniques, mash temperatures, length of mash, boil times, hop techniques... Nothing is an absolute until I try it and find that it doesn't work. If I find something that works when people say doesn't, then I push that further to see where it stops working. If no one ever experiments, then everything will become like BMC, never changing and always boring.

 

[cilestiok]

What do you mean by inline? As in fermenting in a keg and then closing it up at the end?

Carbonation stone inline during transfer to keg.

 

[m00ps]

What do you mean by inline? As in fermenting in a keg and then closing it up at the end?

Inline is the new decoction, duh

 

[Billy-Klubb]

I'm gonna try in in line decoction.

 

[joshesmusica]

Oh god, please don't get this one shut down guys. I actually want to see all kinds of cool ideas!

 

[Seismogenic]

Not sure if this is quite what you were asking, but I like to treat all new recipes as parameter studies at first. I'll do a couple of one gallon batches, varying one component each time, and then do a side-by-side tasting to see how the finished product changes. (And, of course, to see which version I like best.)

It's also fun to bring friends in on the testing stage. With my IPA, I did four versions, exactly the same ingredients and timing of hop additions in each, just changed the order of which hops went in when. The friends who tasted all four side by side actually had a hard time believing that I'd only changed one thing from batch to batch, they were so different. It was very instructive on many fronts.

 

[specharka]

Oh god, please don't get this one shut down guys. I actually want to see all kinds of cool ideas!

[/thread]

But in all seriousness, yessir! Sour worted gose with grains to inoculate? Sure. Farmhouse ale fermented with Brett bottle dregs? Why not! Smoked porter fermented with lager yeast? Yum. Parti-gyle barleywine/English mild ale? Delicious! Accidental barleywine sour because I was too lazy to sanitize new transfer equipment...well, not so much. But you catch my drift.

 

[Revvy]

I dunno if this show has been talked about on HBT at all, but I just stumbled onto a new Sam Caligione webseries about experimental beers on youtube.

It's called, .

It looks like Brewmasters meets chopped with celebrity guests. It appears his premise is to ask a non brewer what ingredients he'd like to have a beer made with, and then set about making it.

Just started watching it. Interesting.

 

[m00ps]

have you seen those guys making sours in old garage/workshop vacuum cleaner bodies? Like literally. Those red ones with desk chair wheels. Not sure if they cleaned out the sawdust beforehand

 

[unionrdr]

Sam's done some half dozen of those shows already. Interesting...