cgeorg
Active Member
Hi,
I've been doing a little bit of brewing and a whole lot of reading. So far I've done a partial mash kit of my own, and helped a buddy with an all grain recipe (though I didn't actually look at his recipe, I was just helping while he ran the show). The SMaSH concept looks really interesting to me, especially since I am interested in creating my own recipes, and knowing what I will get when I brew an existing recipe.
Along those lines, I've come up with an idea for a crazy "SMaSH course in home brewing" weekend, which would get me familiar with the characteristics of several base malts and hops.
The basic idea is that I would do several small BIAB batches, and split those further into different boils with different hops. Possibly even pitching onto different yeasts?
The setup would look something like this:
Use BIAB to extract enough for a 3 gallon batch with a single malt. Split the wort into 3 equal boils, each one using a different kind of hop. So, we would end up with 1 gallon each of 3 different hopped, same malted beers. This process could be performed 2 more times in a fairly long but not overwhelming brew day, and we would have 9 gallons of a variety of SMaSHes for our tasting/learning pleasure.
Questions:
1) Is this insane?
2) How do I ferment these? A quick search tells me that 1 gallon bottle fermentation is ok. For my beer, I use spring water that comes in 1 gal plastic jugs, can I use these to ferment? If not, can I just split my batches into growlers to ferment? I could let them ferment in the growler for about 2 weeks (dry hopping after 1), then just siphon to a second growler with some conditioning tablets for another 2 weeks, then drink?
3) Suggestions on malts? I was thinking regular old Pale 2-row, Vienna, and Munich.
4) Same 3 hops for each malt, or different, for a total of 9? If the malt and hop flavors will be easy to tell apart, I'd prefer to do 9, and I'll match my higher alpha hops with the higher FG malts for a bit more balance in the beers.
5) Yeast? I will probably default to a clean ale yeast unless there is some reason not to.
6) Seriously, is this insane?
I've been doing a little bit of brewing and a whole lot of reading. So far I've done a partial mash kit of my own, and helped a buddy with an all grain recipe (though I didn't actually look at his recipe, I was just helping while he ran the show). The SMaSH concept looks really interesting to me, especially since I am interested in creating my own recipes, and knowing what I will get when I brew an existing recipe.
Along those lines, I've come up with an idea for a crazy "SMaSH course in home brewing" weekend, which would get me familiar with the characteristics of several base malts and hops.
The basic idea is that I would do several small BIAB batches, and split those further into different boils with different hops. Possibly even pitching onto different yeasts?
The setup would look something like this:
Use BIAB to extract enough for a 3 gallon batch with a single malt. Split the wort into 3 equal boils, each one using a different kind of hop. So, we would end up with 1 gallon each of 3 different hopped, same malted beers. This process could be performed 2 more times in a fairly long but not overwhelming brew day, and we would have 9 gallons of a variety of SMaSHes for our tasting/learning pleasure.
Questions:
1) Is this insane?
2) How do I ferment these? A quick search tells me that 1 gallon bottle fermentation is ok. For my beer, I use spring water that comes in 1 gal plastic jugs, can I use these to ferment? If not, can I just split my batches into growlers to ferment? I could let them ferment in the growler for about 2 weeks (dry hopping after 1), then just siphon to a second growler with some conditioning tablets for another 2 weeks, then drink?
3) Suggestions on malts? I was thinking regular old Pale 2-row, Vienna, and Munich.
4) Same 3 hops for each malt, or different, for a total of 9? If the malt and hop flavors will be easy to tell apart, I'd prefer to do 9, and I'll match my higher alpha hops with the higher FG malts for a bit more balance in the beers.
5) Yeast? I will probably default to a clean ale yeast unless there is some reason not to.
6) Seriously, is this insane?