The ever changing opinions of proper techniques in brewing

[Golddiggie]

You been brewing for TWO WHOLE YEARS!!! Wow, you must be some kind of expert by now. Have you thought about just going back to brewing and getting over yourself? Some of us have been homebrewing for over 35 years and after many experiments, bow to the time honored traditions. Those people were not fools, and they had hundreds of years to perfect their knowledge. Why do you suppose Sam Adams brews in the traditional manner? Some of their beers are decoction brewed.

Yeah, concerning the premise for your post, I can agree, you can hear anything anymore because there are a bunch of WANNABEEs only interested in trying to exalt themselves with their supposed knowledge of brewing. My suggestion is to ground oneself in Fix, Donaldson, Miller, Noonan, and those who have proven themselves, then forget about the Johnny-come-lately bunch with all their mis-information.

What on Earth is your problem?? I guess your personality matches your avatar. This is not the first time you've come into a thread of mine with anger and aggression over NOTHING! I've never done anything to you so I don't know why you are harassing me, are you just an angry drinker or something? I've reported your post. I have no idea what your purpose is on this forum. NOTHING I've said is to frown down upon anyone's techniques or to challenge anyone and I'd stated that in my original post. You sir need some serious help and you really should not be posting on public forums. And by the way, I've decocted many times, my point about decocting is OTHERS saying it's a waste of time and my asking how if it's a long held tradition over many centuries. Did you even read my post?


Rev.

Personally, I've been brewing for just over two years too. BUT, I've also progressed far faster than a LOT of other brewers out there. I've latched onto brewing beer/making mead with both hands, feet, and other body parts. I've read what I deemed valuable (with advice from others) and done as much as possible to improve my brewing. I'm not going to look to some cantankerous geezer that can't handle how some people learn things very fast, and take to others naturally. I've been cooking for longer than a good many HBT members have been alive (over 30 years), which I also have a natural skill for. I get those from my father, along with other skills/abilities that help me in both of those areas. I also embrace technology where it will help me in my tasks. I research things seven ways to Sunday before I make a decision on them (thank gods for the internet).

Granted 20-30 years ago you didn't have all the tools, resources, etc that are available today. But, if you can't adapt to the times, you're a dinosaur. In my career/field, those that do not adapt/grow stagnate and their career path dies. I refuse to let that happen in either my professional life, or personal life. :rockin:

BTW, +1 to Rev2010

/transmission

 

[Rev2010]

Personally, I've been brewing for just over two years too. BUT, I've also progressed far faster than a LOT of other brewers out there.

That's the thing with me as well, I'm an autodidact, I learn on my own often because I WANT to learn, and I absorb a lot really fast. I'm a musician and my guitar teacher nearly 19 years ago ran out of lessons to give me in only 4-5 months because I advanced so quickly, and that reminds me of something to counter older angry guy (and I'm coming up on 39 myself so I'm not some 22 year old) - I've seen guitarists, pianists, etc that have been playing/practicing relentlessly and learning for 2-3 years that are far more advanced than myself and others that have been playing for 20+ years. People post vids on forums and while we're all jealous in a sense at least most on the music end commend the person for their natural talent. Those that resist claim things like "No feeling in their playing" and whatever else but it's usually nonsense. As mentioned before as well, I brew every weekend when I am in season, with my out of season only being during the hot weather months, so I get on average 32 batches in a year, not like 6-10 as a casual hobby.


Rev.

 

[daksin]

Oh man, this thread was only 3 posts when I was at work. I may need to read this sober. Subscribed.

 

[Airborneguy]

I don't understand why this discussion always becomes an argument. This isn't the same situation as if a few guys got together every year, dressed up in pads and helmets, threw an oblong ball around and told everyone they were playing professional tennis. There are no 'rules' (unless you count some laws, but that's a different story).

Make beer, make YOUR beer, and enjoy how YOU make it. Who cares how anyone else brews THIER beer, does it really matter? I've never joined a large club or participated in many events because of this whole attitude which seems to be prevalent in our hobby for some strange reason.

Brewers are all buddy buddy cool as hell until one guy mentions that he does something the other guy doesn't do. Next thing you know it's like two pregnant women or new mothers talking about who's the better mother. So stupid.

 

[daksin]

I don't understand why this discussion always becomes an argument. This isn't the same situation as if a few guys got together every year, dressed up in pads and helmets, threw an oblong ball around and told everyone they were playing professional tennis. There are no 'rules' (unless you count some laws, but that's a different story).

Make beer, make YOUR beer, and enjoy how YOU make it. Who cares how anyone else brews THIER beer, does it really matter? I've never joined a large club or participated in many events because of this whole attitude which seems to be prevalent in our hobby for some strange reason.

Brewers are all buddy buddy cool as hell until one guy mentions that he does something the other guy doesn't do. Next thing you know it's like two pregnant women or new mothers talking about who's the better mother. So stupid.

I don't know, it seems like you're describing a bit of human nature rather than something exclusive to homebrewers. People who are passionate about something naturally want other people to be passionate about it as well, and want them to maximize their enjoyment of said thing. If an outsider is doing something an enthusiast sees as detrimental to their enjoyment of said thing, they are likely to jump up in excitement to extol the virtues of a long primary or short dry hop or some such thing.

I don't think I've ever seen an Iodophor vs Starsan discussion come to actual fisticuffs.

 

[AnOldUR]

I don't understand why this discussion always becomes an argument. . . . So stupid.

But so entertaining.

 

[theveganbrewer]

Is whirlpooling something that is changing? I haven't been brewing for long, but I see a lot of threads talking about testing the results, but not a lot of actual results. Was this something that was done by homebrewers a few years ago?

 

[Calichusetts]

I'm not trying to go big brother. I guess it is just my way of learning/thinking. Do it a couple times to show that it works, then advance your techniques and process'. I suppose we can add this to the ever changing opinions on which this thread was started.

To stay on topic... 60 minute boil vs what I'm perceiving to be a trend towards 75 or 90 minute boils. Why boil longer? I've never really heard of any other pros besides concentrating the wort.

I do 120 minute boils now...for a few reasons:

Better coagulation
Lower ph
color (carmelization)
maltier (malliard reactions)
higher OG

Also, not necessarily making a better beer, after the first hour, I check my volumes and calculate my boil off, I then adjust the time or strength of the boil to get the exact volume I want. I literally hit my exact volume every time. Finally, with a two hour boil and since I only late hop, I get 1 hour and 40 minutes of free time. I now bottle a batch and dry hop another. One brew day...everything done.

Randy Mosher talks about the 120 minute boil as a lazy mans decoction in Radical...check it out. That is where I heard it and I tried it. LOVED THE results. Such an easy way to balance out a lower ABV but hoppy brew. Which brings me back to my point early in this...try things, experiment and do what you like and what works for you. 120 boils will probably never be the norm or even a minority of brewers, but its what I like for the reasons above and its why I do it.

 

[Pappers_]

You been brewing for TWO WHOLE YEARS!!! Wow, you must be some kind of expert by now. Have you thought about just going back to brewing and getting over yourself? Some of us have been homebrewing for over 35 years and after many experiments, bow to the time honored traditions. Those people were not fools, and they had hundreds of years to perfect their knowledge. Why do you suppose Sam Adams brews in the traditional manner? Some of their beers are decoction brewed.

Yeah, concerning the premise for your post, I can agree, you can hear anything anymore because there are a bunch of WANNABEEs only interested in trying to exalt themselves with their supposed knowledge of brewing. My suggestion is to ground oneself in Fix, Donaldson, Miller, Noonan, and those who have proven themselves, then forget about the Johnny-come-lately bunch with all their mis-information.

One great thing about internet forums like HBT is the tremendous amount of information that gets shared - as in the quoted post above, especially the list of brewing forefathers.

Unfortunately, when people have strong opinions, it is easy to make things personal and use inappropriate sarcasm, also as in the quoted post above. Sarcasm directed at another member is almost always going to end badly - one way to keep our forum civil is to check ourselves when using sarcasm.

I'm not deleting any posts here, because I think it can be illustrative to see when conversations go off the tracks and into inappropriately uncivil arguments and demeaning of other members. Lets get back on track and keep it civil.

 

[metanoia]

Make beer, make YOUR beer, and enjoy how YOU make it. Who cares how anyone else brews THIER beer, does it really matter? I've never joined a large club or participated in many events because of this whole attitude which seems to be prevalent in our hobby for some strange reason.

*********. I'd venture to say that even people who "argue" on here about their methods and what they think is best, they're really just trying to expand their brewing horizons in the end. And if people on here didn't share what they though was the best method for doing this or that, HBT wouldn't be the amazing resource it is today.

I edited out the personal attack in the comment above. We've asked folks to keep it civil, be respectful of other members and do not demean them. I'm not going to edit this thread if we can't be civil, I'll just close it. Last warning. - Pappers

 

[Revvy]

I do 120 minute boils now...for a few reasons:

Better coagulation
Lower ph
color (carmelization)
maltier (malliard reactions)
higher OG

Also, not necessarily making a better beer, after the first hour, I check my volumes and calculate my boil off, I then adjust the time or strength of the boil to get the exact volume I want. I literally hit my exact volume every time. Finally, with a two hour boil and since I only late hop, I get 1 hour and 40 minutes of free time. I now bottle a batch and dry hop another. One brew day...everything done.

Randy Mosher talks about the 120 minute boil as a lazy mans decoction in Radical...check it out. That is where I heard it and I tried it. LOVED THE results. Such an easy way to balance out a lower ABV but hoppy brew. Which brings me back to my point early in this...try things, experiment and do what you like and what works for you. 120 boils will probably never be the norm or even a minority of brewers, but its what I like for the reasons above and its why I do it.

Is this for your "normal" beers? You know your typical Ipa's, Pales, whatevers, basic every day beers? Like I said earlier I've only ever done it for huge beers- gone longer than 90.

So obviously your pre-boil volumes are adjusted to accommodate this, right?

Interesting, something new to play with. I missed this in Radical Brewing.

 

[bmeyer46]

I'm trying to shorten my brew day..not make it longer!

 

[Golddiggie]

I'm more interested in making great beer than doing it quick.

 

[bmeyer46]

the faster I do it the more I brew! winning! LOL

 

[Golddiggie]

the faster I do it the more I brew! winning! LOL

Bah... Just brew larger batches. How long a batch takes me is how long it takes me. I think the longest, total brew time (from setup to getting back home) was about 8 hours. It was a longer boil, and I had some equipment issues to work through (first time using some new items). I've gone as short as about 5 hours with an hour boil. That's from weighing the grain to cleaning up.

 

[organ]

You been brewing for TWO WHOLE YEARS!!! Wow, you must be some kind of expert by now. Have you thought about just going back to brewing and getting over yourself? Some of us have been homebrewing for over 35 years and after many experiments, bow to the time honored traditions. Those people were not fools, and they had hundreds of years to perfect their knowledge. Why do you suppose Sam Adams brews in the traditional manner? Some of their beers are decoction brewed.

Yeah, concerning the premise for your post, I can agree, you can hear anything anymore because there are a bunch of WANNABEEs only interested in trying to exalt themselves with their supposed knowledge of brewing. My suggestion is to ground oneself in Fix, Donaldson, Miller, Noonan, and those who have proven themselves, then forget about the Johnny-come-lately bunch with all their mis-information.

I've been brewing for thousands of years; don't tell anybody, but, 'twas I who first turned water into wine. Jesus was working on a clone recipe.

 

[skw]

I think the main fallacy in this thinking is that there is a "proper" way to do things.

That.

 

[Nightshade]

I'm more interested in making great beer than doing it quick.

Great beer takes time and in my brewing day what honestly is another hour to get the best results I can? Nothing when the end results speak for themselves.

 

[Krovitz]

I got one. Somehow I got this notion that caramelizing wort is bad and I'll ruin my beer and go to hell. So I made a great beer a while back, but on brew day I had excess sparge water that I boiled along side the kettle and just topped off when I had room. I thought I did something WRONG and brewed the same recipe with the correct amount of sparge water. What resulted was a completely different beer. Not bad (over hopped) but not great. I realized my "mistake" was what made the first batch great. After a little research I learned that boiling a small portion of wort and adding it back is a common practice in some English and Scottish styles of beer. It gives a unique flavor that balanced my first batch perfectly.
I finally understand Rumsfeld; there's things I know I don't know but there's also things I don't know I don't know. Ha. The books are great ways to get started brewing. They give a clear concise path to make beer. We all grow from that and realize there are many paths to take. Papazian has said when the tide rises, all boats go up. HBT is a perfect example of that. Thousands of brewers sharing their experience benefits all of us.

 

[nbrack]

I'm a newbie, so I am still in that filtering stage of figuring out what I like and what works best for me. I love to see all the different viewpoints and methods. At the end of the day it's only beer so it would be nice if a few individuals didn't hold their nose so high in the air.... but sometimes things just come across that way, it is the internet after all and at least Godwin's Law isn't coming up in every thread

I don't have anything to contribute except to say thanks to everyone who gets into conversations and exposes their methods and opinions. All of it advances the hobby in some way and us newbies really have it easy with all of the experimentation that has come before us!

 

[bmeyer46]

I take my time with my all grain beers, but sometimes I just want to cook up something real quick, so I get a kit and do brew on the stove...
I generally do BIAB, but have got some of the one gallon extract kits to fill in...also being less expensive than a full 5 gallon batch, I get to try several different beers for the same money.
If I find something I really like, I'll get a 5 gallon all grain kit.

 

[chicken]

As someone who first got into this hobby more than 30 years ago, I find it interesting to see how some things have changed. I have to admit it's hard to let go of some of the things I "know" --for example, that glass carboys are better than plastic buckets, and the importance of racking into secondary to get the beer off of the yeast.

On the one hand, it's easy to think "What I'm doing has always worked, why change?" On the other hand, I consider that when I first started brewing, I did the best I could with the information available to me at the time. Now I have more information, and newer information, and I still want to do the best I can with what information is available to me.

I figure it's possible to achieve some sort of balance. There's something to be said for holding onto older methods that work well, but there's always something new to be learned, and new things to be tried.

 

[metanoia]

Regarding the 60 vs 90 vs 120 minute boils, at the beginning of the Sunday Session podcast (I'm still working on the first year of the show from back in 2005) they would constantly talk about 90 minute boils in regards to providing clearer beer. I think that Jamil might have even mentioned it as well. I decided to try it out starting a few batches back; I'm just starting to crack the first batch open (which were made without a whirlfloc tablet) and they're a lot clearer than my old brews. *shrug*

This hobby is all about n=1 experiments, and that's what makes it great. That's true for the nanobreweries as well. Even at the microbrewery and macrobrewery levels they have their own methods to make their beer, well, their beer; the only difference is that they need to be consistant because of their brand names. That's really the general difference between us and them when it comes to methodology.

 

[Calichusetts]

Regarding the 60 vs 90 vs 120 minute boils, at the beginning of the Sunday Session podcast (I'm still working on the first year of the show from back in 2005) they would constantly talk about 90 minute boils in regards to providing clearer beer. I think that Jamil might have even mentioned it as well. I decided to try it out starting a few batches back; I'm just starting to crack the first batch open (which were made without a whirlfloc tablet) and they're a lot clearer than my old brews. *shrug*

Thats because longer boils promote better coagulation, better coagulations leads to a better breaks in your beer...therefore clearer beer. There is some German brewery out there that talks about the benefits of longer boils...I found it through google one day

I'm trying to shorten my brew day..not make it longer!

I am shortening my brew week with this method. Everything is done in 5-6 hours. Now I'm not spending another 20 minutes on another day dry hopping and then an hour on another day bottling. Everything is done in one day with longer boils. Longer day...shorter week (if that makes sense)

Is this for your "normal" beers? You know your typical Ipa's, Pales, whatevers, basic every day beers? Like I said earlier I've only ever done it for huge beers- gone longer than 90.

So obviously your pre-boil volumes are adjusted to accommodate this, right?

Interesting, something new to play with. I missed this in Radical Brewing.

I do this for all beers...My mash is 1.45 quarts per pound...then I just upped it on the sparge but you could easily do two sparges or a larger mash. I like the thinner mashes as I have never even seen a dough ball.

Randy talks about it pretty early in the book, I think when he talks about decoctions. I'll try to look it up but its there.

 

[BigRock947]

As someone who first got into this hobby more than 30 years ago, I find it interesting to see how some things have changed. I have to admit it's hard to let go of some of the things I "know" --for example, that glass carboys are better than plastic buckets, and the importance of racking into secondary to get the beer off of the yeast.

On the one hand, it's easy to think "What I'm doing has always worked, why change?" On the other hand, I consider that when I first started brewing, I did the best I could with the information available to me at the time. Now I have more information, and newer information, and I still want to do the best I can with what information is available to me.

I figure it's possible to achieve some sort of balance. There's something to be said for holding onto older methods that work well, but there's always something new to be learned, and new things to be tried.

+1

You said it better than I could.

Also thanks to all of you on HBT, you have helped me to make better beer than I could have on my own.

 

[SixStringBeer]

I do this for all beers...My mash is 1.45 quarts per pound...then I just upped it on the sparge but you could easily do two sparges or a larger mash. I like the thinner mashes as I have never even seen a dough ball.

I was gonna say, that the efficiency is generally better when one plans for a 2 hour boil instead of a 60-90min boil alone generally makes it far superior in my mind. Larger sparge, fewer dough balls, etc. +1 in general on 2 hours over 1 hour on the boil; definitely worth the extra time.

I still can't stress enough that with the increased caramels and melanoidins (malliard reactions) time isn't the sole factor though. Two hours with a tame boil isn't going to contribute much change to the wort; you really need to crank up the heat and keep the boil rolling to get any appreciable difference.

 

[bmeyer46]

perhaps things were done the way they were 100 years ago, because they didn't have the knowledge, testing or equipment that we have now?
I mean things have changed a lot...even in just the last 30 years.

 

[bobbrewedit]

perhaps things were done the way they were 100 years ago, because they didn't have the knowledge, testing or equipment that we have now?
I mean things have changed a lot...even in just the last 30 years.

I think you have to be careful here...when I was born they did everything to convince parents to feed their infants formula...because it was better for the infant...Now they are on the complete oposite end of the spectrum, going so far as to try to force hospitals to no longer keep formula on hand for new parents. Now...if it's 2012, you'd say, see, they've figured it out...if it's 1970, you were screwed by believing in their current "knowledge, testing and equipment".

My point is there is always some "new" way, sometimes good and sometimes bad. BIAB seems to be the newest, easiest, fastest way to AG brew. Awesome, good for folks who brew with this method, it may well be gods gift to home brewers. But certainly the brewers who continue to brew AG without BIAB should not be looked at as "blindly hanging on to old information" or refusing to keep up with the times. This is an example, but applys to the way a lot of people discuss the use of secondaries, decoctions etc.

 

[bmeyer46]

I"ll try anything once, just so I can figure out for myself if it works for me...I usually do BIAB, but have the cooler setup for a mash tun...I've done no chill, yeast starters, harvesting yeast etc...I just like the methods that I use because they are easy for me...I'm never opposed to trying something different if it's feasible for me.

 

[Jon73]

Is BIAB really easier? I get that the grains are all trapped in the bag making it easier to dump, etc. It just doesn't look right for some reason. I know it's whatever works for the individual, I was just looking for some first hand feedback on BIAB. I don't know anybody that does it. I do the picnic cooler, but as soon as my GD parts come in, it's RIMS city.