Two recipe kits in one batch

[drs650]

Hi All - new to the forum, and pretty new to brewing beer. Wanted to share an experience, and ask if anyone else has advice / wisdom / related anecdotes to share.

I brewed my 3rd batch this past Saturday, first two were an Irish Red Ale and an Autumn Amber Ale. This latest batch was a German Weissbier. All of these have been extract brewing recipes, and all the kits have come from Milwaukee Home Brewing. Everything has been good so far, quite tasty in fact, but I definitely see the one-note, one-dimension drawback to extract brewing.

In any case, I decided to try something different. I happened to end up with 2 of the wheat beer recipe kits, so I decided to take a gamble. I brewed both kits (2 gallons of extract, 2 batches of grains and hops) all at once, in 4 gallons of water. I split the wort into 2 fermentors (2 gallons apiece) and then added 3 gallons of distilled water to each. Trying to end up with 10 gallons of beer, and have a little more runway for drinking between batches. As far as I can tell, it ought to work fine, but I'm curious if anyone else has done this and what were the results. Any advice to share?

Truthfully, the horse is already out of the barn, so it's not like I can change anything now. Nevertheless, I thought I would recount the experience and seek any ex post facto wisdom you care to share. In a month I'll update with the results.

many thanks,

David
'Do Better' Brewing

 

[unionrdr]

Don't see why it shouldn't work as long as you got the boil times right & had good sanitation. Not to mention,a healthy yeast pitch at the right temp.

 

[jwalk4]

Did you hit your gravities you expected?

Other than that, I side with unionrdr, you should be good to go!

 

[hypergolic]

You ended up with twice the wort you would have had you brewed only one batch right? If so yeah that should be fine. The reason I ask is that hop utilization changes with the gravity of the wort. But if I read your post correctly it sounds like you doubled the water also.

 

[Matt3989]

I disagree about your one note one dimension thing with extract though. While AG does give you quite quite a bit more freedom, i wouldn't say extract brewing limits you all that much. There are plenty of delicious extract brews out there.

I recently brewed a vanilla cream ale from a recipe i found on here and modified, after the goat week of bottle conditioning, it tastes delicious. And right now i have a dry stout in my fermenter that i plan on racking over chocolate nibs, vanilla beans, and tart cherries (i might add some lactose and make it a sweet stout after i taste the final product, because the cacao might make it overly bitter, maybe bottle with cane sugar too)

I got a little of topic, but my point is, just because you are doing extract brews doesn't mean you have to be limited. My advice is, take your extra down time and formulate your own recipe...

P.S. If you take my advice, i highly recommend spending $24 on beersmith

 

[mcspanner]

I went on an extract brewing adventure, off piste so to speak, this morning.

I saw a can of Geordie Winter Warmer in a discount store so thought I'd try it out as a starting point for experimentation.

It said on the instructions that the can should be added to 23 ltrs of water for a malty 4% ish brew, but I had other plans. I had 1kg of wheat DME which I boiled up with a tea made of mulled wine spice bags ( orange rind, cinnamon, clove and ginger, with an extra pinch of ground nutmeg) added the can of winter warmer and topped up to 10 ltrs giving me a wort of OG 1080.

The can came with a sachet of muntons ale yeast but i put that to one side and pitched some rehydrated Brewferm Blanche dried yeast and yeast nutrient in there and 9 hours later it has already started to bubble away nicely.

This really is an unknown beast but I'm hoping to get a rich spiced dunkel weissen type beer with characteristic fruitiness from that Belgian yeast, but it's just a guess at the minute. The wort sample was very tasty though.

 

[drs650]

I haven't actually tried testing SG yet, just been working off of the suggested fermentation times and hoping for the best. I expect within the next couple batches I'll start taking that measurement, but thus far I've stayed pretty simple. thanks for the suggestion though.

Did you hit your gravities you expected?

Other than that, I side with unionrdr, you should be good to go!

 

[drs650]

That's correct, I doubled the water as well.

You ended up with twice the wort you would have had you brewed only one batch right? If so yeah that should be fine. The reason I ask is that hop utilization changes with the gravity of the wort. But if I read your post correctly it sounds like you doubled the water also.

 

[drs650]

Thanks very much - I agree with your assessment. I've only scratched the surface on extract brewing, working on my third batch currently, and the only real experimentation I've done so far has been to try doubling the recipe to get 10 gallons at once. I'm sure there are a ton of more complicated recipe kits, and lots of fooling around I can do. Definitely appreciate the tips. Thanks!

I disagree about your one note one dimension thing with extract though. While AG does give you quite quite a bit more freedom, i wouldn't say extract brewing limits you all that much. There are plenty of delicious extract brews out there.

I recently brewed a vanilla cream ale from a recipe i found on here and modified, after the goat week of bottle conditioning, it tastes delicious. And right now i have a dry stout in my fermenter that i plan on racking over chocolate nibs, vanilla beans, and tart cherries (i might add some lactose and make it a sweet stout after i taste the final product, because the cacao might make it overly bitter, maybe bottle with cane sugar too)

I got a little of topic, but my point is, just because you are doing extract brews doesn't mean you have to be limited. My advice is, take your extra down time and formulate your own recipe...

P.S. If you take my advice, i highly recommend spending $24 on beersmith

 

[drs650]

Just a quick update on this thread. The 2-batches in 1 experiment is complete. The beer is done bottle conditioning, and I've had a couple so far. It's excellent. One of the best brews I've done so far. Thanks for the support everyone.

 

[unionrdr]

Glad to here it turned out well. I used the stuff in my avatar for one 6G beer. known down ynder as "toucan" (two can) brews. I just added to that to make an extract version of the old #3 Burton ale of the 1890's.