At my previous house I would often Brew right in the kitchen. I re-jetted my stove to get more horsepower out of it and it was just enough to brew 10 gal batches with insulation on the kettle. Which I still use by the way, and always have. Now I have a propane burner that I can just about set the kettle on fire if I want to and I think what’s going on is that the boil is far too hard and is creating all kinds of problems with hop harshness. That beer had Cascade in the mash and Magnum in the boil for the entire time and I’m thinking they were getting utilized far too much. Some of the early batches I did at that home using biab were positively stellar. And I know for a fact they couldn’t have been boiled as hard because I hadn’t re-jetted the stove yet.
Maybe I’m wrong and maybe it doesn’t mean anything. The only information I have is my own notes and what I can read online. Nobody can fix my beer from the other side of the earth. So I’m going to give it a try, for better or for worse.
It’s great to get ideas from the web and from “experts”, but in the end beer is an art that is guided by science rather than science itself. The end result is experienced with the senses the same as music or visual arts. The only “facts” that matter are whether you enjoy the process and the beer itself. If I read an idea that sounds like it may make my beer and/or brewday more enjoyable, then I try it out. If it works for me, I add it to my toolbox. If it doesn’t, then I discard it.
Well, I’m open to other suggestions. My notes from years ago didn’t include all the details they do now. I am more or less reading notes from all batches of the era and trying to put together a timeline of new equipment and techniques and then backing into what I should have made note of in other batches. Not exactly “science”… I was trying to build brewing skills, not secretarial…
I write down a lot more opinion and speculation stuff nowadays, regardless of how ridiculous I think it is. I’ve wanted to have those ridiculous thoughts on paper more than once, and never wrote them down. Also, I used Excel from very early on as a brewing notes DB. But that was more for numbers and that sort of thing. Lots of the text stuff was only handwritten on the sheets I was using for the brew day. So, while there’s lots of stuff, it’s not so easily searchable. I guess I should be happy I still have it all. I just wish I’d written more.
I listened to the podcast Ron did on Scottish brewing. I guess if I want to brew a historical Scottish style, I’m restricted to 1.025-1.140, hops from near 0 to 8 pounds per barrel with a pound per barrel of dry hops. Color is restricted to 3 srm through about 400, and age is the one relative constant where I need to drink it young! :D As long as I stay within that, anything goes!
This is solid advice and is how I developed the recipes I brew most often. Many of those recipes were starting points to what I now consider my own recipes. Some of them I never changed except to match to the efficiency of my system and to use my own hops. At very least brewing them straight from the book as is gave me a set of reference points that I’ve used when creating a brand new recipes.
I consider myself to be an intermediate-level brewer. I have a lot of questions, but I’ve got the basics covered, brew drinkable beers, and have never had to dump a batch.
A lot of my attempts start with a beer I drink and I think is pretty good but . . .
Fill in the blank
Too hoppy, not hoppy enough
ABV too high or too low,
I would prefer a different yeast because . . .
Can’t get that precise malt or I don’t like that because . . .
I’ve never been afraid to modify existing recipes or to read many recipes on a given style and create a “composite recipe” that is different from each, sometimes “twisting the normal parameters of a style” to suit my preferences.
Randy Mosher’s mastering Homebrew is my go-to source for answering some of the questions I have, for generating ideas, and for surveying the boundaries of a given style. His book has lots of charts, graphs, and illustrations that make it much easier for me to find the info I need as compared to other books on brewing. I would recommend it to anyone.
Do I get it right the first time? Of course not. Is it ever perfect? No, but the joy is in the journey and the anticipation of waiting for the yeast to work its magic so you can have that first taste.
And, when you get a compliment being able to say, “thanks, that’s my own recipe.”
I would love to see Designing Great Beers (2nd Ed.). The book has a lot of really good info on commercial and homebrew recipes, and I’d still recommend it to anyone. But the market has moved a bunch since 1996. It’d be awesome to see an update with new styles and a refreshed data set.
Ah, well. It’s probably a losing proposition financially, anyways. It would be a cool protect but with 9000-ish breweries just in the US, it would be a massive data collection, collation, and analysis project … before you even start trying write it into a book.
Maybe we could get all the brewers to agree to encode their recipes in the same markup language and then write some automated processing in Python (cuz everyone seems to use now)…
There are a lot of stats from commercial recipes in there, too.
But you’re right, a larger preponderance of the tables and recipe analysis is from the 2nd Round NHC recipes than I was remembering. I was remembering it as 50/50, but it’s more like 85/15 home-to-commercial.
A lot of the commercial stuff I was remembering is historic, too, and wouldn’t necessarily need to be redone.
