… or maybe better to just say that I occasionally **** up. :D I had S-04 up and running awhile back and decided to make a recipe I have made for 20+ years… Memory Lapse Pale Ale which is really, probably an amber ale. 2-row, crystal, wheat and 25 IBUs of Mt. Hood. It’s very balanced when made properly but it’s precariously close to being too malty so caution is the word. I typically make it with 1056 or WLP001 but here the S-04 didn’t attenuate the same and the beer was overly malty. I could have dropped a muslin bag of Mt. Hood into the keg for 2-3 days and I think it would have done the beer up righteous but instead I weighed out 1 gram of calcium sulfate and dropped into some filtered water, heated it and added that right to the keg. It worked. The beer is much crisper. No, I don’t like doing this. Ever. But it’s nice to know you can correct something post-fermentation like that. This is why I’m a hobby brewer and not a pro. :P Cheers Beerheads.
Nice recovery!
excellent experiment.
i love any hobby like this. i was very into cheesemaking several years ago, but i started to realize it has a much, much steeper cost and learning curve than homebrewing and the excellent cheese at the store was coming out just barely more expensive than my homemade stuff. after one total wreck of a cheese that become utterly covered in bluemold of unknown origin i decided i was done with it.
When we design a recipe, we have all these pieces pushing the beer in various directions… malty, crisp, hoppy, balanced, etc. The water, the condition of the hops, the specific malt you bought that time, how the yeast attenuates, etc. all impact the final beer. I’m often trying to find a balance in my beer that works for my tastebuds and I’m right there most of the time but sometimes I whiff. If you like IPAs with 70, 80, 90 IBUs all the time you may not have the same issue although you certainly could. My water leans towards sulfate so adding chloride is common for me but I could overdo that as well. As recipe designers we always have to keep all these variables in mind and make sure there aren’t too many things pushing in the same direction. I should have known on this one… S-04 wasn’t going to attenuate like 1056/WLP001 so I needed to do something to make the beer crisper and I didn’t see it until it was too late.
Thanks for sharing. It’s great to learn from somebody else’s experience along with my own.
We’re all learning from each other, to be sure. Many of us brew by ourselves too which is interesting. When you brew with someone else or even a group, all kinds of things come up that you may not have thought of.
This is primarily why I never graduated beyond mozzarella/ricotta/paneer and a few soft cheeses. It’s tough enough when you brew a mediocre batch of beer or two that may take a few weeks to replace. I can only imagine the frustration of time wasted from a bad batch of aged cheese.
from what i gathered, you just need another degree of sanitation compared to homebrewing for cheeses that arent quite hard. it was not easy to break into though, and again - if i could get get all the beer i wanted from the store for a reasonable price i would homebrew a lot less tbh.
Interesting to talk about different motivations for brewing. I can get pretty much anything I want from the stores here. I brew for the brewing, not the beer. But I certainly understand why you feel different.
Same here. I’ve reduced most of my beers to 2.5 gallons so that I can brew more because I enjoy the brewing.
But I will say that the drinking part is a HUGE bonus! 
It’s a consuming hobby.
i know you’ve noted this before and to try to clarify again, it’s just that 1. Ontario has a gov’t monopoly on all beer sold at the LCBO (the place that gets good beer), “the beer store” corporation is owned by Mol-Coor/InBev and Sleeman/Sapporo and has very limited choices-basically pale lagers and strong lagers. 2. The taxes are probably the highest on alcohol in the western world forcing the prices up. 3. The govt sets and has just gone through a sin tax style price raise across the entire board becuase they deemed people are drinking too much.
in short the selection is highly limited (no surprises or hidden gems), they favour boring and conservative ontario craft brewers and they set the price of it both to rake in cash and punish consumers. i splurged and got some belgians on the weekend.
330ml bottles: westmalle tripel - $5.60, rochefort 8: $5.20 and some others. a 500ml can of wernesgruner is now $3.10. a quick google turns up a 4 pack of tallboy wernesgruner is $5.99, so half the price. and that is in spite of the insane buying and logistics power the LCBO has.
landmark US craft brewery beers from the 2000s to present simply dont exist here and mostly never have. so i have attempted to brew things like them over time. especially strong craft beers, stouts/porters and oak aged beers, they are very rare here.
i find the brewing process very interesting and satisfying when it all goes well but i just dont call it “fun” i guess. when i have more freetime on my hands i might be able to enjoy it more then.
I like the brewing specifically when I have a beer pictured in my mind and I want to design a recipe and make the beer a reality. Sometimes this happens with a beer I have tried somewhere and I want to make my own version of it but it could also just be a “vision” of a beer and I want to brew it to see how close the real thing comes to what I pictured. Having draft beer at home is something that has spoiled me. Having people over and drinking from the taps is always fun and my friends, family and neighbors always like the concept of it. Some think that “my little hobby” has been taken too far. ;) Let them think that. There was a taco commercial a long time ago “I like making them. Then I like eating them!”… I’m that way with beer. 
Talk about continued learning…I’m working on the presentation Drew and I are doing at HBC. Modern Hopping Techniques in WCIPA. To paraphrase Matt Damon, we’re gonna science the sh*t out of it. It’s simply amazing the amount of research that’s been done in brewing the last few years.
… and we’re all better for it.
As long as we learn how to interpret and apply it. Unfortunately it seems that some have problems with that.
I suppose. I feel like the brewing world is lucky to have people who like to experiment, crunch numbers and dispel myths. If you run across something for the first time, it’s almost always true that someone else has already been there and has some useful advice. It’s funny how your ideas about brewing change over time too… if I had a bad batch years ago, dumping it would make me physically ill (OMG all that work and expense!!) and now if I have something that just didn’t come out the way I expected… toodles! You’re taking up valuable real estate inside one of my kegs and it’s time for you to go! :D This experiment I did with the CaSO4… I had done that before. But if it hadn’t worked as I envisioned, I would have just retired this batch and moved on.
My Baja yeast Int’l Lager batch didn’t turn out as envisioned. I may try your Gypsum trick, give it some time, and see if that picks it up a bit. Too bad, too. I really wanted to like this yeast. At this point, the NovaLager batch knocks it out of the water.
I’ve just had my first taste of my first Novalager pils. Initial impression is that it’s a great yeast.
That’s discouraging. Please describe what your experiencing because I am SO looking forward to using it. If you’re saying that the beer isn’t “crisp” or something it would be helpful to know. I know you use RO water and my water is VERY different so not sure how relevant it is but I really like WLP940 and I was hoping this was a dry version of it.