May/June issue pitching rate article

[weithman5]

just read the article last night. nice job. i think it would be interesting to see a comparison with “over pitching”  if i recall (yes it was last night but my faculties are limited) you pitched under at about half of normal ( 3 and 7.5) what would happen if a beer was pitched at twice normal?  just curious.  of course now i am going to have to play around

[punatic]

@blatz

@punatic

Perhaps things have changed since I stopped judging.   As often as not the beer being judged had plenty of room for improvement.  Occasionally there was what I called a bolt of lightning - that beer or mead that sat me back in my seat and made me say, “Wow!  That is amazing!”

Perhaps the scoring system has changed too; you can score 40+ now?

I’ve only been judging about 6 years or so, but in listening to some of the old guys in my club, judging 15 years ago was actually fairly easy - for a flight of 8 beers, maybe 4 were drinkable and not clearly infected or fermeted too warm, etc. And of those 4 there were usually 1 or 2 that clearly stood above the rest.  Maybe this is similar to the experience you had?

I guess with the popularity of homebrewing and much more easily accessible info on brewing better beer thanks to forums like these and publications by the likes of Gordon, Jamil, Palmer, etc., the entries have generally improved across the board to the point where now 6 of those 8 in the example above are solid beers.

My comments above were in slight jest, but the fact is I judge a flight of 6 amber/dark lagers a few weeks ago and had 4 beers that were worthy of 40+ scores, the best of which it turns out was a vienna lager by our very own forum friend “Spanishcastleales”.  I made sure to save that and the dunkel I was really fond of as a reward for all the writing  ;D

Max possible score is 50 nowadays.

http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=7350.30

[a10t2]

@weithman5

i think it would be interesting to see a comparison with “over pitching”

That was my original thought, but to do triangle tests on three pitching rates everyone would have to get nine samples, which would either mean brewing multiple batches (and introducing that as a variable) or cutting the sample size by two-thirds.

If enough people were interested in an over-pitching experiment, I’d certainly be willing to do it again.

[johnf]

@denny

The results seem to mirror the conflicting opinions of the “experts”…some say under pitching produces more esters, others say it produces fewer.

Maybe this is why you put “experts” in quotes but I find that people who write about fermentation professionally or academically tend to say lower pitching rates produce less esters and people who write about it as a hobby tend to say the opposite.

So it’s like that Five Star 5.2 stuff, it works as long as you don’t check the pH. Under pitching produces more esters as long as you don’t have a large and trained tasting panel or a gas chromatograph.

[nateo]

@johnf

Under pitching produces more esters as long as you don’t have a large and trained tasting panel or a gas chromatograph.

Exactly! It just FEELS like it’s more Belgiany. Underpitching is cool and different, so it must make your beer cool and different too.