Two Marzens Experiment (was: random semi-organized chaos, new year resolutions)

General Homebrew Discussion
1

You’ve come to the right place!  May all our posts be archived until kingdom come or until we lose interest, whichever comes first.  Keeping fingers crossed…  ;D

It seems I haven’t brewed for almost 6 months – yikes!  I’m really intrigued by that 100% oat malt idea though, might need to try that sooner than later!  Otherwise I have the ingredients for a 19th century American stock ale on deck for random brewing purposes, hopefully sometime in February.

I still need to bottle all my cider and cyser from October, it’s all done and ready to rock.  The wild fermented one in the back of the fridge is not bad but not great either, has a slight acetone flavor.  The others are great.  I made four batches in all.

Sometime this year I really still want to run an exbeeriment to determine the impact of high vs. low efficiency on finished beer flavor.  I have the experience to dial in my efficiency to whatever I want, from 50s to 90s, so I figure I’m the right guy to run this, with the only variables being efficiency and total weight of malt.  Someone give me a round tuit again, as I seem to have lost the last one.

Feel free to insert your own random comments here – might possibly turn into an accidental interesting thread, maybe, or maybe not.  Happy brewing, all.

2

I’ll be interested to see the results of the efficiency xbmt, Dave. And the 19th century stock ale sounds pretty interesting, too. And tasty !

3

The intersting part of an experiment like that will be to keep the OG the same even with different efficiencies.

4

Dave, I’m curious to see what you find with that experiment. I feel pretty confident that you’d find a difference between the extremes, but the real question becomes whether there’s a “sweet spot” that produces the best results, and what the delta in efficiency needs to be to reliably detect a difference between samples. Also, at the extremes you need to be careful that any difference is attributable to the difference in efficiency itself rather than from changes in process needed to get those efficiencies.

5

Yeah, having a constant OG and process (as mentioned ) would definitely be critical to getting solid data.  As would blind triangles to see how easily differences are recognized by a group.

6

Just musing on 2 batches with different efficiency same OG problem…

If you know the pre boil gravity and your boil off rate you should be able to adjust boil length on the 2 batches to hit the same target OG. Lengthen higher preboil batch’s boil and or shorten the lower preboil batch’s boil.

Also, after boiling you could adjust the OG of the batch with higher OG by diluting to match the lower OG.

I think you should set some boundaries. Try to keep the boil length of both batches within 5% of each other and limit dilution to 5% of the post boil volume. 5% is a swag.

7

If you adjust the boil length, then the hopping won’t be the same…right?

8

I add time before the 60 minute addition. That’s why I mentioned knowing the preboil gravity and the boil off rate.

I have occasionally done this to boil off excess water from sparge when I ended up with too much.

9

I’ll try to remember to measure preboil gravity to avoid addition of that variable into the experiment.  I intend to have nearly identical boil volumes, boil times, IBUs, etc.  The ONLY variables should be efficiency and mass of grains… well, that, and maybe the variable of whether to adjust all grains or only the base malt.  But then if I were to do a SMASH, then that one would be eliminated as well – I had not considered that.  Maybe I should do that.  Then there’s no argument over “he reduced all the specialty grains, not just the base malt” or vice-versa, yadda yadda.  Yeah, I guess I’d better do that.  Base malt vs. all malt adjustments for efficiency will need to be a different experiment, which I can save for some later date… maybe in 2019 or so.  :wink:

10

Oh yeah… here’s the thread I was really looking for.  Too bad I didn’t find this until AFTER I already brewed my experiment.

Bring out your dead… KLACK!

If anyone’s interested, I got a round tuit.  Experiment formally in progress.  Tee hee.  ;D 8)

It will be a tale of two Marzens, same recipe, different mashes and different efficiencies:

Batch #1: Decocted, sparged, 81% efficiency.

Batch #2: Single infused, no-sparge, 64% efficiency.

You could say that it’s a double or triple variable test, not suitable for blind triangles, and I don’t care.  I just want to see if no-sparge is as awesome as I think it is, and decoction as much a waste of time as I think it might be, even if I did do a fast one in less than 4 hours.  Git er done and raise more questions than answers, or something.  ;D

I was shooting for an OG of 1.054 originally.  Unfortunately, Batch #1 the gravity was a touch low, 1.049.  Then I adjusted the malt bill down slightly for Batch #2, but it still turned out just a tad high, 1.053.  You figure that’s close enough for comparison purposes?  The efficiencies are still way different with a spread of 17% with only 4 gravity points difference.  Or should I add extract to Batch #1 to match Batch #2?  I don’t want to fiddle too much if I can help it.  I’m thinking I’ll just leave it, cuz you can’t probably taste 4 gravity points difference especially after it’s all fermented out – final gravity points will still be pretty close within 2-3 points of each other probably in the low teens.

Also got around to finally bottling that cyser today that I made last Oct/Nov.  Smelled great.  Too bad I can’t drink today.  But ahh… it was a really, really good day today.  I feel like I’ve redeemed myself slightly.  :smiley:

More facts and figures:

Both batches were BIAB on my stovetop, 1.3 gallons each.  Yeah, yeah, I don’t drink much and wanted the day done before midnight.  What time is it?  The clock on the wall says 12-o-clock.

Adding up all the rests for the Batch #1 double decoction, I determined that for the average molecule in contact with enzymes in a temperature range of 140-165 F, the total time in that temp range was about 55 minutes, plus or minus 5 minutes.  Overall average rest temperature was about 153-154 F for the most time.  So…

For Batch #2, I went ahead and did the single infusion at an average 153 F, with a range of about 147-156 F for various readings.  Temperature was stable in the 150s until the last ~10 minutes of the mash, which is way beyond the 40 minute mashes that I’m used to anyway so I know it didn’t really matter much.

And oops.  I forgot to vorlauf Batch #1.  Batch #2 was real chunky so I just HAD to vorlauf.  Batch #1 looks like 80% scrambled eggs in the fermenter.  Batch #2 just got done, looks hazy still.  EDIT: After 12 hours, they looked basically identical – see photo below.

Recipe… not these exact ingredients, I had to make a couple minor substitutions and didn’t use any chocolate malt, but in the spirit of the following:

vienna.jpg
vienna.jpg811×915 111 KB

Speaking of which… the only hops used were my homegrown Hallertau, 2015 crop, estimated alpha 4.8%, 60-minute addition only, no late hops.

Boil lengths were identical, 65 minutes each.  Hop additions were identical, 0.33 oz each at 60.  Used same salts in each to hit Munich water profile.

Malt bills had all the same percentages of each, but single infusion no-sparge Batch #2 had more total mass 2.95 lb versus decocted sparged Batch #1, 2.18 lb.  Yes, I crunched a ton of numbers to come up with all this junk, and it turned out reasonably awesome I think.

I’ve gotta go to bed.  Talk to some of ya’ll tomorrow.

11

Boy am I tired this morning.

55 F was as cold as I could get the fermenters this morning before work, so I went ahead and pitched at 55 F.  Yeast is WLP830, a liter split between them.  I’ve got the fermenters in a cooler with ice bricks and will need to trade those out in the evening to keep cool, otherwise it’s about 65 F in my basement.  I might get a little fruity esters, but well, that’s what I get for not having a fermentation fridge and making lagers in the middle of friggin August.  Besides, I’ve always wanted to ferment a lager in the upper 50s and see what the effects might be.  So you could say this is a fourth or fifth experiment embedded into all this.

Here’s what the twins looked like immediately prior to pitching yeast this morning:

TaleTwoMarzens.jpg
TaleTwoMarzens.jpg877×683 83.1 KB

12

24 hours after pitching (both pitched at the same time) and both fermenters are fermenting! airlocks going.  Batch #1 looks hazy orange like a latte, while Batch #2 looks darker and more clear.  I expect this might soon change when high krausen is reached later today/tomorrow, but don’t know.  Seems odd that they would look so different.  I should have taken a picture.  Temperature was down to 52 F yesterday evening then rose to 57 F last night so I added several ice bricks this morning.

13

So Ca + Mg would be 100 ppm. That’s a bit lower than Martin’s pale ale profile with Ca+Mg = 160. Right?

14

If memory serves, Ca was about 75 and Mg about 15 or 20?  So yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re right.  You think there’s a water thing to the difference in protein breaky scrambled eggy stuff?  The salt additions for each twin were identical.

15

Ouch sorry should have been posted in https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=27380.msg357038#msg357038

16

No problem Frank.

17

Apparently your thread is so randomly chaotic whatever that you have a reply for anything that is posted here.

18

Understood – I’ll go lie down now.

19

Update:

Two marzens, same recipe, different efficiencies, different mash methods, one sparged and one not, everything else the same…

Are now in bottles after just 14 days with the help of gelatin and ice.  They look and taste a bit different… one with a touch more haze, one with diacetyl and the other not.  I’m hoping the diacetyl disappears with a few weeks of age as has been my experience in the past.  One I feel also has a much richer malt flavor than the other.  Final gravities were also quite different, 3 points from one another.  Feel free to take guesses as to what’s what; however, I shall most likely need to restructure this very confusing thread later anyway.

Cheers.

20

I just got through blind triangling myself.  I singled out the odd one but damn, they were close.  Initial results are forthcoming within the next few days…