The 'Top Tips' Thread!

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adm

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by adm » Fri Sep 10, 2010 4:29 pm

Me too...... different beers for the joy of experimenting, then tweaking them little by little to perfect them!

WishboneBrewery
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Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by WishboneBrewery » Fri Sep 10, 2010 6:49 pm

variety and experimenting, try lots of ideas, then then good ones get a repeat brew with tweaks. (the old 'Its hard to make Bad beer' is worth remembering)
I currently only have 3 beers I've made more than once, my Otter Dark Stout started as an extract recipe and then AG and then a tweaked second AG. My Over-run By Yanks APA gained its second brew a short while ago with some changes as i wanted to further emphasise the hop character. My Bluebird type clones-ish beers are technically on their third iteration now though the 3rd stretched the theme further.
I made a May Day beer that is definitely going to be re-brewed.

More! ;)

Piscator

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by Piscator » Sat Sep 11, 2010 10:47 am

My biggest revelation has been the recognition of the taste that I have always thought of as "homebrew twang" - which has made an intermittent appearance in my all grain brewing.

The "twang" I have decided is down to oxidisation and was rammed home recently when I bottled a batch of beer which tasted superb from the fermenter (hic!).
I couldn't find my little bottler stem so bottled straight from the tap - careful though I was it was nearly impossible to do without entraining some air.
Sure enough the bottled beer several weeks later has the "twang" and is nothing like the superb ale I tasted from the fermenter.
Looking back, brews I have dropped into a keg using a length of tube or bottles filled using the little bottler have all been free of the taste, however the ones where I have been a little less careful about moving the beer have been affected by this defect.

So my "top tip" is to put as much care and effort into the racking and filling of fermented beer, as you lavish on the brewing process itself - and be careful to avoid aeration.

Piscator

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by Piscator » Sat Sep 11, 2010 11:31 am

Chris-x1 wrote:
Looking back, brews I have dropped into a keg using a length of tube or bottles filled using the little bottler have all been free of the taste, however the ones where I have been a little less careful about moving the beer have been affected by this defect.

So my "top tip" is to put as much care and effort into the racking and filling of fermented beer, as you lavish on the brewing process itself - and be careful to avoid aeration.
That's a good example of what I just said above - that's absolutely true with dried yeasts a presumably some wet yeasts - however I have found a lot of wet yeasts are very forgiving when it comes to post fermentation transfers- -they would appear to quicklyl utilise o2 before it causes oxidation - Ringwood brewery and Whitesheild yeast are particularly good examples.

I'm not suggesting care isn't needed, that's a great tip imo but if I were coming from a position of only using wet yeasts which were better at reducing the effects of oxygen on beer then I may dismiss the need for filler and transfer pipe and it would be genuine advice because my experience would suggest they weren't necessary.

One of our members who has won a first prize for his beer used to rack directly from the FV tap - he produced a video showing him doing it. However he used crouch vale yeast which is a very lively yeast which happens to be good at utilizing o2, had it been so4 it would have knackered his beer and he certainly wouldn't win any prizes with it.

There's no substitute for practical experience.
Hi Chris, thats all good stuff to know - I have generally used SO4 (and always dried yeasts) however I have just recieved my first vial of White Labs WLP002 for my next brew - my first with liquid yeast. (I've also just had a sack of malt delivered so busy times ahead :mrgreen: )
I have decided that after a lot of hopping between recipes and types, I still dont know anything like enough about each of the individual ingredient characteristics and the influence each one has in a recipe as there's almost no recipes I've brewed more than twice. (and thats after about 6 years of AG brewing) Lately I have been making some single grain and single hop brews which have been very rewarding, and have decided that the way forward for me to learn more, is to pick a couple of recipes and work on achieving consistecy of quality through careful focus of ALL the parameters - making small step changes one at a time.
I will be working on a London Pride"ish" recipe and a mild recipe until I'm happy I can produce the same beer every time to the quality I want - and understand why I was able to do it.

It's difficult to resist the urge to flit from one style to another when you start out with grain brewing as there are almost no limits.
I got a copy of GW's BYOBRAAH when I started (along with Dave Lines Big Book of Brewing) which became my bibles and taught me the practical aspects of the process, and my my mind was boggled by the number of recipes I could produce - and initially I set about trying as many as I could, and was drinking my way through about 120 pints a month for a few months to clear space in the barrels and bottles to be able to make the next one :mrgreen:
I soon reached the conclusion that this was not good for my health though and throttled production back :oops:
For me now, it's all about getting a consistent result that I can be proud of.

Cheers
Steve

Piscator

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by Piscator » Sat Sep 11, 2010 5:09 pm

Chris-x1 wrote:btw imo you wont get London Pride right without brewers caramel.
Don't mind that, as long as I can consistently produce a good beer - somewhere in the vicinity of Pride, hence the London Pride"ish" :lol:

Dr. Dextrin

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by Dr. Dextrin » Sat Sep 11, 2010 7:21 pm

I'm with Chris on this one, mainly. I brewed for many years (ooh) quite long time ago now and flitted from style to style - mostly using recipes but with my own "guesstimated" adjustments.

When I started brewing again seriously I decided to take the opposite approach and concentrate on perfecting the beers I really like. It's really paying off now. The thing I've learned is that the good commercial brews have all been tweaked to perfection, that's why they're so perfect! In comparison, most of the clone recipes out there aren't going to give you the same quality. Not only do they not quite taste the same, they don't taste quite as *good* either. Get a glass of the real McCoy and drink it alongside your clone (and be honest with yourself) and you'll see what I mean.

Partly that's because everyone's water/equipment/technique is different, but partly it's because most of the clone recipes haven't been tweaked to match the real thing very closely. In fact quite a lot of the recipes in books are just fairly obvious variations on a few generic recipes and quite a few don't much resemble what they're meant to be IMHO, sometimes laughably so. To get a better match, you'll soon find you need to use unexpected ingredients, techniques, yeasts, etc. that are the brewers' little secrets that they don't normally reveal. Commercial brewers do this because it makes better beer, so there's a lot to be gained by figuring out what they're doing. And that needs experimentation, lots of it. Fortunately, this seems to get easier with a little practice and once you've figured out what to do it's usually fairly clear that you're on the right track.

But I do accept that a lot of fun can be had just brewing different styles. It's just that perfection has to be worked at, like with anything.

Trunky

:)

Post by Trunky » Sat Sep 11, 2010 7:37 pm

:)
Last edited by Trunky on Sat Oct 22, 2011 3:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Piscator

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by Piscator » Sat Sep 11, 2010 7:49 pm

Trunky wrote:I approach brewing in a similar way, I like pale beers* and after fiddling with a 100% MO grain bill and trying different mash temps and hops
I was honestly surprised at how good a beer can be made just using MO and Styrian Goldings.

raiderman

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by raiderman » Sat Sep 11, 2010 10:43 pm

wheelers original and best book has a recipe called Caroline, pale malt and goldings and nowt else. Its the basis for everything I brew. I play with the hop loading and types, I add carapils and munich or vienna and every once in a while I go back to the original recipe just in case I forget how good it is. And then I think I can tweak it and awty I go again.

lancsSteve

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by lancsSteve » Tue Sep 14, 2010 5:30 pm

raiderman wrote:wheelers original and best book has a recipe called Caroline, pale malt and goldings and nowt else. Its the basis for everything I brew.
Shall have to brew that I recon - tis indeed a great book!

EccentricDyslexic

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by EccentricDyslexic » Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:09 pm

How to rescue a bland beer- drop a quater to a half of a hop aroma tablet in the keg....2 days later it makes a bland brew a hoppy session beer!

Steve

andybiochem

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by andybiochem » Tue Nov 23, 2010 3:44 pm

My background... been brewing for a year now. Done 21 ag brews ranging from very pale 100% MO IPAs to dark stouts.

Some tips from me:

- When experimenting, brew in small batches (10 - 15L). Then if you end up with slop it dosen't matter so much pouring it away.

- If you do end up with slop, bottle some of it anyway and give it to non-brewing mates to try. Some of my disasters (ferment too high, too much crystal, etc) I've been told are my "best yet" with demads for more #-o !!!

- If you don't like dark beers, brew just one small batch of double stout with extra black malt. Once it's ready, FORCE yourself to drink it. Pour a bottle when you get home from work and sip it throughout the evening. It might take you months, bottle by bottle, but once you've finished drinking the whole batch you'll have a new-found respect for drinks like Guinness / Milds. You might even brew one again! I did this, and I can't tell you how much more enjoyable it is to go to non-cask ale pubs/bars that have Guinness draught on tap. It's the closest thing to real beer you'll find in those places. It also means that I don't have to ask "it's not a dark one is it?" when ordering real ales...I really enjoy dark beers now after years and years of avoiding them.

- Brew some small experimental ales with high %s of speciality malts. E.g. brew a 85% Pale with 15% crystal malt beer...or brew 85% Pale with 15% Chocolate malt....or 15% Amber malt....etc etc. You'll soon realise what flavour each type of malt imparts. For me, I can now spot crystal and black malt a mile off.

- Brew an IPA with 100 IBUs. Just so you know for definate what 'bitterness' is, and what it does to the drinkability of a beer. See what your mates think of a 100IBU beer. For me, it's the perfect bitterness for an IPA, but my mates can't get through a glass of it!

- As a rule of thumb for a good hoppy IPA, multiply your brew length (in Litres) by 15, to give you an idea (in grams) of how much hops to use. E.g. 15L brew...15 * 15 = 225g. Most of this should go in the boil in the last 15 mins....I know this ingores the alpha content of the hops, but is a good rule of thumb.

- Grab 2 bottles of every brew you do, and stick them somewhere difficult to get at (e.g. the attic). Retrieve tham after a10 - 12 months to see what real conditioning is all about. I'm yet to brew an ale that didn't taste much better after extended conditioning (except for my crazy hopped IPAs, which lose their hoppyness within a month or so). I've only been brewing for about a year, so have only tried my first 4 ales....but I'd bet they'd win awards now!!! ha ha.

- A cloudy beer when bottled, will change flavour much more rapidly than a clear beer bottled, and probably not for the best. This will prevent you from ever 'knowing' what changes to your recipes makes to the actual flavour of the beer. If it's not clear after fining, fine, fine, and fine again.

- If you have multiple thermometers / hydrometers, pick one (the most expensive one, or the old-school glass one) to be your gold-standard. I.e. if this hydrometer says your beer is 1.040, then the beer IS 1.040. If your refactometer says otherwise then it's wrong. Keep a log of the differences between your tools and take them into account when making measurements. If you're really geek, like me, then you can create linear equations from your data (always use Deming regression) to express the difference mathematically.

- The best thing I ever did to improve my beers was to get a temperature controlled fridge. Even SWMBO can tell the difference in flavour. It turns your ales semi-pro overnight!

- Unless your mates are brewers themselves and know about hops / malt / bitterness / diacetyl etc, don't listen to a word they say....other than if they like it or not. I've had mates say how "amazingly hoppy" my milds are, and how malty my Double IPA was. Clueless :lol:

- Brew Orfy's Hobgoblin clone. Enough said.

- Safale US-05 fermented at 17 deg c will give you a very clean, yeast-free flavour. Windsor yeast fermented at 22 deg c will give you a full-yeast fruity flavour (and a massive under-attenuation).

- Don't get into the habit of 'upping' the ABV to 5 - 6% because you think it'll improve the flavour. One of the best beers I have done was 3.2% (I actually aimed for 3.6%, but had poor efficiency). On bottling day it tasted thin and watery, but 3 months on it has developed really really well.

- If you make labels for your bottles, only label 40% or so. These bottles I give away to friends to enjoy (or not). It's a waste of time bottling the ales I'm going to drink, and it's a PITA getting the labels off all your bottles when cleaning them for your next brew.

- In my last 2 brews I added porridge oats as 2% of the grist. It'll now be going in ALL non-IPA beers I brew. The smoothness and head retention it gives is amazing.

I've learnt soooo much from this forum, though't I'd try to give something back.
Cheers!!

Oh, one last tip, more to do with drinking than brewing...They say that a beer of 2% alcohol wouldn't be able to get you drunk (normal drinking speed), as the body can remove the alcohol pretty fast. Therefore a 6% beer is 4 times more potent than a 3% beer. Even the difference between a 4% and 5% beer is notable. Sticking to around 4% ales, I can get through a night at the pub without feeling too drunk. Whereas two 6% pints will send me over the edge!!! :lol:

EccentricDyslexic

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by EccentricDyslexic » Wed Nov 24, 2010 2:00 pm

Fab post andybiochem!

Steve

WishboneBrewery
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Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by WishboneBrewery » Wed Nov 24, 2010 8:21 pm

Good stuff, but I'm not sure I agree with the Cloudy beer thing... most beer I bottle has some level of cloudiness which drops out within a week or two weeks at most leaving a lovely clear beer. How does this effect the taste?

micmacmoc

Re: The 'Top Tips' Thread!

Post by micmacmoc » Sun Nov 28, 2010 1:43 pm

I now bottle one pint of every batch in a clear bottle so I can see when they've dropped clear. Yes, they are kept in the dark.
The tip about just changing one ingredient has been most useful, I'm currently doing the same recipe and changing just the hops whilst splitting the 46 litre brew into two, half kegged with Notts and half bottled with us05.

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