Advantages of brewing to 32pints instead of 40?

[winka]

Morning all, just wondering what advantages there is to brewing short. Does it improve the taste and body? Or just add extra to the strength.

Cheers

[Normski]

Everything will be increased. Its something that may or maynot be in a good way. Try it, if you like it good. If not add some liquor (water).

[hommebru]

it's just an increased concentration, imagine the kit and adjuncts like cordial and the more water you add the less potent the flavour becomes.
pretty much the shorter you brew means, like normski said, everything is increased. body, taste, bitterness, hoppyness, mouthfeel, abv etc.

say you take a Cooper's Stout kit, brewing to 40 litres will leave you with a brew that's 17.75 IBU's, whilst brewing to 32 will result in a brew of 22.18 IBU's, that's around 25% more bitterness for example.

furthermore, like normski also said, this might not be desirable. brewing short does not always improve a kit in relation to what you might be trying to achieve, or rather, brewing too short. most people brew to 20litres (4.5 gallons) instead of 23litres (5gallons) to get the best of both worlds. but going down to 3gallons for instance can completely change the taste of a beer, leaving you with something more reminiscent of a barley wine rather than what you intended.

ultimately i'd consider what you're after and then see if you can accomplish this by brewing short, sometimes it's better to just use adjuncts (grains, hops, dme or all 3) to achieve this, but if you're not so handy with using these, then brewing short can help negate the need for extra fiddling, but at the cost of volume. i'd recommend caution when using overtly dark kits as the roasted flavours might lead to something quite undesirable, and if you're looking to make a pale ale, brewing short will leave you with a more reddish/brown ale. in my opinion, brewing short (as in to 24-32 pints) works best with lighter kits such as milds, although if you're unfamiliar with using hops, it can be a good way to produce a hoppy IPA, as tbh the cooper's IPA by itself is pretty lacklustre.

[oldbloke]

I've got one of the new Gone With The Wheat kits and was thinking of brewing it short.
It's got two of everything (except yeast), so I was thinking I'd just do half of it in 2 demis to see how it goes, in case we want to add anything for the second half.
That'd give 16 pints (or a little more if there's not too much trub) instead of 20, but that might be a bit /too/ short, so I thought maybe dissolve the priming sugar in enough water to bring the total volume up to 18 pints, put that in the bottles first, syphon the brew onto it.
Sound reasonable?

[winka]

Thanks for the replies chaps, my next brew will be a coopers Australian pale ale, so if anyone's got any experience of this I'd love to hear. I'm brewing it with 2 jars of holland and barrat lme and 1 jar of honey.

Basically I got into homebrewing to make as much beer for as cheap as possible so the tight t**t in me sort of begrudges short changing myself of 8 Pints

Cheers

[Geezah]

Re: Adapted Kit Recipes.

Postby Geezah » Sat Aug 06, 2011 2:45 pm
I have just made up an Elderwych clone to something like this.....

150g crystal malt steeped at 65c for 30 minutes
added 100g of extra light DME
added 20g EKG, 20g Fuggles & 26g of fresh elderflowers @ 20 minutes
@30 minutes removed grains and flame out - left hop/elder bag in for another 10 mins
removed hops/flowers and got wort to boiling point and added 370g of honey and flame out again
Made up a Coopers APA kit with the other 900g of dme and the crystal wort to 20 litres
I used the remaining 80g of honey for priming.

Aurora hops added dry on day 4 and removed when kegged on day 13.

Used the coopers yeast.

A truely excellent pint.

also....

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