Lazy brew day - Extract from recipe in 1.5 hours
A bit of a brewing adventure.
I moved my home brewing to the garage. But then winter hits. The pre-hopped kit I usually rely on has been replaced with one that is crap. So I needed to find an efficient way of brewing in the house during the winter.
And so we come back to my questioning "conventional wisdom".
I don't have a connector to use my immersion chiller in the house, I hate hour long full boils on the stove and LOATHE chilling in a cold tub. Getting to a boil on my stove and chilling in a tub take forever, thus, as you might imagine, before I moved outdoors, my brew days easily took 4-5 hours. And that is ignoring the mash time. Using my burner and immersion chiller I was generally looking at 3-ish hours (again, ignoring mash time). Note I ignore mash time because it is an hour where I'm literally not even paying attention to beer and beer goes in and comes back out at near enough the same temp that it doesn't affect heating times much either. I do need to plan that hour into my brew day if doing AG though.
That conventional wisdom (or at least what I've interpreted of it) is that you should always do a long boil with as much volume as possible. But then, most of that conventional wisdom is espoused by AG junkies. So my question was "how much of that can I throw out the window (if anything) if I'm going all extract?".
Well, firstly, the boil. While it is partly for bittering, I'm ok with using all late additions though. And most of my recipes can be concluded in 15-20 minute boils from a bittering perspective. Another side is DMS reduction. But, extracts, both dry and liquid should have already been through that. Lastly is sanitation. If you trust your water and extract sources though, this is overkill.
Did a bit of reading which seemed to support this. In fact, reading up on this also drew me to the conclusion that this may explain why I found all of my stronger extract recipes in the past came out with a similar, somewhat off putting sweetness. Once again, extracts are already boiled, etc... during production. Further boiling darkens them and potentially caramelizes them (along with additional maillard reactions). Possible I was ending up with more non-fermentable sugars than planned as a result. When looking up this, found a lot of people recommending to only add extracts in the last 15 minutes to sanitize if possible.
So, that reduces the boil time. Good. But not great. I still need to boil and cool 5 gallons. If all I need the boil for is the bittering though, I don't really need a full volume boil in theory. There are some potential issues here. Mainly around losses. But, as I said, in theory this works. Reduce water and fermentables to a volume you're comfortable with but keep the full volume of hops. In my case, I went with 1/5 of the water and sugars.
If you have some smaller equipment with smaller estimated losses you probably still want to beef up the hops a tad, as well as the amount of fermentables in the final wort. Reasoning is math... if I doil a full boil and end up with an SG of 1.040, then the wort in my fermenter is also 1.040, the volume is just reduced by my losses. If I'm doing a partial boil and incurring losses, and THEN diluting the wort, then I'll be slightly off.
Thinking about this now... I could have gotten around this by filling my brew pot with the cold water, stirring gently, then draining into the fermenter. Maybe I'll do that next time.
Anyway, getting 1G to a boil and cooling it is a LOT faster than 5G.
Full approach looked like this (adjusted for adding water to kettle instead of fermenter).
I moved my home brewing to the garage. But then winter hits. The pre-hopped kit I usually rely on has been replaced with one that is crap. So I needed to find an efficient way of brewing in the house during the winter.
And so we come back to my questioning "conventional wisdom".
I don't have a connector to use my immersion chiller in the house, I hate hour long full boils on the stove and LOATHE chilling in a cold tub. Getting to a boil on my stove and chilling in a tub take forever, thus, as you might imagine, before I moved outdoors, my brew days easily took 4-5 hours. And that is ignoring the mash time. Using my burner and immersion chiller I was generally looking at 3-ish hours (again, ignoring mash time). Note I ignore mash time because it is an hour where I'm literally not even paying attention to beer and beer goes in and comes back out at near enough the same temp that it doesn't affect heating times much either. I do need to plan that hour into my brew day if doing AG though.
That conventional wisdom (or at least what I've interpreted of it) is that you should always do a long boil with as much volume as possible. But then, most of that conventional wisdom is espoused by AG junkies. So my question was "how much of that can I throw out the window (if anything) if I'm going all extract?".
Well, firstly, the boil. While it is partly for bittering, I'm ok with using all late additions though. And most of my recipes can be concluded in 15-20 minute boils from a bittering perspective. Another side is DMS reduction. But, extracts, both dry and liquid should have already been through that. Lastly is sanitation. If you trust your water and extract sources though, this is overkill.
Did a bit of reading which seemed to support this. In fact, reading up on this also drew me to the conclusion that this may explain why I found all of my stronger extract recipes in the past came out with a similar, somewhat off putting sweetness. Once again, extracts are already boiled, etc... during production. Further boiling darkens them and potentially caramelizes them (along with additional maillard reactions). Possible I was ending up with more non-fermentable sugars than planned as a result. When looking up this, found a lot of people recommending to only add extracts in the last 15 minutes to sanitize if possible.
So, that reduces the boil time. Good. But not great. I still need to boil and cool 5 gallons. If all I need the boil for is the bittering though, I don't really need a full volume boil in theory. There are some potential issues here. Mainly around losses. But, as I said, in theory this works. Reduce water and fermentables to a volume you're comfortable with but keep the full volume of hops. In my case, I went with 1/5 of the water and sugars.
If you have some smaller equipment with smaller estimated losses you probably still want to beef up the hops a tad, as well as the amount of fermentables in the final wort. Reasoning is math... if I doil a full boil and end up with an SG of 1.040, then the wort in my fermenter is also 1.040, the volume is just reduced by my losses. If I'm doing a partial boil and incurring losses, and THEN diluting the wort, then I'll be slightly off.
Thinking about this now... I could have gotten around this by filling my brew pot with the cold water, stirring gently, then draining into the fermenter. Maybe I'll do that next time.
Anyway, getting 1G to a boil and cooling it is a LOT faster than 5G.
Full approach looked like this (adjusted for adding water to kettle instead of fermenter).
- Add steeping grains to pot and 1.5G of water (assuming about 0.5G will boil off).
- Heat until about 70C, remove steeping grains from water.
- In my case, I just tied the bag off above water so it could drain for a while
- Remove from heat, add 1/5 of fermentables
- Bring to a boil
- Add hops
- When done, remove from heat (wait for steeping/whirlpool hops if applicable)
- Add remaining fermentables
- Both DME and LME dissolve easier in hot water, so mix it in kettle when hot rather than in cold water in fermenter. Also, it will help cool the wort.
- Cool kettle as much as required that remaining cold water will bring to target temps
- If you add water first it will be more difficult/take longer to get down to pitching temps
- Add cold water
- drain to fermenter
- Add yeast
First attempt with this approach is currently bubbling away. Will blog an update when it is done. There are some unanswered questions... like can I really efficiently brew a 260 IBU mini-brew? And how about clarity and color?
I taste tested the final wort, and I think the IBUs are roughly where I wanted them, but I don't always taste my wort for this so I'm not sure where it will land. As bitter as it tastes now as the sugars are eaten up it should taste more bitter in the end, so I think I definitely hit my target IBUs. I'll wager clarity will hurt as a result of the method, but I'm just trying to be lazy and keep out of the cold. So I won't lose sleep over that.
At the end of the day, it should produce beer.
This is roughly a recipe I've done before though with a full volume boil. Only difference was one hops type I needed to sub. So I should have an idea how it compares at the end between both approaches.
[update #1]
Well. So much for the recipe being mostly "known". Stopped hearing bubbles after the 4th day or so, but still let it ride out to 10 days. When I opened fermentation fridge, discovered why the bubbles had stopped. Lid cracked around stopper. Not sure what effect that would have. In theory CO2 is heavier than air and forms a protective blanket. But reality is a lot less black and white. Being that it was just a crack and fermentation would have been going on the whole time, a steady flow of CO2 should have stopped air from getting in during much of the process. The small opening would also significantly slow the rate of air mixing in. But, it would also affect pressure and other aspects inside.
Sampled a bit before racking into the keg. Bitterness I tasted before fermentations is pretty much gone. We'll see how it turns out in the end. Just a little ticked that my bucket chose this batch to die on. Oh well.
[/update #1]
[update #1]
Well. So much for the recipe being mostly "known". Stopped hearing bubbles after the 4th day or so, but still let it ride out to 10 days. When I opened fermentation fridge, discovered why the bubbles had stopped. Lid cracked around stopper. Not sure what effect that would have. In theory CO2 is heavier than air and forms a protective blanket. But reality is a lot less black and white. Being that it was just a crack and fermentation would have been going on the whole time, a steady flow of CO2 should have stopped air from getting in during much of the process. The small opening would also significantly slow the rate of air mixing in. But, it would also affect pressure and other aspects inside.
Sampled a bit before racking into the keg. Bitterness I tasted before fermentations is pretty much gone. We'll see how it turns out in the end. Just a little ticked that my bucket chose this batch to die on. Oh well.
[/update #1]
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