re: Homebrewing Thread: Volume II

I have a couple of SS brew buckets and a 15 gallon ssbrewtech kettle if anyone is interested

I can't or the bird might ban me. I'll hit you on untappd.

quote:

---

I can't or the bird might ban me. I'll hit you on untappd.

---

Cool. Just curious on price and size of the brew buckets.

They're 7 gallon, I installed the thermowells through the side and modded the top with a 1.5" TC fitting for dry hopping and pressurized transfers (Also have the TC Hose barb/PRV fittings from SSbrewtech for both of them.

I got "The New IPA" by Scott Janish a couple days ago for Fathers day. Since i brewed an NEIPA a couple days before, i skimmed through some of the later chapters.

Couple things i picked up on, that i'm glad to say that i do, in part from reading Janish's blog...
1) One of the key elements to making a good NEIPA is reducing the amount of oxygen on the cold side. The oxygen free transfer that i did the last batch really helped, and i added my first round of dry hops yesterday for my batch, and made sure to purge with CO2 after, just to make sure no O2 made its way in there, even though it was still fermenting, albeit slowly.

2) Law of diminishing returns - There is a point where more hops does not equal better. Dry hopping with 5-6 oz. of hops at one time will yield you little better results than if you stay in the 2-3.5 oz. range. From the few paragraphs i read on it so far, up to 3.5 oz. in a 5.6-6 gallon batch yields close to 85% extraction rate. Once you start going over that amount, your extraction rate plummets to as low as 14%. Janish suggests dividing up your dry hop quantity into smaller amounts and do multiple rounds of dry hopping. My current beer, the first dry hop i did yesterday was 3.25 oz. (biotrans hops). My next dry hop charge is currently planned at 4.5 oz. but i may divide that up into 2 dry hop additions.

Some other things that i saw mentioned was mash hopping, and how it improves hop utilization and maintaining a decent boil hop addition to round out the hoppiness of your beer. And in the forward, Stan Heironymus mentions the Sapporo study where they discovered the relationship of hop oils (geranial, linalool, beta-citranellol) and certain combinations of each that led to more flowery or citrusy or tropical presence in the beer. The following link has some info on that. There is more information on that study later in the book.

LINK

So far, this is a pretty great book, and a lot of the information for the book can be found on Janish's website www.scottjanish.com. Just from some of his articles on his blog, my understanding of NEIPA has improved. The book should give you a better understanding of the process of NEIPA rather than just following the standard "sulfate:chloride ratio/ whirlpool hopping/ biotrans hopping" and give you the reasoning of why its done and better ways to improve on the methodology.

That mash part is interesting. May have to try that.

Oh, also, i think there was a part discussing diastaticus. Which if you are on brew magazine mailing lists, this seems to be the new "caution" in homebrew. Diastaticus is a type of yeast (i think) that releases beta-glucasaides (spelling?) which increase your fruityness. However, the downside to diastaticus is that it has a habit of over attenuating a beer.

I may have made all of that up, but after reading a few articles on it, this is what i gathered from it. Hopefully someone can correct me on this.

quote:

---

Been reading about the First Wort Hop a little bit. Alot seem to use that same phrase of rounding out the hoppiness and creating a smoother bitterness. I want to give that a go when I trey a west coast style pale ale or IPA soon.

---

I do first wort hopping all the time. Increases the IBU's a little. However, i have no idea if it rounds out the flavor. Brulosophy did an experiment of FWH vs. 60 minute boil hopping and shockingly found no difference between the 2. (If you pay attention to the brulosophy experiments it appears nothing that you do to "improve" your beer actually matters.)

quote:

---

Finally realized I might not have the CO2 tank even turned on, so I gave it a turn.... Immediately blows about 30PSI into the carboy. My heart drops thinking I'm about to blow up this glass tank and I panicked to turn it back off. I could hear the pressure building, then boom, the carboy cap flies off. Thank God, could have been alot worse.

---

I seem to do stupid stuff all the time when i transfer or bottle from keg. One of my really genius moments was unscrewing the keg post while i had my CO2 attached to the keg. Stream of beer went straight into my eyes.

quote:

---

Said screw it after that, I just filled it normally while I drank a beer to calm back down . Anyway, I tasted my kolsch, and there is basically no lemon in there. Made a tincture last night to add in about a week. I'm assuming its just a guessing game? Add some, taste, repeat until its the right amount.

---

Oh, so a few posts back i discussed the cold side aeration and mitigating it. I think i'm going to make a cheap device to do so, inspired by a brulosophy post. Going to buy a 3 piece airlock, a piece of tubing that fits over the post inside the airlock, and a mylar birthday balloon. When i go to cold crash the fermenter, i'll fill the mylar balloon with CO2 so the fermenter only sucks in CO2 and not O2. May make 2 just in case i need another quickly.

Similar to this.

quote:

---

According to that guy's results, you should just throw everything into the kettle, bring it up to a boil, transfer it to your fermenters, and pitch the yeast because people of varying levels of experience won't be able to reliably distinguish beers of the same recipe that were brewed differently...

---

You'll like the latest brulosophy experiment.

INVESTIGATING THE DRY HOP SATURATION POINT

quote:

---

To evaluate the differences between an IPA dry hopped at a rate of 10 g/L (1.34 oz/gal; 2.6 lbs/bbl) and the same beer dry hopped at a rate of 15 g/L (2 oz/gal; 3.9 lbs/bbl).

---

quote:

---

While 15 tasters (p<0.05) would have had to identify the unique sample in order to reach statistical significance, only 13 (p=0.10) made the accurate selection

---

quote:

---

Out of the 3 semi-blind triangle tests I attempted, I identified the odd-beer-out exactly 0 times.

---

I'm shocked!

quote:

---

Similar to this.

---

use a 3way barbes slitter. like in these pics. Hell the 12 bucks is a good price if it were in stock.

LINK