This session was a bit unusual. I have a bunch of new gear, and it was two back-to-back batches to run an experiment.
First off, the new gear. There will be a separate post with pictures (link to follow), but the short story is I’ve converted to all electric and moved it to my basement using the no-sparge method (full volume mash). This is very common with the BIAB crowd. I guess you’d call my setup a hybrid. I use a bag, but with a dedicated mash tun and boil kettle. The bag has drastically increased efficiency and it makes cleanup easier.
Now for the experiment. I’ve been brewing what I think is pretty damned good beer over these many years, and I’m always looking for ways to improve the final product. Getting a firm hold over the fermentation temperature years ago was a big improvement. Now it’s time to move on to water chemistry.
I purchased a LaMotte water testing kit to get a more accurate profile of the local water. The city here uses several wells, and minerals can vary quite a bit. I also threw a few bucks at Martin Brungard and got the full version of Bru’un Water. I highly recommend you do the same. He’s providing an invaluable service to the community and deserves some compensation.
The goal of this experiment is to see how much of a difference the chemistry makes for a particular style. I will be doing more of these in the future with different styles, because I’m sure the water profile matters a lot more to certain styles than others.
For this trial, I’m working with a very simple American Pale recipe. The thought is the simpler the recipe, the clearer the impact.
First off, the measured water profile. I use an Apex under sink water filter for our drinking and brewing water. It’s the one with one sediment filter and two charcoal filters. It makes it taste great without removing any of the minerals.
Calcium: 60 ppm
Magnesium: 43 ppm
Sodium: 2 ppm
Sulfate: 10 ppm
Chloride: 10 ppm
Bicarbonate: 427 ppm
pH: 7.3
The first batch was done with nothing but 1 ml of lactic acid (88%) per gallon of water. This is the way I’ve been doing it for years, so I consider that baseline. I knew going in that the pH was going to be too high because of the new no-sparge method. It turned out to be 6.25. It didn’t appear to affect efficiency though, because the pre-boil gravity was spot on.
The second batch had the following additions:
Gypsum: 19.5 g
Canning salt: 2 g
Lactic Acid (88%): 13.7 ml
Phosphoric Acid (10%): 19.5 ml
I split the acid between the two types to keep them under the taste threshold. The pH came in at a much better 5.76. Again, the numbers were spot on.
The boil and fermentation was exactly the same for both. I pitched the yeast at 68F a couple hours apart, and I raised the temperature to 72F three days into fermentation. They both dropped to the predicted final gravity of 1.011 after 7 days. I will leave them to clean up for the next week, then crash them to about 35F for a gelatin addition. A couple days later they will be kegged.
My plan is to bottle up some samples and give them to a few people for semi-blind tasting and feedback. More on that when the time comes.
Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the new brewery. I was able to knock out both batches in the same time it used to take me to brew one in the garage. Once everything becomes routine I should be able to get brew days down to around 4 hours, cleaning included.