Experimental Brewing
The umbrella of “experimental brewing” covers several semi-related approaches to recipe design. When brewers initially move beyond pre-packaged kits, experimentation can be as simple as changing the aroma hop variety in a pale ale recipe. Some conservative brewers, taking the scientific method to heart, manipulate a single variable at a time to investigate the impact of small process and ingredient changes on the final product. For more adventurous brewers, exploration includes adding ingredients that have no sensible place in beer (sometimes with delicious results!).
While I’m all in favor of every homebrewer at least occasionally reaching beyond classic styles and commercial clones, I do not endorse tossing whatever ingredients strike your momentary fancy into the boil. A standard 5-gallon (19-L) batch yields two cases of bottles and that’s a lot of a failed experiment to stomach! On the other hand, don’t plan for months and months trying to perfect a recipe without a single test brew. Find a sensible approach and give it a shot, but be prepared to adjust and re-brew.
I recommend waiting to begin the more advanced types of experimentation until after you have dialed in your process to the point where you consistently produce palatable beers. If your brewing is highly variable, it can be difficult to trust the results of an experiment, and the last thing a new brewer needs is another layer of complexity and variability. Hopefully this article will provide valuable strategies for researching and conducting brewing experiments, enabling better results on your first attempt, and allowing you to achieve your flavor target in fewer batches.
Research
The first step in any experiment should be to learn everything about the experimental variable. If representative commercial beers exist, get your hands on them. Read about the ingredient or technique in question. I admit the Internet is usually where I check first, but don’t skip over the many terrific homebrewing books. For brewing with weird ingredients it is hard to beat Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass (Brewers Publications, 2004).
While the experiences of other brewers are valuable, look into the non-traditional ingredients themselves; can the culinary or scientific communities enlighten or inspire you? Here are a few examples:
I’ve read a dozen ways to infuse chocolate into stouts (and probably tried half of them). I’d always liked the idea of using cocoa powder because its low fat content minimized head disruption, but the fluffy powder is tricky to mix into cold beer and the flavor often comes across chalky and flat. I happened upon an America’s Test Kitchen brownie recipe that gave instructions for “blooming” the cocoa powder in boiling water to hydrate it before combining with the rest of the ingredients. This approach allows the cocoa powder to incorporate more readily into fermented beer and produces a richer chocolate flavor.
Another example was when thinking about how to impart coffee into Modern Times’ Black House oatmeal stout. I considered using different timings and temperatures, and eventually we settled on steeping whole coffee beans directly in the fermented beer. While the concept is similar to blending with cold brewed coffee, I find “dry-beaning” produces a longer-lasting coffee aroma. Leaving the beans whole slows extraction, providing a wider window before over-extraction, and makes removing the beans from the beer easier. Green (unroasted) beans are shelf-stable for years, but coffee starts going downhill almost immediately once roasted. Rather than rely on a commercial coffee roaster, Modern Times roasts its own coffee in-brewery. You can do something similar at home with a popcorn air-popper if you don’t want to invest in a purpose-built roaster. This method requires less than 2 ounces of beans in a 5-gallon (60 g in a 19-L) batch.
A few other culinary tips that I’ve applied to homebrewing with good results: Toasting and then grinding whole spices and dried chilies immediately before using to amplify both their potency and complexity. Like coffee, the essential oils are volatile and diminish quickly. To add citrus flavor to a beer, add the zest immediately but consider waiting a few hours after squeezing the fruit before adding the juice to give oxidation a chance to improve its flavor (www.cookingissues.com/2010/10/01/fresh-lime-juice-wtf/). This is just one of many tips I’ve gleaned from the rise of craft cocktails. The wide range of bitters now available is another fun way to play with flavors in the glass. (I’m especially fond of Bittermens’ Hopped Grapefruit Bitters in IPAs.)
In general I look at the most natural product as the first option. Fresh fruit possesses a more interesting range of flavors than pasteurized purees or juices, which in turn are more exciting than artificial flavorings. However, in cases where the raw product is either tricky to work with or isn’t concentrated enough, adding a small dose of natural concentrate or even artificial extract to taste can be an acceptable way to boost the character. Coconut is a great example; while toasted unsweetened coconut flakes provide a great base flavor, a few drops of coconut extract brings the aroma people expect. Liquors, flavored/herbal teas, and powdered citrus juices can all be added to beers with delicious results.
A few things to consider when experimenting:
• What varieties and processing types are available?
• Is it seasonal?
• What affects the quality?
• What influence do timing and temperature have?
For example, while you might enjoy eating a banana with a touch of green on the peel, this is long before a banana is best suited for baking (or brewing). As fruits ripen their aromatics and sugars increase. Consider brewing with fruits that are a couple of days (or more) beyond the point you’d want to eat them out of hand (but before they begin to rot or mold).
Acquisition and Evaluation of Ingredients
While the Internet has pretty much everything, I try to shop for unique ingredients where I can taste or at least smell things and inspect them before buying. Farmer’s markets, spice shops, and ethnic groceries are often superb sources for offbeat brewing ingredients. If you are using anything that isn’t sold as food, ensure it is food grade (wood can be tricky — if it is sold for smoking it is a safe bet, while the lumber section of a hardware store may not be).
As with malt and hops, evaluate every ingredient before brewing. What does it smell and taste like? Steep it in hot water; how does that change its attributes? Dose some of this flavorful liquid into a glass of beer; how does the character of the beer change? It is always a good idea to compare these initial notes to the flavor of the finished beer, learning which flavors and aromas carry through best.
Avoid Gimmicks
One of my pet peeves is gimmicky beers. I love weird beers, but what I am talking about here specifically are beers that are brewed for a reason that sounds fun in the description, but doesn’t improve the result when the beer is sampled blind. This includes things like wacky ingredients (e.g., book pages), formulas (e.g., “We add one more hop variety each year”), and record breaking (e.g., “The sourest beer in the history of the world!”).
The goal of brewing should be to create the most enjoyable beer in the glass, not to tell the best story about how or why that beer was brewed. Ultimately though, if these qualities are among the types of beers you enjoy, go ahead and brew whatever you want to drink — it hasn’t, for example, stopped Scotland’s Brew Dogs, who have brewed with such ingredients as condensed San Fran-cisco fog and San Diego kelp for their TV show.
Matching Flavors
One resource that has sparked numerous recipe concepts for me is The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs (Little, Brown and Company, 2008). This book catalogues ingredients that talented chefs pair together. Think of a prominent flavor in the base beer and find the corresponding ingredient in the book. See if any of the suggested ingredients or combinations appeal to you. For example:
• The “malt” of a brown ale with banana or caramel.
• The “grapefruit” of an American IPA with pomegranate or ginger.
• The “coffee” of a stout with cinnamon, clove, and orange.
• The “black pepper” of a saison with lemon or lime.
• The “lemon” of a gueuze with hazelnuts or honey.
You can also reference flavors that you might infuse via blending or barrel-aging from a specific wine or spirit. The “beer” entry itself has some common pairings for cooking with our favorite beverage, but they probably wouldn’t translate well to the glass (e.g., pork and sauerkraut) — of course there are exceptions such as commercial breweries that have brewed with Rocky Mountain oysters (Colorado’s Wynkoop Brewing Company), smoked goat brains (Philadelphia’s Dock Street Brewery), and many dozens of other seemingly unappetizing ingredients.
When determining how much of an ingredient to add, it is always best to either aim low or reserve plain beer for eventual blending. If you are flavoring with spices, use the smallest reasonable amount initially — you can always dose with spice-tea at bottling/kegging to taste. If you are adding fruit, you might choose to over-fruit a portion of the beer (5 lbs. per gallon — 0.6 kg/L), retaining the rest of the batch to mellow the fruit once the fermentation is complete.
Another trick is to add a small amount of a second ingredient to boost the flavor and complexity of the star ingredient. For example vanilla, coffee, or unrefined sugar can enhance the presence of chocolate without being immediately apparent.
Culinary Beers
As brewers (and humans) most of us are interested in food, so the culinary world is a frequent source of inspiration. However, just because a combination tastes good on a plate, doesn’t guarantee it will translate agreeably to beer. While I may love a slice of pizza or carrot cake, their flavors infused into beer do not work for my palate. When we eat we get variation from bite to bite, we experience the ingredients somewhat separately. Think about culinary beers as sauces. What works without texture (like the recent wave of chile-chocolate Mexican mole-inspired imperial stouts, e.g., Cigar City Hunahpu’s, Perennial Abraxas, Prairie Bomb! etc.) is different than what works as an entire entrée.
For some ingredients texture is more important than flavor; really analyze why you enjoy an ingredient before adding it to a batch. Hold your nose while tasting an additive to block the aroma; if there isn’t much change in your perception, texture is the dominant character. Flavor intensity needs to be adequately robust to sense, but not so overpowering to be annoying by the end of a glass.
Split Batches
One of the best ways to experiment is to split a batch of wort into multiple finished beers. For example, I turned three 5-gallon (19-L) batches of Belgian blonde ale into 15 different variations by adding sugars (everything from table sugar to agave, muscovado, and various candi sugars). It is best to keep the basic recipe simple if your ultimate goal is to evaluate the various ingredients, but making a bland base beer may not give you an accurate representation of how those flavors will fare in the context of a more interesting recipe.
If you are brewing 5-gallon (19-L) batches, it is helpful to own smaller fermenters to hold split batches. I have several 3-gallon (11-L) fermenters in my homebrewery that I use primarily to separate batches in half for fruit variants. I also have 1-gallon (3.8-L) jugs that are perfect for splitting batches five ways (while writing this story they were filled with a pale sour with five obscure varietal honeys). Being able to split one wort into multiple finished beers saves time and effort, and distributes risk (nine bottles each of five experimental beers are less risky than 45 bottles of a single beer).
If you rely on an auto-siphon to transfer beer, ensure that yours is sized to fit through the mouth of the smaller fermenters. All other equipment (bottling bucket etc.) should work fine, although some brewers opt to bypass bulk priming preferring to prime in the bottle. You can even perform single bottle experiments, adding a few whole hop cones, wood cubes, coffee beans etc. (just be prepared for gushing when you pop the cap, thanks to the additional nucleation sites they provide for carbon dioxide bubbles to form).
Your experimental ingredient add-ing process will determine the timing of when one batch should become several. In general, the later you split a batch, the less effort is required.
Splitting Ingredient Recommendations
In the Bottling Bucket: Spice/herb teas and tinctures, extracts, and salts (avoid incorporating anything fermentable unless taking into account the impact on priming)
Secondary Fermenter: Sugars, fruits, dry hops, and wood
Primary Fermenter: Yeast strains
Boil: Boil hops
Mash: Malts, mashing process, pre-boil hops
Rather than splitting a wort/beer five ways some brewers leave most of the batch as is and draw off 1 gallon (3.8 L) to alter. This is especially valuable for new brewers who have a “great” idea. An entire batch is too much to risk on an unproven flavor profile (like my second batch, a vanilla cream ale . . .).
If you find that the initial trial is enjoyable, then you can tweak the recipe and re-brew a full batch.
Evaluation of Results
Take notes not only on your process, but on the final results. Evaluate for yourself, but don’t stop there. Experiments are a fun excuse to get your friends or homebrew club involved! We’re all sensitive to aromatic and flavor-active molecules at different concentrations. Set up a blind tasting to learn how your opinion compares to a group consensus.
Blind taste tests are helpful, as are silent ballots. Triangle tests are a standard method at commercial breweries for evaluating whether two beers are perceptibly different. Do this at home (or at your next homebrew club meeting) by giving each taster two glasses of one beer and one of another then have them pick the two that match. Although you need a statistically significant number of samples for validation, you can simply repeat the test a couple of times with the same volunteers if you are short on subjects. Tables are widely available online, but to be 95% confident there is a difference you’ll need four out of five subjects/trials to select the correct pair.
The most important step after tasting notes and statistics have been examined is to form what you’ve learned into actionable ideas. If you tried a split batch with five new hop varieties, document which other hops, malts, yeasts, and styles would complement each. If you determine that a decoction mash doesn’t produce a beer that tastes any different than an infusion mash, make a note of that. This will allow you to reference your notes quickly rather than pouring over pages of descriptors when designing a new recipe.
Explore and Experiment
If you are interested in making experimental beers, rather than mimicking a favorite commercial beer, take an occasional batch of homebrew to explore. Use your small production volume and lack of commercial business and regulatory oversight to brew the way many craft brewers wish they could: Put the beer first without concern for cost, ingredient scarcity, marketability, legality, or time constraints. Go out of your way to procure the highest-quality ingredients available. Think like a chef, but remember that the way flavors work in beer is different than food. Try one of the recipes provided on page 52 and 53 as a jumping off point into your own experimental batch, or concoct your own from scratch!
Recipes:
Dessert Stout
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.054 FG = 1.015 IBU = 21 SRM = 35 ABV = 5.1%
This is the perfect not-too-roasty stout to try out all of your favorite dessert flavor combinations: coconut, coffee, chocolate, jammy fruit, hazelnuts etc.
Ingredients
8.5 lbs. (3.9 kg) Golden Promise pale ale malt
13 oz. (0.37 kg) flaked oats
8 oz. (0.23 kg) Weyermann Carafa® I special malt (350 °L)
8 oz. (0.23 kg) pale chocolate malt (225 °L)
8 oz. (0.23 kg) Weyermann Caramunich® III malt (55 °L)
5 oz. (0.14 kg) black malt
5.5 AAU Nugget whole hops (60 min) (0.5 oz./14 g of 11% alpha acid)
Wyeast 1056 (American Ale), White Labs WLP001 (California Ale), or Fermentis Safale US-05
Priming sugar (if bottling)
Step by Step
Heat 15 qts. (14 L) of water to achieve a mash temperature of 153 °F (67 °C). Hold at this temperature for 60 minutes or until conversion is complete. Sparge slowly with 170 °F (77 °C) water, collecting wort until the pre-boil kettle volume is around 6.5 gallons (24.6 L).
Boil the wort for 75 minutes adding hops with 60 minutes left in the boil. Chill the wort to 65 °F (18 °C), let the break material settle, rack to the fermenter, aerate the wort with filtered air or pure O2 and pitch yeast.
Ferment at 68 °F (20 °C). After fermentation is complete, transfer the beer to five 1-gallon (3.8-L) jugs and flavor as desired with Frangelico (hazelnut liquor), 100% raspberry jam, “bloomed” cocoa powder and vanilla bean, coffee beans, maple syrup, ancho peppers, etc. Once you’re certain the final gravity is stable, bottle or keg each aiming for 2.2 volumes of CO2.
Dessert Stout
(5 gallons/19 L, partial mash)
OG = 1.054 FG = 1.015 IBU = 21 SRM = 35 ABV = 5.1%
Ingredients
3.3 lbs. (1.5 kg) Maris Otter liquid malt extract
4 lbs. (1.8 kg) Golden Promise pale ale malt
13 oz. (0.37 kg) flaked oats
8 oz. (0.23 kg) Weyermann Carafa® I special malt (350 °L)
8 oz. (0.23 kg) pale chocolate malt (225 °L)
8 oz. (0.23 kg) Weyermann Caramunich® III malt (55 °L)
5 oz. (0.14 kg) black malt
5.5 AAU Nugget whole hops (60 min) (0.5 oz./14 g of 11% alpha acid)
Wyeast 1056 (American Ale), White Labs WLP001 (California Ale), or Fermentis Safale US-05
Priming sugar (if bottling)
Step by Step
Separate out the dark roasted grains. Mash the pale ale malt, oats and Caramunich® at 153 °F (67 °C) for 30 minutes. Stir in the dark roasted grains and continue to mash for 30 more minutes. Raise the temperature to mash out at 168 °F (76 °C) and begin the lauter phase (see all-grain recipe, left). Bring the wort to a boil and add the liquid malt extract off heat. Stir until the malt extract is dissolved and return to a boil. Boil 75 minutes adding the hops with 60 minutes left in the boil. Chill the wort to 65 °F (18 °C), let the break material settle, rack to the fermenter, aerate the wort with filtered air or pure O2 and pitch yeast.
Ferment at 68 °F (20 °C). After fermentation is complete, transfer to five 1-gallon (3.8-L) jugs and flavor as desired with Frangelico (hazelnut liquor), 100% raspberry jam, “bloomed” cocoa powder and vanilla bean, coffee beans, maple syrup, ancho peppers, etc. Once you’re certain the final gravity is stable, bottle or keg each aiming for 2.2 volumes of CO2. Use the priming chart at https://byo.com/resources/carbonation to determine your priming sugar needs.
Sucro-licious Belgian
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.051 (1.060-1.063, with sugar) FG = 1.006 IBU = 21 SRM = 6+ (sugar dependent) ABV = 7.4%
Sugar selection can completely change the impression of a Belgian beer. Some dubbels are little more than Belgian blondes with dark candi syrup instead of pure sucrose.
Ingredients
7.5 lbs. (3.4 kg) European Pilsner malt
2.75 lbs. (1.25 kg) Belgian pale malt
0.25 lbs. (0.11 kg) melanoidin malt
6 AAU Hallertau whole hops (60 min) (1.5 oz./43 g of 4% alpha acid)
White Labs WLP530 (Abbey Ale), Wyeast 3787 (Trappist High Gravity), or Fermentis Safbrew T-58
Priming sugar (if bottling)
Step by Step
Heat 15 qts. (14 L) of water to achieve a mash temperature of 153 °F (67 °C). Mash at 153 °F (67 °C) for 60 minutes. Sparge slowly with 170 °F (77 °C) water, collecting wort until the pre-boil kettle volume is around 6.5 gallons (24.6 L).
Boil the wort for 75 minutes adding the hops with 60 minutes left in the boil. Chill the wort to 65 °F (18 °C), let the break material settle, rack to the fermenter, aerate the wort with filtered air or pure O2 and pitch yeast.
Ferment at 72 °F (22 °C). After fermentation is complete, transfer the beer into five jugs with 4 oz. per gallon (120 g per 4 L) of agave, gur, date sugar, candi sugar/syrup, homemade caramel, golden syrup, or unrefined cane sugars (e.g., turbinado, demerara, muscovado). Once the final gravity is stable, bottle or keg each aiming for 2.2 volumes of CO2. Use the priming chart at https://byo.com/resources/carbonation to determine the priming sugar needs.
Sucro-licious Belgian
(5 gallons/19 L, partial mash)
OG = 1.051 (1.060-1.063, with sugar) FG = 1.006 IBU = 21 SRM = 6+ (sugar dependent) ABV = 7.4%
Ingredients
4.1 lbs. (1.86 kg) Pilsen dried malt extract
2.75 lbs. (1.25 kg) Belgian pale malt
0.25 lbs. (0.11 kg) melanoidin malt
6 AAU Hallertau whole hops (60 min) (1.5 oz./43 g of 4% alpha acid)
White Labs WLP530 (Abbey Ale), Wyeast 3787 (Trappist High Gravity), or Fermentis Safbrew T-58
Priming sugar (if bottling)
Step by Step
Heat 6 qts. (5.7 L) of water to achieve a mash temperature of 153 °F (67 °C). Mash the grains at 153 °F (67 °C) for 60 minutes. Raise the temperature to mash out at 168 °F (76 °C) and begin the lauter phase (see all-grain recipe, left).
Bring the wort to a boil and add the dried malt extract off heat. Stir until the extract is dissolved and return to a boil.
Boil the wort for 75 minutes adding the hops with 60 minutes left in the boil. Chill the wort to 65 °F (18 °C), let the break material settle, rack to the fermenter, aerate the wort with filtered air or pure O2 and pitch yeast.
Ferment at 72 °F (22 °C). After you are certain that fermentation is complete, transfer the beer into five 1-gallon (3.8-L) jugs with 4 oz. per gallon (120 g per 4 L) each of agave, gur, date sugar, candi sugar/syrup, homemade caramel, golden syrup, or unrefined cane sugars (e.g., turbinado, demerara, muscovado).
Once the final gravity is stable, bottle or keg the beer, each aiming for 2.2 volumes of CO2.
