More Quick Tips: Making brew day and beyond efficient
To catch you up as to what’s going on. Over the past five years of producing our podcast we’ve been offering a “Quick Tip” at the end of the program. Inspired by our own brewing practices, listener suggestions, ideas we’ve seen discussed by others — these tips capture the, “oh hey, yeah, this is how I do things.” Oftentimes, in those throwaway comments you can find practical nuggets of beer-y gold.
Last issue we brought you through your prep for the brew day. Now it’s time to get brewing and beyond!
Organization Tips
Toolbox: Every brewer needs a toolbox, some need more than one. Make a toolbox that’s just for the brewery. Don’t mix your house tools in there and don’t go raiding the house box, lest you start misplacing things. Drew actually keeps a toolbox for brew day uses (the wrenches, thermometers, gauges, meters he’ll need while brewing) up at the front of the brewery and a separate one filled with pieces needed for draft maintenance by the kegs. And ALWAYS put things back where they came from as soon as you’re done using them. It doesn’t do you any good to have toolboxes if the tools you need aren’t in them.
Save Your Water: Denny doesn’t have to worry about rain living in Oregon, but for a good number of homebrewers, water is a precious resource. If you’re actively chilling your wort, make sure to save your now warm water. You can start a load of laundry with it, clean your brew gear, or save to water your garden. Whatever you do, don’t just throw it away.
Mist Yourself: Brewing on a really hot day doesn’t happen often for Denny, but for Drew it’s pretty much a given. Avoid heat stroke and make your brew day more pleasant by setting up a misting rig. For a low price, you can buy a simple set of misting hoses or even a misting stand that connects to a water hose and sprays a fine cloud of cooling water. If you don’t have enough garden hose taps, you can always pressurize a keg and rig it via garden hose fittings to spray water on your area.
Save Your Beer: Now this is the tip that always has brewers annoyed with us, but it’s true. Neither of us find drinking during the brew day to be conducive to making good beer! Denny brews early in the day, so the deer in his yard would look with judging doe eyes if he was drinking at 8 a.m. Drew on the other hand brews later, but still finds that drinking early leads to more screw-ups and forgotten tasks — like cleaning at the end of the brew day. Either wait until you’re done or until you’re on the downslope — beer is boiled, chiller is ready, fermenter is sanitized and yeast is ready to party.
Process
Keep Things Flowing: Keep rice hulls on hand just in case. Some people include them in every batch, but if you need them that often it might be a good idea to get to the source of the problem and look at your lauter system. In all the years and batches of Denny’s brewing he’s never had a stuck runoff, but he still keeps a few pounds around because it just might happen.
Second-Batch Brew In A Bag (BIAB): Many people don’t sparge when doing a BIAB beer. But if that’s not you, here’s a concept for sparging. Heat up another pot of water than the one you’re using for the mash. When the mash is finished, move your bag to the other pot for a while. You can either combine the two for a single beer, or keep them separate if you want to make a lower gravity second beer. Heck, at that point you can go old school and play the gyle game — mixing ratios of the strong first mash and the less sugary second soak.
Conversion Math: The iodine test used to verify the conversion of mash starch is an old technique of questionable reliability. A better method: Test your conversion efficiency. Simply put, for any given water volume-to-grain weight ratio there is a maximum amount of sugar that can be dissolved in it. Check out how much sugar you’ve put into your water and you’ll know how efficient you’ve been. The easiest way to check conversion efficiency is with the spreadsheet built by Kai Troester at http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting_Brewhouse_Efficiency#Determining_Conversion_Efficiency
The iodine test used to verify the conversion of mash starch is an old technique of questionable reliability.
In general, your efficiency will go down as the original gravity (OG) of the beer goes up. You can mitigate that to some extent by increasing your kettle volume, but there are downsides to that. When you make a big beer, be sure to calculate what your efficiency was so you can use that number for designing future recipes. Until you have that number in hand, just assume your efficiency will be lower. Make an educated guess the first time and see what happens. If you overshoot your OG, you can always add water to get back to your target.
Easy Sugar Handling: Drew picked this trick up from Dave Mathis, formerly of BJ’s Restaurants and Brewhouse as well as American River Brewing. Instead of struggling to stir sugar into the boil kettle and get it to dissolve without scorching on the bottom, put your sugar in a hop bag and suspend it in the boil. (Use a spoon or your mash paddle to hold it up.) Let the mechanics of the boil dissolve your sugar problems!
Open Your Senses: Don’t just watch what happens when you’re brewing. Use your ears and nose too. Is that smell something burning? Is the sound of water running actually the valve on the fermenter you’re filling being open? Again, Denny? Try to stay aware of all the sights, sounds and smells of the brewery. (It’s a good way to get adept at operating your gear!)
Clean Now To Not Clean Later: Clean as you go. Not only will that leave you less to do at the end of your brew day, it will also make your life easier by not having things in your way as you brew. (Not to mention, it’s way easier to clean things before they dry and crust up!)
Y’all Come Back Now: Make it a habit to check on your brew the next day. Yeah, we know most homebrewers can’t help but do this, but if you brew in a garage it can slip your mind. Check on your beer to make sure it’s doing what you expected it to, or to take action if it’s not. And you’d be surprised how often we find something we forgot to do the day before that can be taken care of the next day.
Sometimes You Just Need to Party: Since it may have been a while since you’ve had a chance to brew with other people around, it’s a good time to remember that when you do it’s more about the people than the beer. Between the distraction and the likelihood (certainty?) that you’ll be drinking, it’s possible the brew session won’t go as smoothly as it does when you brew alone. That’s fine. You’ll still make beer, even if it isn’t exactly what you had in mind. In this case, close enough is good enough. Enjoy your brew day; accept what happens.
Use Your Phone: Your smartphone can be used for a lot more than just streaming music while you brew. You can set reminders, timers, use it as a calculator . . . not to mention all the brewing apps available these days. And don’t forget about your phone’s voice activating feature . . . setting a timer or alarm in seconds when you’re in the middle of a task can be extremely helpful.
Transfer, Packaging and More…
Lean In: When you rack, put a wedge under the front of the fermenter to help the yeast slide toward the back and provide you with clear beer for racking at the front.
Damn the Poppets: Sometimes when racking to a keg, or from one keg to another, the poppets may get clogged and stop the flow of beer, especially with beers that see dry hops. But you what? We don’t need no stinking poppets! You can remove the poppets before racking and replace them when you’re done.
Prime By Your High: When priming your beer, use the highest temperature the beer has reached after fermentation slowed, not the current temperature (unless that’s the highest temperature). During fermentation, the CO2 created partially dissolves into the beer. As the beer warms, the CO2 comes out of solution. If you cold crash, for instance, the CO2 doesn’t go back into the beer. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. To account for the amount of CO2 already dissolved in the beer, use the highest temperature.
Eis, Eis Baby: Want to make a quick and easy eisbier without dedicating an entire batch to it? It’s easy to make a stronger beer from just a small portion of your regular-strength beer. Fill a 2-L soda bottle about two-thirds full. Squeeze out the air, cap it, and put it in your freezer on its side. When it starts to take on a frozen-solid appearance, simply pour off the liquid. You may need to let it thaw for a bit if you over freeze. Make sure you’re sitting down when you drink it!
Blending
Not Just For Sours: For some reason homebrewers only seem to think of blending as a thing to do when a beer is off and you want to try and rescue it. (Like brewing 5 gallons/19 L of a less hoppy beer to blend with a beer that’s too hoppy.) But sour brewers know the blending is the true secret to nirvana. If it’s a good enough trick for them, it should be for you as well!
Try sitting down one night with several of your beers and give them a blend. One of Drew’s favorites is roughly three parts cream ale to one part IPA!
Take it Easy: To carry on with that thought, table blending, whether with flavorings or even separate batches of beer, is a great way to experiment with flavors without committing an entire batch to your latest wild idea.
Know When To Fold Them: If you have a beer that just isn’t what you wanted, feel free to try various fixes. Sometimes you’ll improve it, other times you’ll wonder what you were thinking. But know when to cut your losses. Some beers just can’t be fixed and you need to recognize that if it happens. Maybe you can use it for a marinade or brine, or sometimes you just need to dump it. There’s no shame in that. Life is too short to drink bad beer when you could be drinking good beer.
OK, that should hold everyone for a while. We have a ton more quick tips and like we said we give them out on every episode of the podcast. Got a tip for us? Email us at [email protected].
