Say I was going to brew a beer now for summer drinking (would have brewed the last beer in October but ignoring that for the sake of the argument) what would I brew?
A big roasty porter, a Russian Imperial Stout? Too high in alcohol, too much body etc, not enticing in summer.
So a pale ale it would be (a pale lager would have had to be brewed months ago so it could take 2 weeks to ferment and more weeks to lager, cold storage.)
Again, a big ale is out—too heavy for summer drinking and need weeks to age to lose the alcohol heat. Let us set the abv (alcohol by volume to under 5%.) Not wanting Love on a Beach (fucking close to water) we will set the abv to 4.5%. Now, how much malt will be needed?
We need to define some terms.
Wort—unfermented beer. Winemakers call the juice from pressing grapes must while brewers call the liquid running from the chiller into the fermenter wort.
OG, Original Gravity—the density of the wort before fermenting starts, a measure of the sugars, fermentable and unfermentable, plus other ingredients
FG, Final Gravity, the density of the finished beer. OG – FG is a measure of the amount of sugar fermented by the yeast.
Abv, alcohol by volume calculation is complicated by the fact that the FG measures not just the amount of sugars turnmed into alcohol but also the fact beer contains alcohol which is lighter than water.
Degrees of Extract—a laboratory figure for the amount of sugar gotten out of a weight of grain. Look it up for yourselves, e.g. look up Bairds or Weyermann websites is and see DE for pale malt 301. A brewer can get maybe 80% of the laboratory figure
Brewlength—the volume at the end of the brew. Here we tend to do 22L batches, in the US they make 5gal batches, ≈ 5 x 4 = 20L. But there are wastages, I allowed 2L of wort sopped up by the hops plus bits stuck in chiller, below the outlet of the kettle etc, so we work on 24L. Since we boil wort for an hour we start with 26L of wort. I use V (volume) to stand for brewlength.
We decided that abv is to be 4.5% so we have: (OG - FG) x ƒ = abv where ƒ is a correction factor that allows for the alcohol being lighter than water factor. We do not need to use that equation, however.
Let us think a bit more about our desired beer. It is a smallish beer so we need to pack it full of body and flavor. Malt flavor is what we are considering. To get some body into our beer we want to work the malt to get as much body and flavor as we can.
We could use more malt—but keeping to the 4.5%abv target we have set ourselves we have to keep the OG low enough to not have the beer over 4.5%abv. So we need to have more malt but not use all of it. Hmmmm there are two ways to do that. Remember abv = (OG - FG) x ƒ = 4.5. We see that is we keep FG high OG - FG is small and so abv is small. A beer made so it is dry, with little body, a very low FG will have most of the sugars fermented out so high alcohol. So we can use techniques to keep FG a bit high and end up with an ale with some body to it despite it being under 5% abv.
What about malt flavor? The answer here is pretty easy: we use the best ale malt there is, Maris Otter. There is some resurgence of interest in a very nice Australian malts, Schooner and Sloop. But a good malt. That has to be the basis. Anything else we can do? We want to keep the ale nice and pale, deep gold but no darker say. It has to look nice on a bloody hot day, color and a nice head of foam. We could add some slightly roasted malt to increase the maltiness of the ale: vienna malt say, lightest of the roasted malts. But we can make some nice “light amber malt” in our own kitchen stove! Will describe how we do that later, just note that we will make 2Kg of light amber malt from however much Maris Otter we decide to use.
For decent head we could have say 250g wheat malt as part of our grist: wheat has a lot of protein and it is protein that keeps a head on the beer. Or we could use wheat malt extract to prime the bottles. We do not want our beer too fizzy, we want to drain the first glass in one blissful go, so priming will be light.
OK, that is it for malt, beer also contains hops!
Next post—all about the hops we will use. We will set our target bitterness as 80% of our OG. This, in our little pale ale, is not up to IPA standards but is a noticeable pleasant, mouth cleansing bitterness. A chap called Daniels went through a vast number of beers and noted the relationship between bittering, BU, and gravity, OG units. An extra special bitter might be 6% abv and have more Bittering Units than Gravity units. Nice sipping beer, not what we look for in the middle of an Australian summer! We will keep BU:OG at 80% (personal preference, experience in brewing.)
Next post: talk about the process of brewing and how we will tweak it to get a smallish ale with a nice body to it. Then a post full of lovely brewmath!
A big roasty porter, a Russian Imperial Stout? Too high in alcohol, too much body etc, not enticing in summer.
So a pale ale it would be (a pale lager would have had to be brewed months ago so it could take 2 weeks to ferment and more weeks to lager, cold storage.)
Again, a big ale is out—too heavy for summer drinking and need weeks to age to lose the alcohol heat. Let us set the abv (alcohol by volume to under 5%.) Not wanting Love on a Beach (fucking close to water) we will set the abv to 4.5%. Now, how much malt will be needed?
We need to define some terms.
Wort—unfermented beer. Winemakers call the juice from pressing grapes must while brewers call the liquid running from the chiller into the fermenter wort.
OG, Original Gravity—the density of the wort before fermenting starts, a measure of the sugars, fermentable and unfermentable, plus other ingredients
FG, Final Gravity, the density of the finished beer. OG – FG is a measure of the amount of sugar fermented by the yeast.
Abv, alcohol by volume calculation is complicated by the fact that the FG measures not just the amount of sugars turnmed into alcohol but also the fact beer contains alcohol which is lighter than water.
Degrees of Extract—a laboratory figure for the amount of sugar gotten out of a weight of grain. Look it up for yourselves, e.g. look up Bairds or Weyermann websites is and see DE for pale malt 301. A brewer can get maybe 80% of the laboratory figure
Brewlength—the volume at the end of the brew. Here we tend to do 22L batches, in the US they make 5gal batches, ≈ 5 x 4 = 20L. But there are wastages, I allowed 2L of wort sopped up by the hops plus bits stuck in chiller, below the outlet of the kettle etc, so we work on 24L. Since we boil wort for an hour we start with 26L of wort. I use V (volume) to stand for brewlength.
We decided that abv is to be 4.5% so we have: (OG - FG) x ƒ = abv where ƒ is a correction factor that allows for the alcohol being lighter than water factor. We do not need to use that equation, however.
Let us think a bit more about our desired beer. It is a smallish beer so we need to pack it full of body and flavor. Malt flavor is what we are considering. To get some body into our beer we want to work the malt to get as much body and flavor as we can.
We could use more malt—but keeping to the 4.5%abv target we have set ourselves we have to keep the OG low enough to not have the beer over 4.5%abv. So we need to have more malt but not use all of it. Hmmmm there are two ways to do that. Remember abv = (OG - FG) x ƒ = 4.5. We see that is we keep FG high OG - FG is small and so abv is small. A beer made so it is dry, with little body, a very low FG will have most of the sugars fermented out so high alcohol. So we can use techniques to keep FG a bit high and end up with an ale with some body to it despite it being under 5% abv.
What about malt flavor? The answer here is pretty easy: we use the best ale malt there is, Maris Otter. There is some resurgence of interest in a very nice Australian malts, Schooner and Sloop. But a good malt. That has to be the basis. Anything else we can do? We want to keep the ale nice and pale, deep gold but no darker say. It has to look nice on a bloody hot day, color and a nice head of foam. We could add some slightly roasted malt to increase the maltiness of the ale: vienna malt say, lightest of the roasted malts. But we can make some nice “light amber malt” in our own kitchen stove! Will describe how we do that later, just note that we will make 2Kg of light amber malt from however much Maris Otter we decide to use.
For decent head we could have say 250g wheat malt as part of our grist: wheat has a lot of protein and it is protein that keeps a head on the beer. Or we could use wheat malt extract to prime the bottles. We do not want our beer too fizzy, we want to drain the first glass in one blissful go, so priming will be light.
OK, that is it for malt, beer also contains hops!
Next post—all about the hops we will use. We will set our target bitterness as 80% of our OG. This, in our little pale ale, is not up to IPA standards but is a noticeable pleasant, mouth cleansing bitterness. A chap called Daniels went through a vast number of beers and noted the relationship between bittering, BU, and gravity, OG units. An extra special bitter might be 6% abv and have more Bittering Units than Gravity units. Nice sipping beer, not what we look for in the middle of an Australian summer! We will keep BU:OG at 80% (personal preference, experience in brewing.)
Next post: talk about the process of brewing and how we will tweak it to get a smallish ale with a nice body to it. Then a post full of lovely brewmath!
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