BeerBorg

So in some other thread talking about partial volume/top ups/short boils, etc. I mentioned you can get pretty extreme about it, and by using near frozen water chill it almost instantly, and still make good beer.

So this is the most extreme example that I ever did in the past, done again for posterity - for those who are *not anal retentive micro manager types who want absolute perfection the first try* but instead simply want 5 gallons of good beer to drink IE after cycling on hot summer days. You can not reproduce a clone recipe this way. You can however design your own. You can then tweak with some trial and error to achieve whatever level of perfection you want then going forward. If you wish to keep doing it. You can make really good beer this way, even though it sounds totally crazy and defies all brewing rules. But it will be your own beer of your own design, not someone else's recipe.

This can be done by anyone with 2 LBCs, 2 LBKs, a 5 gallon bucket, whatever, and nothing but whatever pot you have laying around in your house that you mixed up your old Mr. Beer cans in. Anyone who has brewed Mr. Beer or BrewDemon batches can do this, it is not any more difficult then those things. It takes no more equipment. And it takes hardly any more time. And unless you are doing something dumb it still makes better beer as long as you are making the right kinds of beer where you can pull this off. You can do it on your crappy stove because you are only boiling a gallon or so at max.

I'm not suggesting you follow this recipe, as I've never made this recipe before. But I have used this technique before I got my 12Q and 16Q pots, and based on experience, I will bet that this will be really good to drink after cycling. (If I thought this would turn out crappy I would not have done it as 5 gallons - you can apply similar methods, with just half the amount of everything for 2.5 gallons or 2 gallons or whatever, which is what I would suggest a newbie try first until they get a feel for it and nail down a recipe they like). But I wanted to do a 5 gallon version just to "put my money where my mouth was" as such when I said you can do this on some other thread.

So that said...

This was actually a PARTIAL MASH - because I used my left over "session ipa juice" in it. Which was basically base malt, some Vienna, some honey malt, and some 30L English crystal (which tastes more like malt, not like caramel or sugar), and some carapils. Enough to give me what would amount to a 1.012 wort if I diluted it to 5 gallons.

So you could as an extract brewer simply consider that as something like 1.5# of DME of some sort, or 1.75# of LME of some sort.

To that I added

1# Wheat DME,
1# Ginger Candi Syrup
3# MoreBeer Extra Light LME.

At 5 gallons this would give me about a 1.049 wort in theory. If you want to take a hydrometer sample you will have to wait until after you put it in the fermenter and aerate it though. Because its just something stupidly high in the boil. Which would be really bad if you were boiling for a long time. But you are not going to do that. This is a 10 or 20 minute boil max. This one was 15.

So, I topped it up to 5Q in the pot. Stirred it all in until it was integrated. Yes, it actually can all integrate even with this stupidly thick wort. Just make sure you stir it until it is before turning on the heat. And then once the heat is turned on keep stirring it until it comes near a boil to prevent scorching. That looked like this:
Brought that to a boil.

Added

1/2oz of sweet orange peel
1oz of Calypso hops 13.5% AA (tastes strongly of pear, with some lemons, cherry blossoms, black pepper, bitter orange, mint, and tropical fruit)

That looked like this:
15 minute boil of all that. And then a 30 minute lid on hop stand starting at flameout.
That is enough hops that if I was brewing full volume would give me around 36 IBUs. Except it will not do that because this is a stupidly thick stupidly high gravity boil. In this case it will likely be more like 16 or 18 or so based on my experience/taste from doing this before a handful of times (brewing software can't fathom this thick of a boil the formulas all break down, it's a matter of trial and error, so if you try this be sure to use a good bit more (maybe start with 2x) then you would normally unless you like malty-sweet beer... or if you like malty beer then maybe just 50% more and then tweak upwards as needed next time).

In any case, that is more then enough because this is a table strength Saison and the Ginger and orange are going to make it seem more bitter then it is, and French Saison will ferment down to 1.03 at most or 0.997 quite possibly, and French Saison has a tart vibe to it's finish too - so this will not taste sweet no matter how few IBUs it actually has. So I have no worries here. 36 IBUs would be way too much for what I want. I'd have only used boiled it for 5 minutes or something like that if I was doing it full volume or "late extract addition", but in this case late extract @10 is kind of dumb and more trouble then its worth due to volume calculations. I wanted the hop flavor to stand out a good bit, as I think all that will play great against the Ginger spice and French Saison tartness.

So while the hop stand is going, I go dig up 4 gallons of water I had sitting in my chest freezer for the last 2 1/2 hours or so. It is chilled to the point where ice crystals are just starting to form. Which is exactly where you want this to pull of this magic chilling. If you freeze it too much you can always nuke it back to the point where it's mostly water with slushy ice.
... continued in next post ...

5 image limit, so continue in other post.

So I put 3 gallons of this frozen water into my LBCs (1.5 gallons each). Stick my pot with the lid on it right between them.
The I uncover the LBCs, and then the pot, and then using my very well sanitized utensil (1 cup measuring cup at the bottom of this bowl of sanitizer)
I measure out a cup of wort at a time alternating between each fermenter. If using a bucket you could just dump it in. Note that this wort is still freaking hot. It has not been actively chilled, the only chilling so far is the hop stand. That is why there is near freezing water in the fermenters. So yeah yeah HSA blah blah blah, it won't happen don't worry about it. The Elizabethan used to chill hot wort by tossing it from a bucket to another bucket through the air back and forth a bunch of times and then into their fermenter. So this is like that except just a single toss with a miniature bucket. You know you want to be an Elizabethan right? They were sexy.

The magic thing is that a long time ago I calculated out the thermal mass and how much and how cold the water needed to be to achieve something in the range of a decent pitching temp with this technique. Which turns out to be about exactly 2 gallons to achieve 2.5 gallons of nicely chilled wort (so you need 1/2 gallon of hot highly concentrated wort to top up). So 4 gallons for about 5 gallons of nicely chilled wort (so you need about 1 gallon of hot highly concentrated wort). I didn't hop stand back then with flameout hops when I did this, I dry hopped, but I still just let it sit on the stove for 20-30 minutes with a lid on with the hops I had thrown in at 15 or 10 or whatever. Lid on hop stand at flameout temps however makes it even more versatile, as you can use more hops at 0 if you like for the real hop stand and achieve even more IBUs. You will get about 10 minutes of equivalent full utilization (whatever that is at this concentration level) even with this small volume, because it will not cool fast due to the level of concentration. I can't stress that this is still really hot after 20 minutes of sitting. Do not go sticking your hands in, that would suck. If you do an @0 hopstand, lid on is very important, as you don't want to blow all the aroma oils out into your air over the next 10 minutes, you want whatever can recondense back in to do so as the lid cools and wort cools.

If dividing it between 2 fermenters as I am here (you have BrewDemon or Mr. Beer equipment, otherwise why would you be trying something this crazy LOL) then think of them numbered 1 and 2 - and when adding to the fermenters do it in a pattern like this... 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 1 ... that will help assure that any stratification ends up equally divided between them and as volume drops and you are not measuring out full cups that the volume ends up equal more or less. The last little bit you will have to pour in.

Then I simply top each one of the fermenters up to 2.5 gallons with the remaining water. Actually ended up with 2.55 in each but that's ok, I like a little extra.

After top up, aerate. That will integrate the wort and added water and give you accurate temp (and hydro sample if you wish to take one). I'm just going with 1.048 for this due to extra volume, and I don't really care if it's not exactly that because it's going to ferment out to somewhere between 1.003 and 0.997 in a week to 10 days or so and then not move after that because that's how Bella Saison / French Saison is and I'm ignoring it for 14 days so it simply doesn't matter.

You can likely not see, but after aeration my temp is 66 degrees, which is a perfectly fine pitching temp. With no active cooling besides the hop stand. Magic.

So in went the Bella Saison. I will let this free rise as warm as it likes to go.
Time from start to finish including sanitizing the fermenters and clean up was 1 hour, except for the minute it took for me to throw the jugs of water into the freezer a few hours before I started. (not counting the mash from the PM, but anyone who tries this is probably not going to do a PM, and I call it 0 for this recipe because this PM came out of my freezer and was time spent a while ago on a different brew day).

So, it took me as long to document the insanity here as it did to brew it.

I love it. Go post it on HBT, just to see all the carrying on from people who "don't want to shorten their brewday".

John Sand wrote:I love it. Go post it on HBT, just to see all the carrying on from people who "don't want to shorten their brewday".

LOL. This is not something I would suggest as a "recommended technique" if you have other options LOL. But it does work and it can make really damn good beer if you have a puny stove (I used to have a super wimpy stove) and a puny pot (I used to have only a super puny pot) or if you simply don't want to spend much time and not trying to clone something.

The most important things for anyone who tries it, are style you are going for and hop selection. It has to be a style where you want some hop flavor / aroma, because of the short boil. The hops need to be high AA / and/or you need to use a lot of them (comparatively speaking) at late addition timing. Because that's all the timing you have here unless you want very caramelized wort (something that tastes like scotch ale). So you need to select a high AA hop with the right profile. This is easy these days, there are high AA hops with all sorts of profiles.

Hoppy saisons, APAs, those work well. Also low/moderate bitterness styles with some hop presence can work well (English bitter / ESB - using Pacific Gem hops for example).

It's best to commando the hops and then just dump them into your fermenter, because they suck up so much viable concentrated wort - which will come back out into solution once diluted and whipped around by the yeasties. But because of this, IPAs done this way (which can be done) could plug up your spigots with trub if using LBCs/LBKs. If doing an IPA like this, use a high floc yeast like Notty that will pack as many of the hops into the trub as possible, and have an auto-siphon as a backup plan. If doing an IPA like this you really do absolutely really need to dump all the hops into the fermenter commando because they will suck up a very large volume of concentrated wort, and the only way to recover it is to dump them in and let the dilution/yeast take care if it.

You have to totally ignore your brewing software AAU calculations and just do it and then tweak the hops next time around. Start with "too much". Brewing formulas used by software are totally broken when it comes to this. The wort concentration / ph levels, and osmotic pressure are just whacked in this kind of boil. Organic chemistry is non linear to begin with, and none of the formulas can account for all those factors. You will get more AAUs then they will calculate (but do not sack your hops, put them in commando and dump into your fermenter, or you are just throwing out a heck of a lot of hop goodness and also viable wort). But you will also for sure get less AAUs (a good bit less) then if you did a full volume or partial volume with top up. So you have to be willing to tweak it, so anyone who attempts without experience should play with small batches first.

Regardless, you do not want to boil this very long - 15 to 20 minutes max. And do it as a gentle boil (you have to in my example here, there is hardly any headspace in the little pot I used). Which is why high AA hops / hop selection / and style choice are so important. A 10-15 minute gentle boil does not darken this very much, the effect isn't much different then a 60 minute full volume rolling boil once diluted. But if you were to boil this for 45-60 minutes, you would end up with a very thick very dark concentrate and once diluted some type of scotch ale like substance (your whole boil becomes some kind of pseudo-decoction). Which might be cool. If that's what you want. Not what I want here though. If you were to attempt that then a low AA hop would actually still work instead.

And that's about it.

You can of course always dry hop in the fermenter too, which I might do here with more Calypso hops. It depends on how it tastes in 10 days or so when I pull a sample.

Things that make you go HHMMM! Interesting write up!

Dawg LB Steve wrote:Things that make you go HHMMM! Interesting write up!

I'll be sure to save some of this for you to try LOL.

And we have beer.

Yeastpeople come out sayin' yeah
Feel the Vibe
And it's gettin' stronger

LOL.

mashani wrote:

Dawg LB Steve wrote:Things that make you go HHMMM! Interesting write up!

I'll be sure to save some of this for you to try LOL.

Sounds good, I got to get your bottles back to you.

Horray, beer!

Any reason to not add the bulk of the extract when you do the hop stand, so you're left with much thinner wort and higher hop utilization when you're boiling?

Jon wrote:Horray, beer!

Any reason to not add the bulk of the extract when you do the hop stand, so you're left with much thinner wort and higher hop utilization when you're boiling?

Normally if it was a long boil and larger volume, I would do what you said with about 10 minutes left, then return to a boil, then add finishing hops. That is more or less "standard practice".

Various reasons why I didn't do this listed below:

The volume of the extract added at the end compared to what you boiled to end up at the volume I had as a total would be so much comparatively speaking that you would potentially lower the wort temperature below a pasteurization temperature threshold (which would be bad in my house). I lid on at high temps and let it sit for 10 minutes at least on purpose in the summer to avoid brett, regardless of batch size and regardless of if I am actually hop standing or not. For a 5 gallon batch with more volume, I'd just normally chill in the sink with ice to some extent with the lid still on after that, and then top up with only a gallon and a half or so of water as needed. (my big pot is 16Q). But in this case, it's also about time savings (pretend I'm a mr. beer / brewdemon brewer and I do not want to spend more time yet or invest in equipment yet) - so I would be spending time bringing it back up to a boil after the addition, without scorching the wort which means integrating it with the heat off, bringing it back to a boil carefully while stirring again for a long time, etc... which would make my boil take longer then 15 minutes).

Which leads to...

It was a 15 minute boil. Adding the extract at 10 (especially if the boil length is 10 which sometimes it was when I did this LOL) - just seems silly to me in such cases, and introduces a random amount of time where the temperature drops by some random amount (depends on the temperature of your added extract), and then it takes some random amount of time to bring back to a boil. So you gained utilization, but you lost the ability to potentially recreate this beer exactly as it was, because the utilization between the extract addition and returning to a boil is somewhat of a variable. It is easier to tweak and/or reproduce if you keep out that variable, even if that leads to less efficiency. The boil is so short that the second reason for late extract addition (keeping the wort from darkening during the long boil) is not an issue. If longer then a 15-20 minute boil then I would do what you said however. In a long boil with the bittering coming from 60 minute addition, and the late hops primarily just for flavor, then its not so much an issue. But in this "technique" if you want to call it that, the hops you add are *everything*. Which is why they have to be high AA.

That said, in a batch like this, pushing the limits of your little Mr. Beer pot - if you are not careful and you miscalculate the original volume, then it might end up as more then will fit in your pot. Which would be messy LOL. If you have a bigger pot then it's not an issue. But why would you normally do this if you had a bigger pot LOL? I am only doing it here as an example of what you can get away with if you are creative, stuck with a crappy stove and a little pot and want to make 5 gallons of beer - which is something I learned to be in the past. Now that I have a bigger pot and a real stove, I don't have to do this anymore, but this does work. * although I did do it once last year... see below...

Also, my near frozen freezer temp water vs. thermal mass calculations I did in the past were based specifically on having the wort as hot as it is after just sitting for 20-30 minutes with no active cooling in my 70ish degree house. If you wanted to do the late extract without returning it to a full boil, and achieve pitching temperatures without active cooling, then you would need water somewhere between freezer and fridge temps to just pour it in and end up in the right pitching temperature range. Or else you would be pitching your yeast at 40 or 50 degrees. I don't think Bella Saison would like that. Active cooling and/or not being able to target a 62-68ish degree kind or range at the intended final volume (or very near it) would then make this take longer then 1 hour too. Part of this craziness was also to get to pitching temps with about 0 minutes of effort.

Although not my concern here, as a side effect it wastes no water. Which might not be an issue for many but it could be for some. (that's why nochill got invented by the Aussies, this is a crazy alternative way in some sense).

Hope that made sense.

EDIT:

* I can say (because I know it works well enough) that if it's 95 degrees outside but I am running out of post cycling beer and I simply don't want to stand over a hot pot of boiling liquid for an hour, and my tap water is 75+ degrees so I can't chill for crap and all I want is a saison to drink after cycling - well I might still do this LOL (although I would not push the limits of a 6Q pot, I'd use my 12Q pot to avoid DME boil over disasters). I think I did it once last year for that very reason. Whatever batch that was, I was happy to drink it. I'm sure I'll be happy to drink this. Basically - you have 1 hour, you want 5 gallons of "beer for drinking", you don't care if it's a clone - you just want beer - you can do this. And unless you do something stupid (or you simply hate everything but some random style of beer of exacting standards, IE you don't actually like BEER but only very specific kinds of beer), it actually won't suck! And you can tweak it into something that tastes great if you want to repeat it.

Normally I just use the 6Q pot for pseudo-decoctions anymore obviously.

Makes sense! This technique was born from a very specific need, and it is a great solution for that need. I like it!

Not that I'm probably ever going to try it myself--but then I don't have that very specific need...though I bet it'll come in handy for some Mr. Beer/Brew Demon brewers for sure!

Jon wrote:but then I don't have that very specific need...

Just wait until it's 108 degrees in Huston, and your tap water is 90 and you want to make beer LOL.

Great documentation on another way for beer. Enjoyed reading that Dave.

Wow, that was a long read - but an interesting one.
Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

So this is bottled at 1.002 or there about. As you can see even in my trubby hydro sample, the concentrated boil didn't harm the color (or fermentability) in any way - because it was so short (and it's impossible pretty much to harm fermentability when using French Saison anyways). Most of the color is actually from the partial mash base which had some Vienna and honey malt and 30L crystal in it.

And it tasted really good, all sorts of fruit and some spice in the background, yet still tart and dry. It's going to be a nice beer (if you like Saisons).