Good beer doesn’t necessarily start with ingredients—or at least a good recipe doesn’t. A recipe is only as good as its execution on a given system. This really has less to do with the system and more to do with the brewer. It’s an input/output situation, but the brewer has to know how the system will transform those things they input in order to get the desired output. Knowing how a machine works allows you to make an informed decision about what to put in. So really, knowing your system is the first step in knowing how to create a recipe. A brewer who knows their system knows how to create a recipe or adjust an existing recipe to get the beer they want to get.
Have You Been Paying Attention?
Different recipes will necessarily respond differently on a single system, which makes determining your baseline a challenge if you constantly brew different recipes. For me, brewing the same beer over and over again (granted, with slight changes each time) and taking meticulous notes helped me uncover some inconsistencies in my brewing, determine their cause, and be able to apply that understanding to new recipes, yielding more consistency in my ability to hit the gravities, volumes, etc. I want.
The reverse is also true: different systems will respond differently to the same recipe. Brewing a beer with a friend on their system and then brewing it on your own system might very well make two different beers (though the difference may be slight, I contend that consistency is vital if you want to be able to craft a recipe and know how it will turn out from the start). Knowing how your system responds to a single recipe can help form a baseline for how your system will respond to other recipes as well.
It’s easy to let things ride on a brew day, not take measurements, and let it be what it will be, and certainly there’s a place for that. If you aren’t worried about making the same beer twice and don’t particularly care about hitting the numbers you expect (or you don’t pay attention to numbers at all), then carry on—homebrewing is supposed to be fun, after all. However, if (like me) you find some of the fun in being able to brew consistent beers and being able to brew a recipe multiple times with the same result, knowing how your system responds to your inputs is critical to succeeding in that goal.
Truly, learning my system was more of an accidental function of brewing the same beer (with slight variations) for an entire year. But in retrospect, here are the things that helped me learn what to expect from any new recipe I brew.
Areas of Focus:
1) Know Your Ingredients
Know what can be reasonably expected from the ingredients. Mostly, I mean know what to expect in terms of the malt you use. The potential gravity points per pound per gallon (PPG) of each malt is a great place to start. Without this information, you can’t know your efficiency (mash or brew house), and thus can’t accurately estimate your OG. Of course, most of us (me included) use some form of recipe creation software, and this information is automatically input for us. It’s important, though, to ensure that the malt you are using is accurately represented in the software (i.e., you are choosing the correct malt or adding the malt to the software’s list if it’s missing), as some similarly named malts can vary across different maltsters’ products.
2) Grain Crush
The first several times I tried to repeat a recipe (albeit with slight changes), I had an issue that was greatly confusing: wildly inconsistent gravities. After ensuring I was doing everything the same in my process, that I was using the same volumes of water, that I was collecting the same volume of wort, and that I had accounted for the differences in the ingredients I had changed, I was still having my gravities vary by as much as 14 specific gravity points.
I finally realized my problem was not in my process, but rather in the crush of my grain. I do not own a mill, so I rely on my LHBS to mill my grain for me. For some reason, I was getting an inconsistent crush from their mill (which I never would have figured out if I weren’t repeating this recipe). I had three options: I could buy a mill (not in my budget), ask them to set the gap each time (which I didn’t expect them to do), or ask them to run my malt through the mill twice. I opted for the latter, and this completely eliminated any variation I was getting between batches. Since my process was the same, and now my malt was uniform from batch to batch, I was obtaining the same OG each brew.
3) Volume
There are several places in the brewing process where volume matters. The first is the volume of water used in your mash. Liquor to grist ratio has an impact on the extraction and, thus, on the gravity of wort lautered from the mash tun. I won’t go into the details of all that now, because my main point is to be consistent. Know how much water you are using, and know your liquor to grist ratio. If you want to change that later, at least you’ll have a baseline to work from.
The second place you should pay attention to volume is the volume of wort you collect. If you use the brew in a bag method, you have one input volume and one output volume to work with, making this easy to see how much water your grain is absorbing. You can know exactly how much is going into your kettle with one measurement. If you batch sparge or fly sparge, there are some additional things to consider. I batch sparge, and what helped me to stay consistent with both the amount of wort gathered and the gravity of that wort was paying attention to how much wort I collected each time I lautered.
I began collecting wort in a container with volume markings prior to pouring that wort into my kettle. I then made note of how much I gathered from my first runnings, second runnings, and third runnings (I have a small mash tun, so I do have to sparge at least twice to get my desired volume, depending on the amount of grain used). I then compared how much wort I collected from my second runnings to the volume collected from my first runnings. Since I knew how much water went into the grains, this helped me know how much water was being absorbed by the grains and how much was being left behind in the mash tun. Assuming no extra water absorption by the grains during my first batch sparge (perhaps not completely accurate), I could compare my water input to my wort output for both my first and second runnings and determine how much was lost to the grains and how much was left behind.
Example:
- 4 gallons of water in 12 pounds of grain; 2.5 gallons collected from first runnings.
- 3 gallons of water added for batch sparge; 2.5 gallons collected from second runnings.
- 0.5 gallons left behind in mash tun; 1.5 gallons absorbed by grains.
The amount collected will change with the amount of grain used and the liquor to grist ratio employed, but you can use this as a baseline for future brews.
The next place volume matters is in the kettle. Boil-off rate is dependent on so many factors: kettle dimensions, boil vigor, humidity, etc. Honestly, this is the hardest for me to keep consistent, but kettle markings (or, for me, knowing the handle bolts on my kettle are the 6 gallon mark) will give you a real-time estimate of your evaporation rate. Really, the volume loss here only matters in terms of hitting your estimated OG and getting the final volume of beer you want into your fermentor.
The last place I want to mention volume is basic, but worth noting. The volume of wort lost to trub will be greatly dependent upon the amount of hops used in the recipe, so this is worth considering when you craft your recipe.
Final Thoughts
No one of these things on their own will be your key to consistency. Rather, it’s the sum of the parts and your willingness to pay attention to the details of volumes, etc. that will aid in becoming a more consistent brewer. As important, if not more important, as being consistent with one recipe is the baseline that this information provides and the ability to implement that baseline in new recipes so that the recipe you have in your head or on paper is the beer that you end up drinking.