12
Some things I can think of to increase body:
Milk stouts use lactose, or milk sugar, to increase perceived body and sweetness. Lactose is unfermentable by yeast and so passes to the finished beer.
Dextrin malt (CaraPils, CaraFoam) will impart a nice bit of body without adding crystal-malt-flavor (something I don't like in stouts).
Mash high. Try 156°+ for ...
10
Flaked wheat is raw wheat - it's not been malted. This means that the enzymes that would normally help convert the starches to sugars have not even been created yet, since this is one affect of malting.
"Normal" wheat is also called "red" wheat, due to the slight reddish hue it has. The grain is malted, and so has the ability to convert it's own starches ...
10
If you have designed your recipe to account for adding the extra water at the end of the boil, then I see no issues what so ever.
I would personally add a couple of litres of boiling water every 10 min or so rather than adding it all at the end, just to avoid over concentrating the sugars in the wort, which may encourage caramelisation & Maillard ...
9
The first temperature is of the water you are adding while the second is the expected temperature of the mash after it has been added.
So by adding 12.81 qt of water at 163.7 F to the grain (presumably at room temp) the mixture should land around 152 F. Mashing out is an optional (though common) step that is meant to bring the mash above the temperature ...
8
You can make a flour from the grain, and follow any of the recipes listed here: Spent Grain Chef.
8
A good starting point for fruit additions in 1lb/gl. Strawberries are pretty subtle, though. I added 7.5lb to 5gl of blonde this summer, and the flavor was easily noticable without being overpowering.
8
This gunk is what's known as "trub", and it is proteins left over from the hot and cold breaks.
The experiment conducted here:
http://brulosophy.com/2014/06/02/the-great-trub-exbeeriment-results-are-in/
seems to show that it doesn't really matter whether it's included in the fermenter or not, but most people still remove it/don't add it.
8
The only definitive information I could find specific to your question was in the book Malts and Malting:
'[Malt] must be stored cool and dry in sealed stores [...] to arrest the decline in enzyme levels'
One brief and somewhat vague sentence in 750 pages may give you an idea of how little professional maltsters and brewers seem to concern themselves ...
7
Seal the beer off from oxygen as soon as possible. If you decide to use the airlock, use sanitized water only.
If you have access to CO2, put a layer of the gas over your beer as soon as possible (then close it off). If you've achieved your desired final gravity and you don't need to let it sit in the fermenter any longer, you could also bottle it or keg it ...
7
There is a distinct difference between chloride, which is a dissolved Cl- ion, and free residual chlorine (or the longer-lasting chloramine ions). The chloride is likely fine. The 61ppm concentration would make your water smell like a pool (or stronger) if it were chlorine.
A chlorine residual test must be conducted within 15 minutes of taking the sample. ...
7
The prevailing wisdom on these so called "east coast" IPAs is three fold: The use of ~10% of flaked oats in the grist. A combo of super huge late kettle additions as well as dry hopping. Lastly, the use of London Ale III from Wyeast (Wyeast 1318). Despite London Ale III being a great flocculating English Ale yeast, in the presence of huge amounts of hop ...
7
Well BIAB is all grain brewing. Not to be confused with just steeping specialty grains in extract brewing.
If you have a kettle big enough to do a full mash, doing a partial mash and extract is pointless. Unless it's a high gravity beer that would normally need a much larger mash. Basically if you're mashing at all it doesn't save time doing only partial. ...
7
Q1) No chance of off flavors just from this.
Q2) Yes, this is normal. The post boil gravity will always be higher than pre boil because of the water lost to evaporation.
In your case about 12% of the water was boiled off, resulting in a 12% increase in gravity.
Assuming a 5 gallon batch, you boiled off about 0.6 gallons.
7
There are two potential, but not serious, issues with boiling the volume lower than full:
1. Maillard reactions (not caramelisation) at higher wort gravity tend to be more prominent. Sometimes it's good (e.g. when you boil down first runnings when making dubbel), other times not so good (witbier and other light stuff).
2. Hops tend to be under-utilised in ...
6
Yes, you can make a concentrated wort and the dilute that after the boil as with extract.
The key differences are:
lower mash efficiency: higher gravity mashes tend to have lower conversion efficiency. To keep boil volume to a minimum, you might even choose not to sparge, and just use the first runnings - expect conversion efficiency around 50%. More grain ...
6
First, keep in mind that Mr. wizard is a commercial brewer and his answers come from that point of view. It may not be applicable to homebrewers.
Using wheat may be about the only case where using a protein rest may be of benefit. But it'a not a given. There are still proteolytic enzymes left in the malt. Due to the high protein content of wheat, it can ...
6
The core question is … Why? Different ions lead to different perceived properties in the finished beer; for one example: higher concentrations of chloride emphasize malt character, whereas higher concentrations of sulfate emphasize hop character and dryness.
When? Both in the mash and in the sparge water, mostly based on the ratio in volume, with some ...
6
As someone noted, chlorine and chloride are two different things.
Basically, zero chlorine and chloramine is desirable in your beer. Chlorine can bind with phenols in beer and form chlorophenols, a common homebrew flaw that leads to off-flavors described as medicinal, plastick-y, band-aid-like, or sometimes like electrical smoke.
There are many ways to ...
6
Brewing textbooks I referred to universally state that the gap between the rollers of the mill needs to be much closer together for wet-milling. You don't mention making any adjustments, so I'll assume you didn't. Since the husk is made more elastic by conditioning, the dangers of pulverizing it with too tight a mill are eliminated, and in fact it may do a ...
6
Well you don't steep any grain "during the boil". But to avoid upsetting mash pH you can steep all your non mash required grains in the wort during runoff in the kettle before you start the boil. I routinely add my roasted and crystal malts to a grain bag and steep them this way when I make stouts.
Another application of steeping malts is to actually make ...
6
I add nearly freezing water to chill it quicker to pitch temperature. 1 gallon of near frozen I add to 4 gallons of wort to chill it to lager pitch temperature quicker. Once my immersion chiller cannot reduce the temperature any further, I introduce the near freezing water into my wort. I do not notice any negative effects. The hops are still very nice ...
5
Clarity of wort has no bearing on the clarity of the finished beer. Beer clarity is much more dependent on things like proper pH and mash conversion an d a large amount of flour should have no effect. My crush is very fine with a large amount of flour and my efficiency ranges from 80-85%. Based on that, it's difficult to believe your wort loss is solely ...
5
With 2 pumps, you don't need to worry about gravity feed to the fermenter. Also, for 10 gal. of finished beer I'd recommend something bigger than a 10 gal. pot. That's about all the help I can give you since I've brewed 452 batches using a cooler and wouldn't think of doing it any other way.
5
There are two answers, depending on size:
In largish setup, you may want to be able to heat water for second batch when you are mashing first one.
To heat water fast, you want heating element to output a lot of power. It could burn your mash if used in the tank with grain. It is easier and more reliable to switch heater on full for 10% time than on 10% ...
5
Control over color is the first thing and the biggest. Even the lightest DME will make beer darker than an all grain made with pilsner to the same gravity.
Control over body. All extract, DME included, tends to finish a little higher in gravity points post fermentation than when brewing with all grain. There are ways to help improve the difference in ...
4
The HLT (Hot Liquor Tank) interestingly isn't there to hold wort or anything with alcohol (liquor here is referring to a liquid being used in a process). It has a simple job: It holds and heats water to be used in the mash. You also add salts such as gypsum in the HLT.
With 10 gallon batches, a 5 gallon HLT absolutely not big enough.
That being said, the ...
4
Whether or not they're really necessary depends on the water you have and the beer you want to brew. You need to start by getting an analysis of your water. Some water districts provide all the info you need, but many of them don't. If not, an excellent resource is wardlab.com. Get test W-6. As the what the info means and how you need to adjust your ...
4
There are many mail-order or online places to get these components, but local hardware stores will typically not have everything you need.
There might be a specialty plumbing store near you or a Grainger Industrial Supply type store near you.
If that does not work, you can order online from sites like bargainfittings.com or fittingsandadapters.com.
4
This is called "vorlauf" and yes, it is traditional. That being said, it's also a highly effective way of producing a clear sweet wort. I would guess that you'd need a fairly fine filter, not just a mesh strainer, to achieve the same level of clarity produced by recirculating a few quarts of wort. The filter would need to be so fine that you'd either need a ...
4
The whole "Brew in a Bag" methodology is based on using a very fine bag to filter the wort, just as you suggest. Its certainly feasible and something a lot of home brewers do (it doesn't scale up to pro-brewing sizes).
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