Thanks, Ray! Or: Dude, you saved my homebrew!

Ray Daniels, wherever you are right now, thank you! I should've read your terrific book, Designing Great Beers, sooner. It's an amazing book, and while other beloved books got me off to a great start with homebrewing, I think Designing Great Beers is the book that can take my homebrewing to the next level. With detailed information on every aspect of brewing, from water treatment to grain bills and hop additions, it's a treasure. What I found the other day is that it can even help with the little things, the things that in hindsight look simple. In brewing, simple things matter.

With my students on winter break, and their winter break not coinciding with my kids' winter break (not sure how that mismatch developed, since my employer is the dominant force in Ann Arbor), I had some time on my hands. The homebrewing bug bit me... hard... again, and I decided to brew two batches. The first was an absolutely huge imperial stout from an extract and specialty grain recipe developed by my dear friend Sean "Beer for the Daddy" Nordquist. After a little time with Beer Alchemy on my computer and going back and forth with Sean, I was good to go with the recipe, and the brew day went beautifully (nice job, Sean!). Dark as night, rich, and roasty with aromas of chocolate and coffee, the stout is now percolating away in the fermenter.

Looked and smelled like a chocolate milkshake in the kettle

I had also been busily formulating an IPA to brew the very next day. I built the recipe on my way back from Utah and wrote a recent post about that experience, and since it was my first recipe formulated totally from scratch, I was particularly excited about it.

Although the brew day went well in many ways, my efficiency was poor. For whatever reason, my last couple of all-grain batches have suffered from low efficiency, with the grains reluctant to yield their sugars in the mash. Intent on hitting the right original gravity, I focused more on that than on volume. I ended up hitting my target gravity, but I was nearly a gallon short. A gallon less beer is a lot, particularly when you put in a whole day of effort to make the stuff. I was not entirely happy.

They looked so promising!

The solution, post-mashing, is obvious: either go with what you've got, or add some malt extract to bring the beer up to the right gravity and volume. I wanted to do the latter, but how to do so with reasonable precision? That's where Ray's book came in. I am reading it currently, soaking in gobs of information, and I remembered that he covered how to correct gravity in a really accessible, straightforward way. I grabbed the book, and before long I was sitting with a calculator and a scrap of paper figuring out exactly how much dried malt extract to boil up in a gallon of water so that I could hit the full five gallons without sacrificing the original gravity of the beer. Now, I'm not saying that you can't feel your way through this and just measure as you go, but nothing beats having hard numbers laid out in a readily applied manner. It was quick, it was easy, and it worked. I brought the beer up to volume, still hitting the gravity target, and now the IPA, too, is fermenting away. Ray's advice on this is not complicated; in fact, after reading it, I had a "now why didn't I think of that?" moment. But the point is that I didn't think of it, and he did, and he kindly put it into a very well-written book.

The IPA will be ready to rack to the secondary fermenter in about a week, where I'll dry-hop it and let it sit for awhile. As for the imperial stout, I'll bottle that in a little over a week, maybe two, and put those bottles away for a good long time to mature. It was great to brew up a couple of batches after going a long time without - it's the closest thing I've got to meditation nowadays. But the bug hasn't let go yet. Next up is a repeat of the special bitter I brewed nearly a year ago. That's still the fastest-consumed batch I've ever made, a real favorite around here. Time for more.