Nerding Out

There's a lot of beer-related information floating around on the internet. You've got the forums, reddit, blogs ranging in quality from ones like mine up to those of professional brewers which all abound with information that tends to be highly opinionated and often representative of the conventional homebrew wisdom. But it's rare to find genuinely scholarly resources.

Thankfully, courtesy of BeerNews I stumbled upon the online archives of the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, which is a publication of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling. There are 119 years (yes, YEARS) of journals at 4 volumes per year. The articles run the gamut from very technical microbiology to theoretical methods for calculating the properties of finished fermentations to higher level summaries of years and years of research.

It's pretty amazing and generous that someone decided to put this massive cache of knowledge out there for the brewing community. Much of the information is well beyond the scope of what a homebrewer (or frankly anyone without a microbiology degree) can really grok, but there are some extremely informative and practical articles in each volume.

Just some quick tidbits from some of the reading I've done:

- Concrete studies on the viability of different hop strains stored in different temperature, light and oxygen conditions. (Some of the conventional wisdom is that temperature is more important than exposure to oxygen. Their study states quite the opposite. Furthermore, different cultivars showed different decays of alpha and beta acids. )
- A summary of the attributes of finished beer which can inhibit or promote the growth of bacteria (good and bad) and specifics about the conditions under which certain bacteria can thrive. Fresh, unisomerized hops inhibit most strains of lactic acid bacteria, but not all. (I knew that aged hops were traditionally used in lambics, but never really made the connection as to exactly why.)
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You Don't Want Every Last Ounce of Beer You Produce

No. Really. You don't.

When I first started brewing, I didn't want to lose a single drop of my precious homebrewed nectar. I paid dearly for that extract and those hops, worked really hard to produce that three gallons of stovetop wort and gingerly poured it all through a fine china cap into a bucket of icewater to cool and dilute it back to 5 gallons of finished wort. 

After fermentation, I'd every so carefully siphon each and every drop of finished beer off of the trub and into the bottling bucket and then make sure I didn't leave even an ounce of beer in my bottling bucket. 

I loved each and every drop of those early batches. You should love yours too.

That said, I've learned that it's ok to leave some of that sweet nectar behind at each stage of the process. Even though I won't get to drink it in the long run, the finished product is better when you anticipate a some waste along the way. If you whirlpool (even with a big spoon), that last half gallon or gallon of wort you leave behind in the kettle happens is thick with hop solids and proteins from your hot break. Leaving it behind will yield a much clearer, brighter finished beer. 

Let your fermentation run its course, and then do whatever you can to drop the temperature for a few days to encourage the solids in suspension to settle out. Then siphon carefully, but leave a half inch or an inch of beer in the fermentor on top of your yeast cake. It's not worth it to risk transferring that crap into your packaged end-product. Dead yeast and spent hops? Not so tasty. Your finished batch will be clearer and more stable. This is good.

At the end of the day, base malt (and even extract) are cheap. 

Using prices for fermentables that are representative of what we see here in Chicago, here are some hard numbers to hopefully demonstrate that it's not a very expensive proposition to make enough wort to leave some behind:

Liquid malt extract (LME) is about $3 / lb. To make 5 gallons of 1.051 SG wort (a 5% beer), you'd use 6.8 lbs. To make 6 gallons of wort and yield 5, you'd use 8 lbs. So as an extract brewer it'd cost you an extra $3.60 to get better tasting, clearer beer. Not bad considering that an extract batch runs anywhere from $30 - $50 for 5 gallons.

If you're an all grain brewer, it's even cheaper. If you buy it buy the pound, base malt runs about $1.25 / lb. To make 5 gallons of 1.052 SG wort, you'd used 9.3 lbs. To make 6 gallons, you'd use 11 lbs. So it'll cost you a whopping $2.13 extra.

It's worth it. Trust me. Between this and the extra buck or two it costs to make a yeast starter, you'll improve the quality of your beer massively over not doing either.

*My assumption is that bittering hops are negligibly cheap and barely affect these costs.

*If you are buying base malt by the pound and brew with any regularity, do yourself a favor and find a local homebrew shop where you can buy it in sack quantity. My cost on 2-Row is about $0.70 / lb.