mtb
Beer Bod
- Joined
- 5/1/16
- Messages
- 1,745
- Reaction score
- 1,055
Catherine Aird once stated, “If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning". I seem to be attuned to the latter. This post is little more than a rant but if it toggles a light bulb moment for someone in the same boat, that's great too.
TL;DR: I recently overcame what should have been a simple issue to resolve, but it took months because I neglected to measure pre/post boil volumes and I didn't know what a proper boil should look like.
On many brews over the past nine months, my pre-boil gravity reading was many points higher than the target - just a point or so shy of my target OG - which caused me to assume that I'd somehow hit a higher mash efficiency than expected. I adjusted my recipes on the fly to accommodate this prior to the boil by adjusting the pale ale hop schedule to that of an IPA, increasing the IBU / flavour / aroma additions to complement the post-boil OG projected by the unexpectedly high pre-boil gravity.
After the boil, to my frustration, I'd find that I had hit the originally projected OG. I had the OG & projected ABV of a pale ale, but the hop schedule of an IPA, meaning it was far too bitter. This occurred with other styles as well; although I didn't make adjustments to the recipe on the fly, I ended up hitting my target OG, but the resulting beers were a bit crap. I couldn't pick why and I found maybe one in five was decent enough for my liking, but even then I preferred commercial beers and this shat me like nothing else. I blamed my hydrometer, the hydrometer temperature adjustment calculator I used, Beersmith, having too many beers during the brew day; I got pretty frustrated with it all.
Well, it was my burner. More specifically, I wasn't running it hot enough. The boil wasn't vigorous enough to achieve proper evaporation rates. The penny dropped only when I immersed my temperature probe during the last 10min of the boil, to sanitise it, and I noticed that the reading was 98C. I switched out the burner with a rambo burner I had nearby, and suddenly the shed was full of vapour.. yep, definitely an increased boiloff rate, I thought.
It explained the presence of DMS (creamed / cooked corn flavour) in some of my beers. It explained the unexpected gravity readings. It explained bloody everything. The inconsistency of results (I brewed an award winning IPA in February, for example) is likely explained by weather conditions, where a lack of wind would improve the effectiveness of the burner.
Am I angry with myself? Yeah, a little. I tend to take a less-than-scientific approach with troubleshooting which is odd since I'm in IT and that's what we get paid to bloody do. Overall though, I'm just glad that I found the cause of the issue, and the pain from tipping out three kegs will be offset by the new variety of beers which are currently fermenting and building me a very high expectation. If you see something on the news about a crazy Canberran hurling kegs, beer paraphernalia & his own feces at innocent bystanders while blabbering obscenities, it's probably me, and it's probably because these beers turned out shit too.
</rant>
TL;DR: I recently overcame what should have been a simple issue to resolve, but it took months because I neglected to measure pre/post boil volumes and I didn't know what a proper boil should look like.
On many brews over the past nine months, my pre-boil gravity reading was many points higher than the target - just a point or so shy of my target OG - which caused me to assume that I'd somehow hit a higher mash efficiency than expected. I adjusted my recipes on the fly to accommodate this prior to the boil by adjusting the pale ale hop schedule to that of an IPA, increasing the IBU / flavour / aroma additions to complement the post-boil OG projected by the unexpectedly high pre-boil gravity.
After the boil, to my frustration, I'd find that I had hit the originally projected OG. I had the OG & projected ABV of a pale ale, but the hop schedule of an IPA, meaning it was far too bitter. This occurred with other styles as well; although I didn't make adjustments to the recipe on the fly, I ended up hitting my target OG, but the resulting beers were a bit crap. I couldn't pick why and I found maybe one in five was decent enough for my liking, but even then I preferred commercial beers and this shat me like nothing else. I blamed my hydrometer, the hydrometer temperature adjustment calculator I used, Beersmith, having too many beers during the brew day; I got pretty frustrated with it all.
Well, it was my burner. More specifically, I wasn't running it hot enough. The boil wasn't vigorous enough to achieve proper evaporation rates. The penny dropped only when I immersed my temperature probe during the last 10min of the boil, to sanitise it, and I noticed that the reading was 98C. I switched out the burner with a rambo burner I had nearby, and suddenly the shed was full of vapour.. yep, definitely an increased boiloff rate, I thought.
It explained the presence of DMS (creamed / cooked corn flavour) in some of my beers. It explained the unexpected gravity readings. It explained bloody everything. The inconsistency of results (I brewed an award winning IPA in February, for example) is likely explained by weather conditions, where a lack of wind would improve the effectiveness of the burner.
Am I angry with myself? Yeah, a little. I tend to take a less-than-scientific approach with troubleshooting which is odd since I'm in IT and that's what we get paid to bloody do. Overall though, I'm just glad that I found the cause of the issue, and the pain from tipping out three kegs will be offset by the new variety of beers which are currently fermenting and building me a very high expectation. If you see something on the news about a crazy Canberran hurling kegs, beer paraphernalia & his own feces at innocent bystanders while blabbering obscenities, it's probably me, and it's probably because these beers turned out shit too.
</rant>
