technobabble66
Meat Popsicle
Warning: this might all be silly speculation.
Basically i'm wondering if there's any benefit from doing a re-heat of the wort after chilling it after Flameout.
What i currently do is circulate the wort at flameout through a plate chiller back into the kettle. This drops the temp from 100°C to ~80°C within a few minutes, then down to 65°C after another several mins. Maybe 10mins overall.
What i then normally do is stand it for 20mins (after throwing in my "0min" addition), then whirlpool for 20mins, then drain into the FV at 22°C.
I do this to halt the bittering from late hops ASAP, and make my recipes as reliable & close to predicted on the spreadsheet. And i like to throw in lots of late hops, but don't like overly-bitter beers.
TBH, i'm really chasing maximum hops flavour, rather than aroma or bitterness. This technique hopefully allows me to do lots of 15-20mins additions, and then add even more at flameout for both aroma and flavour impact without making it too bitter.
Now i was speculating that if "flavour" additions are added at 20mins, i'm assuming the volatile oils and other constituents need to boil into the wort and convert into other compounds under the higher temps and longer time to produce the particular flavour impact. As opposed to say 5 or 0min additions that are more "aroma" additions - i'm assuming those aforementioned constituents haven't had enough time at 100°C to convert to the more flavoursome compounds.
Basically, i need to be boiling the hops constituents for a moderate while to get the flavour impact i want.
So i was wondering if there'd be any benefit from switching the heat back on once i'd dropped the wort down to 55°C or so.
My thinking was that at those temps, the flameout hops have their oils etc easily extracted, and yet it's still well below the volatility point of the oils at least (until the wort goes over ~65°C), and so these constituents stay dissolved in the wort. As the heat comes off the element at the base of the urn it causes boiling at the surface of the element. These bubbles then collapse as they rise up through the cooler wort. So the volatiles that should boil off, don't. Instead they stay in the wort and hopefully go through the process of boiling at 100°C at the element surface, then dissolving back into the wort (while it stays below ~65°C).
So it really comes down to whether it's worth doing this faffing around to optimise the flavour impact or is this basically a really complicated way of replicating either FWH additions or the simple 20mins additions?
The clincher is that the FWHs boils for just waaay too long. Whereas the 20mins additions are great, but a lot of potential is lost by volatizing the oils off.
This technique is aimed at maximising the flavour impact of all of whatever's in the hops.
The minor down-side is the bitterness will also be increased at the same rate, but i'm hoping the flavour impact would be relatively greater overall.
Thoughts? either from experience or science?
Basically i'm wondering if there's any benefit from doing a re-heat of the wort after chilling it after Flameout.
What i currently do is circulate the wort at flameout through a plate chiller back into the kettle. This drops the temp from 100°C to ~80°C within a few minutes, then down to 65°C after another several mins. Maybe 10mins overall.
What i then normally do is stand it for 20mins (after throwing in my "0min" addition), then whirlpool for 20mins, then drain into the FV at 22°C.
I do this to halt the bittering from late hops ASAP, and make my recipes as reliable & close to predicted on the spreadsheet. And i like to throw in lots of late hops, but don't like overly-bitter beers.
TBH, i'm really chasing maximum hops flavour, rather than aroma or bitterness. This technique hopefully allows me to do lots of 15-20mins additions, and then add even more at flameout for both aroma and flavour impact without making it too bitter.
Now i was speculating that if "flavour" additions are added at 20mins, i'm assuming the volatile oils and other constituents need to boil into the wort and convert into other compounds under the higher temps and longer time to produce the particular flavour impact. As opposed to say 5 or 0min additions that are more "aroma" additions - i'm assuming those aforementioned constituents haven't had enough time at 100°C to convert to the more flavoursome compounds.
Basically, i need to be boiling the hops constituents for a moderate while to get the flavour impact i want.
So i was wondering if there'd be any benefit from switching the heat back on once i'd dropped the wort down to 55°C or so.
My thinking was that at those temps, the flameout hops have their oils etc easily extracted, and yet it's still well below the volatility point of the oils at least (until the wort goes over ~65°C), and so these constituents stay dissolved in the wort. As the heat comes off the element at the base of the urn it causes boiling at the surface of the element. These bubbles then collapse as they rise up through the cooler wort. So the volatiles that should boil off, don't. Instead they stay in the wort and hopefully go through the process of boiling at 100°C at the element surface, then dissolving back into the wort (while it stays below ~65°C).
So it really comes down to whether it's worth doing this faffing around to optimise the flavour impact or is this basically a really complicated way of replicating either FWH additions or the simple 20mins additions?
The clincher is that the FWHs boils for just waaay too long. Whereas the 20mins additions are great, but a lot of potential is lost by volatizing the oils off.
This technique is aimed at maximising the flavour impact of all of whatever's in the hops.
The minor down-side is the bitterness will also be increased at the same rate, but i'm hoping the flavour impact would be relatively greater overall.
Thoughts? either from experience or science?
