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X Brew Inauguration Day

December 6, 2009 by Brewer Leave a Comment

Today I am embarking on the first in a (hopefully) long-running series of experimental brew days, which I plan on sharing here on brewerman.com. The inspiration for my approach is a combination of the recent revisiting of some Brew Your Own articles, and a lay-off that has given me more free time.  I have been thinking for a while about how I can really zero in on my own ideal recipe.

I’ve been performing my own recipe formulation for my own well-received beers for a while now (thank you Ray Daniels’ Designing Great Beers!), but there are only a few beers that I’ve been really tweaking over the years. To really zero in on what’s in my head, I would need to brew far more often than I currently do, and to do so would require far more money and liver tissue than I have to give.

Enter the Brewerman X Brew series.  I am going to give brewing super-small batches a shot.  Inspired by Brew Your Own’s articles on small-scale brewing, I will be brewing one gallon batches from infusion mashes performed in a Coleman One Gallon Cooler.  Because the volume is so small, I can run multiple brews at one time, and do so in my kitchen … all very convenient, with a minimal hit on resources.

The only way I can realistically pull this off is to:

  • Continue to be faithful to keeping accurate records on metrics and observations
  • Keep as tight control over brew variables as realistically possible (e.g. temps, volumes, time, etc)
  • Keep extremely organized on brew day (multiple hopping schedules at once … ugh)
  • Close the loop: sample, make recipe adjustments, repeat experimentation

The only pitfalls I see are:

  • I may have to get a more-precise digital scale.
  • Fermentation variables of one gallon batch may not transfer to a five-gallon batch (e.g. time sitting on yeast to scrub beer relative to the yeast health after they finish fermenting the beer)
  • Having to return to bottling 🙁

Still, I’m very excited.  The first run will be a single batch this time (a calibration run) targeting one of my favorites: Green Flash’s West Coast IPA.  This recipe was largely taken from the awesome Jamil Show episode where they got a recipe straight from Chuck Silva from Green Flash!

I’ll be posting pictures and run-down of the brew session tomorrow.

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001MGZU5Q?ie=UTF8&tag=brewerman-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001MGZU5Q”>Coleman One Gallon Jug</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=brewerman-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B001MGZU5Q” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />

Filed Under: Small Batch

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