Yeasty wrote:I'm going to start another thread on this subject as I'm conscious of hijacking gvhorwitz's OP, and I think it's a good topic for discussion.
Too right it is Yeasty. I reckon throw it in the "Old Timers" forum so we know where to find the damn thing! Make it good so it becomes a sticky! No pressure though
. I'll see if I can stop Greg's head spinning
.
PistolPatch wrote:All-grain "kits", a new arrival in the home-brew market, work from the opposite direction - they give you the ingredients. They have their place, for sure, but they are crude in their assumptions and should not be regarded as being anywhere near accurate.
Greg, can you leave it with us for a day or two? It's been a while since I or anyone else dealt with this situation...
Smee again
How's your head Greg?
Let's see if I can, and I'm not promising anything, clear things up with a new analogy...
Brewing a Beer is Not Like Baking Bread
Flour, salt, water and a yeast starter (or dried yeast) will make you bread and I, Pat, can give you, Greg, simple weights and volumes so as you can make bread just like me. I will give you the weights and volumes for one 450 gram loaf and you too will get one 450 gram loaf. Simple as that.
I don't want to make brewing beer sound more complicated than making bread because it is and it isn't. For example...
1. When making bread, you can't, after the bake, add a bit more water to the loaf whereas in brewing you can.
2. When making bread you know a given amount of ingredients will produce an x gram loaf whereas in brewing you don't.
What Else is Different?
When making bread, we have no wastage on the flour side of things. In the flour we use, all husks and [can't think of word now] material have been removed. In brewing, we crush a whole grain and many factors come into play into determining how much pure flour our water will freely inter-act and combine with. That's the first loss of ingredient we experience in brewing (and I have been very simplistic with it there) but there are many more, unlike baking. I won't go into them completely here, otherwise it will become confusing. All I'll say is that imagine when you were making bread, after kneading, you were unable to scoop 10% of the dough off the bench-top? In brewing, we all have different bench-tops and scrapers and some work better than others but they can be widely varied so we brewers don't all end up with the same amount of dough in the baking tin as it were. (BIAB brewers will be very consistent btw.) More losses occur in brewing right until we package our beer.
So in brewing, 5 kilograms of flour might give one brewer 5 gallons of beer in bottles whilst it might give another brewer only 4 gallons.
On the salt side of things, we know we need so many grams of salt for one 450 gram loaf whereas, in brewing, we can think of salt as being the hops. In other words in baking, there is basically one type of salt whilst in brewing, there are heaps of different types, all of different strengths, which must be added at varying times to bring about the desired result. Complicated eh? It gets worse though as the effects of the salts depend on how much or how little flour we have 'lost'!
Can you use kits?
Greg, you can use all-grain kits but unlike Fresh Wort Kits, Cold Extract Kits (e.g. Coopers Kits), Hot Extract Brewing or Aeroplane Jelly you can't expect the same results as the all-grain kit manufacturer guy gets if you follow their instructions. For a start, their instructions have no detail (as a few of the guys above have mentioned already and Yeasty will deal with in a new thread I imagine) - they pretty much don't tell you anything in a NB kit
. Education-wise, you certainly won't learn much about constructing recipes by brewing those kits but...
What We Can Do...
An all-grain kit is convenient and what we can do, show you how to use The BIABacus so as you can have a good idea of how to avoid ending up with a very sloppy or super-hard jelly by using the right amount of water and knowing when and where to add that water.
How's your head now?
PP
If you have found
the above or anything else of value on BIABrewer.info, consider supporting us by
getting some BIPs!
.
) we all want to see our fellow biaber succeed with their brews but I've dug myself a few holes in the past trying to sort out a biabacus (and old calculator) file using these recipes and I've come to the conclusion that there are better and easier routes to get you up and brewing good beer.
