Post is in the perfect spot James . (Saw your post in the other thread. Sorry to see that batch ditched but hopefully the Berliner will be excellent.)

Very long day today (and the same goes for pretty much the next seven days) but let's see if I can go through your recipe plan while my brain has some synapses still firing correctly.

The Style

You are certainly picking some advanced styles to brew .

Got to Blasta Brewery in Burswood. They have some hugely grapefruit beers on tap atm. I've never seen it so pronounced. Nev from Online Brewing Supplies is associated with Blasta and so will know the recipes or techniques they are using so it would be worth having a chat to him. (Buy some stuff from him to make his time worth his while).

I attempted to brew a Sculpin IPA a few years back with Sarah but it was nothing special from memory so my comments below won't look at the recipe ingredients or the methodology, I'll just be checking through your BIABAcus...

Your BIABacus File

Very nice job on your BIABacus James. I think your Section W adjustments look really sensible too

- Change your boil time and mash times to 90 minutes (Perth water is really unpredictable so the 90 min boil will do no harm.) Search for a thread called "Mash Gravity Figures needed for BIABacus," and that should have some info on why a 90 minute mash is going to be safer on most grain bills.

- Good decision on the acid malt. You can't use someone else's quantities on acid malt as thee water could be completely different from yours. pH adjustment is an intermediate step in all-grain and you need a tool or two before you can make adjustments correctly. Leave pH until later down the track. (Or, if you visit Nev, he is right into pH.)

- Another good question on the, "batch size." I've had a look at the numbers and there is enough detail from the original recipe for me to conclude that the "batch size" in the recipe you are copying does mean, "Volume of Ambient Wort." That's great as it is very difficult, often impossible to determine VAW from a published recipe.

- DELETE: - In section D, delete the 46.8 on the second line. The reason for this is that the author has not indicated what IBU method they are using or the software. Search posts written by me that include the words: Garetz, Tinseth, Rager and Beersmith and you'll find a post or two with a picture that explains this problem.

- Looks like you are having a few problems other problems in in Section D. The left hand side is not matching that of the original recipe. Some additions are missing and your weights don't match the original. I'll fix that, the 60 minute problem and a few other things mentioned below in the file I'll attach to this post.

- The original recipe uses too much whirfloc and it is added at the wrong time.

- Just skimming the original source and I see that it's one of those recipes I mentioned in the other thread, a recipe someone has published before they have actually brewed it!!! I see thee are a number of comments below it but I don't have time to read them. Maybe there is some info among the comments on how the beer actually turned out????

.... Just saw that in his Notes section he has a link to how the beer turned out so make sure you read that. In the Notes section he also mentions the date he added the grapefruit and dry hops so study that as well.

- So, in Section I give detail of when grapefruit zest/flesh and dry hops will be added.

- Also try and work out what he means by grapefruit zest/flesh as they are two different things.

- I've also changed BIABrewer Link and Recipe Credits in Sections A and B. These fields might seem unimportant but for future users, it gives them immediate access to the original recipe and how we have discussed it.

This post only took me 90 minutes. I think that might be a record for me in this thread . Often they take much longer. This was quick as not only had you done a nice job on your BIABacus but, also, the original recipe had enough data to be able to interpret it fairly easily.

Nice ,
Pat

Hi JayP,

I can’t say for certain but if you added hops at end of the boil - still boiling...but then stop boiling - bitterness is supposed to stop being added (isomerized) into wort when temperature drops to around 170 deg F / 76 deg C. But I use an immersion chillerand have never no-chilled, and pull out the hop bag before transferring to the fermenter.

You report having had undrinkable bitter beer after late hops that sat in the no-chill container. I would need lots more detail to take a stab at what went on there... Can you pull hops out before no- chilling the wort? Or at a very minimum, after several hours and the wort has cooled, pull the hop bag out? That would seem best from my perspective, compared to leaving vegetative matter in the wort for a long time.

Hi James and apologies for such a delayed reply. This is my first day off in many weeks and the rest of this week is booked out. It will be a nice break though to write the below...

Scott's comment seems to have been missed but we'll come back to that.

It's not correct that with "no-chill," a 30 minute addition becomes a 45-50 min addition. I haven't clicked on the links above as I've been aware of this "argument" since it first arose maybe a decade ago now. The graphic in your post is an example of how a very complex area can be over-simplified. These arguments and graphics totally ignore the most important question of all, "What chilling method are they comparing too?"

Before reading further, study, Chilling Myths - Asking the Right Questions. I mentioned it in a prior post I'm sure??? It's a six year old post but read it before proceeding!!!

For a Start, We Have No Clear Definitions on Chilling

Let's call a chilling method that employs a chilling apparatus, "active chilling," and a chilling method that relies solely on ambient temperature, "passive chilling."

Even within those two categories, there are several methods. Active chilling could be using an immersion chiller, a counter-flow chiller, a plate chiller, a swimming pool or snow. Passive chilling could be letting the wort cool overnight in the kettle or transferring it hot to a cube and letting it cool in that.

With "active chilling, there are many variations on how it can be employed. It may be employed immediately after flame-out or 40 minutes later.

On top of all that, with active chilling, regardless of at what time it is employed, there will be differences. For example, an immersion chiller affects the temperature of the whole wort whilst a plate-chiller or counter-flow chiller dramatically drops the temperature of the wort but only a small portion of it in each moment.

Does it Matter?

Depending on the beer style, I think it can matter a great deal. For many styles, the chilling method used and when it is employed will be hardly noticeable, In other styles, it could produce two different beers.

One thing I know for sure is that attempts by software etc to adjust for "no-chill" is a caveman response. We all love to make things black and white and turn things into numbers however, brewing software would better serve us to have fields that allowed the brewer to describe their chilling method and how and when it was used rather than "inventing" formulas that attempt to adjust the least complex of hop contributions, bitterness.

There are no formulas for flavour and aroma. The only hope we have on this is by giving better descriptions of how we handle our hops.

I think the American saying is, "All the rest is moonshine."

Scott's Comment

Scott knows a heap on hops. He's forked out his own money to send his beers for IBU testing, investigated aging of hops etc, etc. He's been on a quest to try and "numerise" hops but he's the first to write that the more he's learned, the less he knows. Correct me if I'm wrong on this [mention]Scott[/mention] but he might even say now something like, "Saying that all varieties of hops work the same way is a bit like saying slow-cooked beef tastes the same as slow-cooked chicken."

I find his post above very important. Here's just a bit of it...

Scott wrote: ↑

5 years ago

You report having had undrinkable bitter beer after late hops that sat in the no-chill container... leaving vegetative matter in the wort for a long time.

Scott's questions in that post are important. You mentioned the beer was undrinkable. Perhaps there was so much vegative matter in the beer, it was rotting? But you haven't indicated to Scott how much matter was in the beer and for how long so, as he said, it's hard to draw conclusions.

You also mentioned about storing cubes almost indefinitely. Well, I've done that. Yes, fresh wort kits are the same as passive chilling in a cube however, there is a shelf life. I've kept some cubes for well over a year without failure. Others have failed mainly I think due to the seals becoming unstable over use but....

One thing I noticed for sure is that the wort gets darker over time and quite dramatically. (From memory, [mention]BobBrews[/mention] even posted pics of this somewhere here. So, a straw coloured brew will become orange to copper within months.

And, these are on brews that are transferred quite cleanly into the cube. I suspect but don't know (and I've brewed a lot) that an increase in vegetative matter into the cube is not going to have any positive effect.

Now, to You

It's been a busy month for me. You've sent me some emails which I've only had time to scan. I'll look forward to reading them properly when I get some solitude. A scan of your emails though amazed me.

Whilst "new to the business," you are brewing styles that are very difficult. This is truly impressive! In fact, they are quite "arty" styles so there's no real rule book for them, just your mouth and nose.

So, for you, don't get hung up on the numbers/calculations. Do though, for now, record what you do as well as you can. That's important.


Pat

JayP - I would be just guessing, but maybe pull hops out before you put in your no-chill container...? Think you already came to that conclusion.

(EDIT - below adds more to PistolPatch’s Hop conversation...)

On hop testing and research, yes [mention]PistolPatch[/mention] has much of it right, and it is hard to make it exactly a science regardless of how hard I try. I developed a spreadsheet to track decline of hops’ AA over time caused by age and other storage factors. Worked pretty well except I found that pellet hops didn’t age as fast as flower hops, and frequently I was overhopping a beer when pellets were used. So then started doing a manual calculation to cut the difference in hops AA in half from pellets with what they would be with pellets. So for example, with inputting all the info if I calculated Hop would drop from 6% to 4%, if pellet hops I brew with assumption it is about 5%. This has actually worked out pretty close, and I need to spend the time to revise my spreadsheet. Or it worked well until my recent example...

German Pilsner -brewed early July:
Split the batch at the end before final 10 min boil so that finishing hops were brewed separate. Fermented in separate containers. Finishing hops - compared Oregon (USA) grown Santiam hops, flower vs. German Tettnanger pellet hops. Santiam is supposedly very similar in character to Tettnanger and wanted to test this myself. I used my AA loss spreadsheet to calculate new hops AA level. Both had some added to what would have been used, but the flower Santiam had more added than the pellet Tettnanger, percentage-wise. Both beers fermenter well. Both OG 1.048. Santiam FG 1.009 and Tettnanger 1.008. Anyhow there is a drastic difference in the final beer! Tettnanger tastes like I didn’t even add final finishing hops - or very little (@ 10 / 5 / 0) , very faint flavor added. Santiam tastes great, just like it is supposed to. In fact, to try and beef up the hop flavor in the Tettnanger I keg hopped for 2 days for the first time ever. It helped, and added a different kind of hop character, but still was way off my target. It’s not bad but it’s not great...

What Did I Learn?
It’s a given that each batch of hops can be a little bit different. Even those from same farmer, same variety and year, in a different field can be different... Perhaps getting larger amounts (1 lb.) might be a better call so I can know the differences better. I would have doubled or tripled amount used on the Tettnanger... It is also possible the AA was mislabeled, but % posted did not seem out of line... And you can’t always take the hops’ character before brewed and assume it will be the same once boiled...but that is another issue. So I guess, use best “science” that I have, and also know that different hop varieties (and even different batches) have different ideosynchrises. So be ready to use “art” to tweak what you are doing.