I’ve been slowly progressing through what I call my “Perfection in Five” series. I haven’t been brewing the same recipes often enough to really dial them in. By that I mean I haven’t defined a repeatable recipe and process. Perfection in Five challenges me to produce one perfected recipe within five brewing sessions.
For years I’ve been brewing 10 gallon batches per session. As I’m sure I’ve said before, it takes the same amount of time to brew five gallons as it does 10, so why not brew 10? If I make a good beer, I want to drink it and I want other people to try it, so it works out well. But if I don’t think the beer is good… well… it sticks around too long and becomes a burden. Since Perfection in Five is an experiment that was meant to be completed quickly, I didn’t want a bunch of beer hanging around, so I decided that five gallon batches made the most sense.
Except I disposed of all of my “small batch” equipment when making room for my new equipment.
I’ve invested in a system where even a 10 gallon batch is small, so trying to produce five gallons really is asking too much. I understand now that I want the option to scale back, so I decided to buy an industrial 10 gallon Igloo cooler for a mash tun. This cooler is designed to keep water cold for a few days at a time, which tickles my fancy for mashing in a near-freezing garage. My assumption is that it will do just as good of a job insulating a hot mash as it would a cold drink. Yes, temperature control is a fetish.
I wanted another control for this experiment to be the ingredients, so I put together the recipe and calculated how much of everything I would need to produce five 5-gallon batches. I gathered up enough grain and hops so that every run of my experiment would use the same batches of those ingredients. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough yeast available at my LHBS, so the control is slightly less controlled in that I will be using two different batches of the same yeast.
This is going to be fun for me, and it’s a great time of year to brew the German pils style I’m trying to duplicate with this recipe.
madera verde 