Curious as to what you've learned! What water profile do you prefer to build from RO for an APA? What is your favorite grist? Hops? Does the yeast make a big difference? You've spent a lot of time trying to find that perfect balance...what's your favorite recipe?
I think I have learned some interesting stuff!
Water: Shreveport has pretty good brewing water, low carbonates, Na and Cl, and a good bit of Ca and SO4. But most local brewers I know are prejudiced against it. I have friends using store bought water without having any idea what its mineral profile might be. Or putting various minerals in RO water and calling it good. I bought an RO unit and totally failed to replicate the quality of Shreveport tap water. This is not a failure to understand the problem, because I'm a chemist! I asked the head brewer at a local brewery how to cope with this and he said "Double the minerals". And I was scandalized. That's not science! Shreveport gets its water out of Cross Lake, and sometimes in late summer it will have an algae bloom that gives it a vegetative smell and taste, but a carbon cartridge takes it right out. These days I add 3 Tblsp of gypsum to the mash to give it more of a Burton on Trent character, but that's it.
Malt: My generic drinkable beer (10 gal batch) is 17 lbs of 2-row, 1 lb of Crystal 60, and 2 lbs of vienna. It works out to OG 1.052 and 8 SRM. The vienna gives it a subtle character that stays out of the way of enjoying two or three, where the Special B, Aromatic and Honey can become cloying. Biscuit in the 10% range is like brewing with saltine crackers.
Hops: I bitter with Magnum or Warrior at 60 minutes, and then throw an ounce of hops in at 20, 15, 10, 5 and 0 minutes. The bittering hop amount is adjusted to give 40 IBU when the aroma/flavor hops are taken into consideration. It seems like only Simcoe and the "C" type hops will have any residual aroma after kegging, but almost any hop will give good hop flavor, and that's what I'm looking for. The hops that stood out in my SMASH series were Calypso (because I didn't like its aroma) and magnum (because it seemed to have no character at all).
Yeast: Generally I use WLP-001. I brewed a split recently using Bells 2HA and Parish Ghost yeast. Those brews are as different as night and day (Ghost is a cloudy IPA), but I couldn't tell which split I was drinking in a blind test. There was a Wyeast I really liked called Greenbelt, but we lost our yeast bank when the ultralow in the lab went tits up, and now it seems to be out of production.
Charlie
Topic: Top Experiments for every Homebrewer (Read 3886 times)
