Looking to do 1 gallon experimental batches....

One thing that you could do is listen to some podcasts like "Brew Strong" and "Can you brew it" from thebrewingnetwork.com. Well mostly "Can you brew it". While these sewed specially to your question, they will help.

The book "Brewing Classic Styles" can help. But I wish that there were more recipes with an explication of why when you add one malt you might change yeast or mash temps. But all of the recipes are solid. They might not be your favorite and might be "safe", you could use them as a starting point and make one change at a time.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Malts_Chart will help.

Small batches? They can help but I like liquid yeast and they are hard to scale down. You could always use a yeast calculator and instead of scaling up starters reverse engineer to a batch size.

 

Brew a 5 gallon batch, and either pre or post fermentation split into 1 gallon jugs. Its an easy way to try different yeasts (e.g. 1 strain per jug) or different secondary treatments (different dry hop in each jug or coffee, cocoa nibs, fruit, etc.). Nice way to see what different ingredients add and also to try different dosing rates of ingredients.

 

James Spencer sometimes does small batches for his video and audiopodcasts over at BasicBrewing. I'm pretty sure there is a video in the archive where he goes through his process. Mostly, though, it's just simple scaling.

If you wanted to do side by side testing of hops, Barfdiggs's suggestion would be a good approach to controlling several extraneous factors. Seems especially ideal for testing dry hops (perhaps against a background of neutral bittering hop like magnum, or against some other favorite bittering hop likely to show up in your ultimate DIPA).

 

Perhaps a parti-gyle? It takes about as much time and effort to brew one gallon as it does five.Combine your strong beer with a few gallons of something a little lighter and get two days' brewing for the price of one.

 

I tried some 1 Gallon batches and I didn't like the outcome at all. From now on I will boil a bigger volume then ferment in small batches.

 

This is true, the easyness of this and the small volumes is what made me try it. I had a hard time with the Mash at such a small volumes, then I tried more of a teabag steep that didn't work in my system well either so I ended up using Liquid Extract. Once I did that I found that the hops (The reason I did the 1 batch was to try different hops) didn't really convert well to the smaller batches so the utilization was off and I got really sweet pale ales with no hop flavors. I read a lot of postings on this site and homebrewtalk about 1 gallon batches and I think it takes a little bit to get dialed in because many people had a lot of success with these. But I didn't like it so now I will stick to larger batches, at least 2 gallons where I can still get a good mash.