Averagely Perfect ESB - Poll #34 - Specific Concentrations for Chloride and Sulfates

Sticking close to the BrunWater suggestions I made previously.

 

I went with 50 and 100 (2 to 1 sulfates to chloride), seems reasonable, besides I doubt there is much difference in the middle choices unless someone went for the low end of chloride and the high end of sulfates (4 to 1).

But, I am definitely not a water expert and have not brewed enough similar recipes with different water additions.

 

Exactly my thoughts

 

No remorse. I won't be first out of the gate to brew this one because I have at least 3 batches I need to make first, but I do look forward to seeing how we did on this, a few months down the line. Thanks @VikeMan for indulging us in another AP crowd-sourced recipe.

 

I'm due to brew (hey that rhymes) - so I will probably do this one!

No real regrets from me

 

No sure how I will make it work and the odd amounts of bittering hops will irk me, but I will try brewing it once as written, then once how I do things( even amounts of hops as I can buy them and no water adjustment) and see which I prefer.

 

Luckily for me, I do my hops in grams instead of ounces. .34oz is basically 10g. Unluckily for me, I have to scale the recipe down to my 2gal system.

As far as the recipe, its not what I would have done on my own, but no regrets. I'm probably going to get a Mocktoberfest going so it can lager until Sept first.

 

If you don't have a scale that you trust, trust your eyeballs. If you get 1 oz packs, you only need to be able to visually separate into 1/3 oz or 1/2 oz. If you buy a 1 oz pack, you know what 1 oz looks like. If you need to scale from a 6 gallon recipe to a 2 gallon recipe, divide your visual estimate by three. If you feel that you will ruin your beer with this method, you can count the hop pellets (or flowers) and dole out proportionally, and then eyeball the remaining dust proportionally, too. RDWHAHB.

 

Not really worried about ruining it - just adjustong quantities to 40% of the original. Its harder on the specialty grains than anything else.

 

It's ok to round off quantities of grains and hops. It won't be the end of the world.

 

Yes, you cab even count kernels of grain and add them the mash proportionally. All that extra effort to make 2 gallons makes it taste that much better! Or you could pull out some measuring cups and figure out how many cups are in a lb of grain, then scale.

 

Cute.

I was more talking about the 0.2lb of Dark Crystal.

 

OK. The grain counting comment was maybe snarky, but at the same time, it's not far-fetched. Homebrewing.org will sell you grain weighed out to the tenth of a pound. Probably other retailers will too. Get 0.1 pound. Now when you scale to your smaller recipe size, even grain counting could be done in a few minutes. Measuring cups, teaspoons, counting grains, whatever it takes. I really did brew for quite a long time buying one oz packs of hop pellets, splitting the hops by counting all the whole pellets and distributing them proportionally among the different additions, and then eyeballing the broken pellets and hop dust and doing the same. To this day, I don't really trust my digital kitchen balance in the grams to ounce range and will double check weighed out hops by eyeball. "Does that really look like one quarter of the hop pack?"

This is not rocket science. History tells us that Hobbits used to brew beer before digital scales and triple beam balances were invented.

 

So how does one get away with making this selected water profile without having to buy a full package of what ever is needed to make it?

 

And if said friend doesn't have a reliable balance, try 1 tsp CaCl2 and 1.5 (scant) tsp gypsum and call it good enough. (reference: https://www.brewersfriend.com/water-chemistry/). This assumes the homebrewer is using RO water. Those using municipal water or well water, with knowledge of chemistry, will probably know how to make the adjustment. Brewers who do not know the chemistry of the their water should probably just ignore the water chem or adopt whatever adjustments have led to good bitter beer in the past.

 

I was just about to ask how to make invert sugar #2 and then, boom, saw the link right in the recipe. Awesome. Thanks a lot!

I would like to know (and I've probably asked this before), do you guys add your CaCl2/CaSO4 additions all to your strike water? Or do you split them 50/50 between strike and then sparge water?

Though I brewed the Averagely Perfect NEIPA, this was the first Averagely Perfect process I witnessed from the beginning. It looks like a lot of work. Thanks a lot for organizing it @VikeMan !