Hey guys, I just brewed my first beer last weekend. It was an all grain batch made with pale malt I made myself. here's the recipe (roughly):
http://hopville.com/recipe/1665289
It was supposed to be a barleywine and I think it came out that way, 1.090 gravity. That's a bit low for what I normally brew, which is fruit and vegetable wine, but I think it should make a pretty epic beer. A friend helped me formulate the recipe, cutting down the ingredients list from something that's supposed to be a clone of lagunitas old barleywine, and i made my own adjustments based on what I could get at the brew shop, and a few on the fly during the brewing process. This recipe doesn't reflect the hopping changes, which were 1.0 oz of bittering (chinook), 0.7 oz of willamette, and 0.5 oz of cascade. I did that because the wort was coming off the mash tun at about 1.060, and I was expecting to get 10 gallons at about that level. By the time the boil was finished, it was about five gallons at 1.090. I'm definitely going to leave the carboy closed until I rack it, but anyone have predictions about the hop quantity? I feel like it's not nearly enough, but the most complicated brew I've ever made involved turning 5 gallons of banana goo into 5 gallons of banana water (unsuccessfully). It smells killer, but I don't smell any hops. Although the vegetable smell is gone. If you ever malt your own grain, be careful about it, because overmodification is really easy to do. I malted this stuff for like 4 days on average, through 7 rounds of malting, and I may have gotten 2-3 batches close to well-modified. The result of that was an atrociously low efficiency (around 40%) if you call that a loss in efficiency, and a terrible vegetable smell in the unboiled wort, which came out eventually. It's real fun to malt your own grain, but it saved me 20 bucks on a grain bill around $80-100, and worried me quite a bit during the mashing. I'd suggest trying it once and if you're good at it, keep it up. Oh, and i was planning on a partigyle brew, but my mash gravity started falling off after about 6 gallons, (1.060 originally) so I called it off and dumped it all into one boil for five gallons of superbeer. Anyway, point of the story is that I'm super stoked about this beer and concerned about the hopping levels. I'm sure it'll be drink when it's done, but I feel like if I'd predicted the 1.090 gravity (don't worry, I did a gallon starter in honey that was looking very sad but was ****ting its pants in excitement for 3-4 days), I could have done more to make it good drink in the end. So, hops?
http://hopville.com/recipe/1665289
It was supposed to be a barleywine and I think it came out that way, 1.090 gravity. That's a bit low for what I normally brew, which is fruit and vegetable wine, but I think it should make a pretty epic beer. A friend helped me formulate the recipe, cutting down the ingredients list from something that's supposed to be a clone of lagunitas old barleywine, and i made my own adjustments based on what I could get at the brew shop, and a few on the fly during the brewing process. This recipe doesn't reflect the hopping changes, which were 1.0 oz of bittering (chinook), 0.7 oz of willamette, and 0.5 oz of cascade. I did that because the wort was coming off the mash tun at about 1.060, and I was expecting to get 10 gallons at about that level. By the time the boil was finished, it was about five gallons at 1.090. I'm definitely going to leave the carboy closed until I rack it, but anyone have predictions about the hop quantity? I feel like it's not nearly enough, but the most complicated brew I've ever made involved turning 5 gallons of banana goo into 5 gallons of banana water (unsuccessfully). It smells killer, but I don't smell any hops. Although the vegetable smell is gone. If you ever malt your own grain, be careful about it, because overmodification is really easy to do. I malted this stuff for like 4 days on average, through 7 rounds of malting, and I may have gotten 2-3 batches close to well-modified. The result of that was an atrociously low efficiency (around 40%) if you call that a loss in efficiency, and a terrible vegetable smell in the unboiled wort, which came out eventually. It's real fun to malt your own grain, but it saved me 20 bucks on a grain bill around $80-100, and worried me quite a bit during the mashing. I'd suggest trying it once and if you're good at it, keep it up. Oh, and i was planning on a partigyle brew, but my mash gravity started falling off after about 6 gallons, (1.060 originally) so I called it off and dumped it all into one boil for five gallons of superbeer. Anyway, point of the story is that I'm super stoked about this beer and concerned about the hopping levels. I'm sure it'll be drink when it's done, but I feel like if I'd predicted the 1.090 gravity (don't worry, I did a gallon starter in honey that was looking very sad but was ****ting its pants in excitement for 3-4 days), I could have done more to make it good drink in the end. So, hops?