This is an awesome idea. Sounds like a great way to get a feel for every aspect of brewing. Are you planning on using different styles, extract, BIAB, things like that? Might make for an interesting comparison. Good luck with this brewing adventure.
Thanks for the comments! It's great to connect with another local brewer. Please plan a day to come brew and taste with me - beer isn't made to be enjoyed alone!
One gallon batches, all BIAB so far. I actually quit brewing about a year ago because I am a perfectionist and bought into the lie that my beer wasn't good enough because I didn't have a cooler-converted mash tun, a hot liquor tank, and a thermostat controlled fermentation fridge. I made a spreadsheet of all of the gear that I needed to brew my next batch, and when I couldn't afford any of it, I waited and waited, and eventually "I haven't brewed in a while" turns into "I don't brew anymore."
I would love to try brewing with a three vessel setup, but right now I have the cheapest pot I could find at W**m***, empty jugs from drinking a ton of apple juice, and a five gallon paint strainer from a hardware store. And I make great beer.
For this project, I will need to offer a little more consistency for my project to be of any use to the brewing community, so I do plan to have a few temp controlled chest freezers, but I don't plan to make any outrageous equipment upgrades. I might upgrade to a set of accurate hydrometers, because reading that cheap triple scale is probably the most time consuming part of my brew day.
If there is a huge interest in comparing equipment setups, I will gladly brew with any setup that I can borrow and return gently and lovingly used and sanitized.
This is an awesome idea. Sounds like a great way to get a feel for every aspect of brewing. Are you planning on using different styles, extract, BIAB, things like that? Might make for an interesting comparison. Good luck with this brewing adventure.
Are you going to invest in some kind of automation? Might make the task easier if you don't have to babysit a brew the whole time.
I wish you luck. Not an easy task.
I don't have a 3 vessel system, but use a cooler mash tun and keggle so 10G batch capacity. Maybe we can put together a brew day together for you to take some wort home. I'm currently building a house and don't have much space to brew at my rental, but we can make it work. You could take home a few gallons which you can add different yeast or adjuncts to.
Boy.. After a year of that, I just might be tired of brewing! The part about relying on K********** would worry me, especially if I were sticking to a firm start date. There's no guarantee that you will take in as much as you are trying for, which means the rest becomes an out-of-pocket expense for you.
I think you will definitely need some help in drinking it, just for the fact that you will need the bottles back! The number of bottles you'll need alone is staggering..
365 gallons of beer, makes about 2920 12-ounce bottles of beer. If you drink two beers a day, you will still have 2190 beers in bottle by the end of your goal. And if you brew bigger batches... Whew! 2190 bottles of beer is 91.25 cases, which is roughly 74.35 cubic feet of storage space, or, lining a ten foot wall of your basement floor to ceiling, which will shrink that living space by 16 inches.
And then there's the ingredient cost. Just looking in BeerSmith at my one-gallon recipes, the cost range is about $3 to $8, and that doesn't even factor in the yeast. You have SMaSH recipes on one end of the spectrum, and Barleywines and RIS and bourbon-aged stouts on the other.. Your average cost for a one-gallon batch may be $5, excluding yeast. I live in Chicagoland with a half dozen LHBS within an hours' drive, and I can guarantee you that I will not be able to find every ingredient for every brew when I plan to brew them.. I would imagine that you will run into the same issue, and will need to resort to ordering at least a portion of your ingredients online. So now you have to factor in shipping cost and shipping lag time which may impact your timeline.
You'll also need to become quite adept at washing and reusing yeast to keep your production costs down.. Even splitting a vial into 2 or 3 fermenters will still add $1 to $3 per batch.. Using dry yeast is an option, but is a limiting factor.
Are you planning a brew every day? Or 365 brews over the course of a year? Do you have a plan for when you get sick, or lose power, or the kids get sick, or need to travel for work, etc?
I fully support the mission, so I hope this doesn't come off as pessimistic. My background is in supply chain logistics, so these are things I work with regularly. I understand that this goal is quite lofty and time-consuming.. Between actual brewing, clean-up, photography, blogging, bottling, this can be an 8 hour day, seven days a week. I wish you luck! And I will be watching your blog. I hope that you post up your recipes as you brew them.
Cheers,
Craig
Since it is not practical for you to brew with most of us who are more than a few hours away, have you considered accepting (a 1 gal beer in a box) someone builds a 1 gal grain bill, and mails it to you for your to brew.
Lots of us probably have misc amounts of specialty grains sitting around that would be more than enough to make a 1 gal batch when combined with a little bit of 2 row. Yeast might be a problem, for shipping, but if you provided a list of yeast strains that you had, that could work around that.
Also this could ease your burden of having to weigh and measure ingredients, just open the box and go.
You definitely need more than just a blog, Video posts for sure.
Have you contacted white labs or wyeast about your plan? 365 days of beer with exclusively using __________ yeast would be good advertising for them.
Liked the Facebook Page. Love the idea. I'd like to see you try the Lithuanian Beer discussed in this forum. I like the Prepackaged 1 gallon brew idea someone had mentioned. I think I could swing one but I'd need help on a one gl recipe. I currently do 15 gl. Sure I could figure it out.
Would you be willing to send a bottle to people who donate a recipe if you go that route? Think about that hard before answering- if you get 50- 100 people willing to donate, that saves you money on the recipe but shipping a bottle back to those who rquest it may be pricey and time consuming- but it would be awesome.
Aside from the brewing time, work and supplies needed...
4 kids and a job? Life is going to get in the way somewhere. No vacations? No sick days? No tournaments for the kids?
This is a great feat. A single man without a job might be able to do it. Good luck.
Don't forget planning time, recipe research/design, transfers, lagering, D-rests,logging,hydro samples,labelling... I don't know,this may just take the fun out of brewing for me. It's quite the challenge. I think you'd want to look for every way to make things more efficient. I also think for the website to be successful the beers would need to be varied. People aren't going to want to read about 363 smash beers. But imagine the parties you could have...
Do you mean to use a single hop addition at the beginning of the boil and only dry hops?
I am glad that you are considering all possibilities to achieve your goal. In my eyes the biggest hurdle will be in the planning phase. Every day, while brewing up one batch and cleaning up and documenting your journey and bottling last months' batches, you will need to be planning the batches coming up in the next four weeks. This week: Do I have the gear ready Are my ingredients in order for each batch? Next week: Will I have my delivery in time for next weeks' brews? Two weeks out: Which recipes can I brew with ingredients I have on hand without requiring an additional online order? And so on and so forth.
Of course there are efficiencies in the process, such as buying in bulk. Base grains around a dollar per pound, specialty grains around a buck fifty.. And then there's hops.. Bought in bulk they are still $12 to $25 per pound. I find some recipes do end up around $3 per one gallon batch, but most end up closer to $5... Three to four dollars in grain, perhaps two in hops... Sometimes less, sometimes more. And that's just the cost for the main ingredients, and doesn't even consider the incidentals, such as bottle caps, StarSan, electricity/gas, water, PH papers, replacement equipment, additives, clarifying agents, dextrose, fruit, etc. I think it wise to err on the side of cost rather than the side of thrift, because we know Mr. Murphy likes to help us brew!
It would be great if you could find a compatriot who could assist with the social media aspect. You're going to have your hands full with everything else.
Good luck in your completing your goal. One thing you might try is repitching the same or very similar beer onto a yeast cake and see if the taste profile is different, just food for thought
Sounds like a winner. Can you add a link to the recipe in your profile? Maybe I should culture the yeast for a quad!
To harness community support, perhaps we could start a group on brewtoad.com for everyone to contribute recipes? Then start a google spreadsheet to collect which recipes others are going to measure and send.
I'd be happy to spend an evening with my food saver to measure and vacuum seal hops. This suggests that it would be convenient to use the same hops during a week period, at least for bittering.
I think the area where we should concentrate our brain power right now is bottling. It takes you just as long to wash and sanitize a bottling bucket for 5 gallons as it does for 1. Perhaps we can find a way to cut these time costs. For example, could you bottle in 2L soda bottles.
Easy recipe: 12 lb pale, 1lb Carafa I, 1lb Munich, 1lb Wheat Malt; 1 oz Warrior 75 min., 1.5oz Styrian goldings 5 min.; Trappist Yeast of your choice (big starter) 2 lb. Dark (as dark as you can cook it) Candi Sugar after 3 days fermentation; Mash Profile: 147.2 F for 50 min 154.4 F for 20 min 163.4 F for 15 min Sparge 167.0 F
In secondary, rack over Dark Cherries (2-6 lbs. depending, I do the low end), for a month, add Med. Toast Oak Spirals soaked in good bourbon for a week, leave spirals in 3-4 weeks. Rack into tertiary or bottle 3-6 months it's wonderful, my guess is it would age nicely for years.
I think I'm going to drink one of these tonight!
I say try the sanctuary Gose recipe under the sour recipe section.. a nice quick gose.
good luck and enjoy
I will definitely make this at some point. I'm not a huge fruit beer fan, but this sounds really fun to make if nothing else. I am not sure it qualifies as an "easy recipe" though, but thanks for the post!
I will let you know which day I will decide to brew this. It sounds like a good winter beer, so maybe early on in the YOB.
I've never had a Gose. How do you pronounce it... like the bird or like "ghost" without the "t"?
However, if anyone can think of a great, cost effective, way to batch prime without boiling priming sugar, that could shave some time and an extra pot on the stove. Is there a sanitary way to premake a priming syrup? Freeze in ice cube trays? Would you trust adding dextrose directly to the batch without boiling?
I've only done a few 1-gal batches, but when I did, I found it pretty convenient to bottle directly from the primary, using a mini-autosiphon with a racking cane on the end. I used those little priming tablets. A second pair of hands helps, but one person can do it. You just need to wedge the autosiphone in the top of the jug to keep it off the yeast cake; I used a short cut of tubbing. The other odd part is starting the autosiphone while depressing the racking cane, but that's only the first bottle. The cost of the priming tablets might be the biggest deterrent though.
Are you going to use a house yeast and keep a starter going at all times?
I am blown away at your offer to help! Are you local to the Charlotte area? Either way, I would appreciate help in any area.
However, if anyone can think of a great, cost effective, way to batch prime without boiling priming sugar, that could shave some time and an extra pot on the stove. Is there a sanitary way to premake a priming syrup? Freeze in ice cube trays? Would you trust adding dextrose directly to the batch without boiling?
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