Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

Resurrecting a topic and a really good idea Eric Benda suggested over two years ago....

Postby Eric B » Fri Jan 22, 2016 10:05 pm

I have a proposal that we can use for a club competition or tech meeting. My idea is that we all get the same recipe (Broken down by percentages so you can adjust to your system) and we all brew that exact same beer. The competition side is that the judges critique the beer on how well it was brewed versus the others. So kind of a brew off, if you will... Orrrr we can use it for a tech meeting so that we can discuss why there is certain differences in each beer that was brewed. Help us all maybe learn more on changes we can make to better ourselves. My thoughts is that we use a fairly simple style such as an American Pale Ale for this experiment/competition.

Post here if you would be interested in participating/contributing....meaning, you would be willing to brew a stock recipe using your system and style of brewing. And would be willing to share your results with a group.

I think the Tech Meeting would involve:
1) Participants submit two 12 oz bottles of their brew.
2) Judging the entries, in the blind, very similar to how we execute our club competitions....but everyone would judge.
3) After the judging, we could have a roundtable discussion, beginning with each brewer discussing briefly, their system and technique....share their brewing notes.
4) Followed by an open discussion on the judging results versus the techniques applied.

I would open this to Extract, Partial-Mash, and All-Grain techniques. We would just have to come up with three recipes.

Thoughts?

When would you like to do this?

If this were a January or February Tech meeting, it might help support our emerging winter pour events. We will have the Bunged Competition in early Fall....not that would factor much into scheduling this.

Let's kick around a few ideas.

I'd be in.

I would suggest a fairly well known recipe for this as well. Something like BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde or a Jamil recipe.

Gotta be careful with grains as well. Not every malt house is the same.

- Josh Peanasky

I'd be interested. But I brew outdoors, so I would need to brew by October-ish and not much later.

jjpeanasky wrote:I'd be in.

I would suggest a fairly well known recipe for this as well. Something like BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde or a Jamil recipe.

Gotta be careful with grains as well. Not every malt house is the same.

- Josh Peanasky

A blonde style would be good...just about any style that is not overly malty or hopped up....so in the end subtle differences maybe be detectable.

We could specify the hop profile, yeast, and the grain bill for all grain and partial mashes.

It will be helpful if the brewers keep good notes on the brewing steps, fermentation conditions, and bottling/conditioning; to try to correlate flavor/color/body/carbonation differences to deviations in brewing styles.

Single malt, single hop, designated OG, designated yeast. Designated bitterness/gravity ratio. Any deviation from the recipe ruins the intent of the competition. I agree that the malt maltster matters.

I'm sure their are others I am missing but, M. Franklin, Benda, and #LeePaulson have specific malts they prefer for different beers.

Should the differences in malt be what something we examine first?

A tech meeting with the same style of malt from different maltsters?

With enough hot water and a couple of french presses we could identify the flavors we are chasing quickly.

Thoughts?

I chuckled reading this, because I was reading this exact same thing earlier today. I think the yeast strain would be a big factor not everybody has temperature-controlled fermentation capabilities so a pseudo lager or very clean ale yeast would be Optimum, the difference with these yeast on temperature between 60 and 66 degrees is not going to be that big of a difference S05 or wlp001 for example.
I like the idea of using the same recipe but I also like marks idea of single hop single Mash, have we given a thought to water profile, I believe that'll be the big determining Factor of what makes one beer different from another
Thoughts?
Oh, yes I'm in

I'm in as well. I'm not so interested in competition, but comparative judging and critical comments.

I'm not sure SMASH really matters as much as having a common recipe and common ingredients. Keeping the recipe on the less complicated side is good though. And, yes, I too definitely have preferences of malt for a particular style.

I'd recommend something fairly clean like a California Common or more classic American Amber (less hoppy than the expectation today). And, actually staying toward the malty side would work in our favor.

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I'd be in.

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Depending on when the meeting is, I'll be in.

mjensen52402 wrote: Should the differences in malt be what something we examine first?

A tech meeting with the same style of malt from different maltsters?

With enough hot water and a couple of french presses we could identify the flavors we are chasing quickly.

Thoughts?

Briess (love or hate them) has a great procedure for steeping malt and detecting flavors. That's a great way to start, and could be a tech meeting all on it's own. Would be easy to do with a electric tea kettle/instant pot/sous vide to get hot water.

- Josh Peanasky

mjensen52402 wrote: Should the differences in malt be what something we examine first?

Lee Paulsen did a tech meeting like this in 2015, soon after I joined. He brewed 4 or 5 1 gallon batches of SMASH, only varied the type of malt. He then held a meeting whereby we tasted the resulting beers as well as smelling and tasting the original grains.

It was a very effective meeting, and is where I learned the source of the flavor of pilsners that I like so much.

Josh P's suggestion of the hot bath wort could be just as effective. I can generally tell how my beers are going to finish by tasting the raw wort.

Would a Keurig with a re useable cup filter work? Never measured temp on one, if its in range that would work smoothly i think for steeping coffee cup sized samples.

I think the Kuerig would be to hot. Coffee extraction for that process would be at least 190 degrees and likely close to 200 degrees.

But, there are a number of us that have a Zymatic (the Kuerig of beer?) available. We could each do a couple of batches varying a chosen parameter such as base grain or mash temperature.

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You're trying to get a rise out of me with that one!

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Hey, I'm ribbing myself on that one too.

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