How to Get Two Beers from the Effort of One
Tricks for the Busy Brewer
by John Palmer (Brewing Techniques - Vol. 5, No.2)
A simple method enables any home brewer to make two beers as distinct as pale ale and Doppelbock in one brewing session.
Like many of us with interests and responsibilities outside of our favorite hobby — home brewing — I often find it difficult to schedule brewing time into my weekends. It seems as though there is always one more lawn chore waiting to be done, or it’s my turn to watch the kids, or other distractions beckon me away from my home brewery. If I am lucky, I can tell my family that come hell or high water I will brew next Saturday — and run out of the room before they can say “No!”
That being the case, I need to make every brewing session count. I need to brew enough beer to last me a couple months until I can manage to arrange more brew time. But who wants to spend several months drinking 10 gallons of the same beer? I want some variety, often a light and a dark that I can alternate depending on my mood, my activity, or the weather. My solution is to make two different beers from one brewing session.
The technique I describe in this article can be applied in all home brewing situations, whether you use 5 or 10 gallons as your basic batch size and whether you brew from extract, extract with steeped grain, or all-grain. The method is based on batch blending — brewing a generic wort for the bulk of the batch and then adding a small specialty wort (or two) to produce the final beers.
Common Denominators
Pick any two styles of beer, and they will have two ingredients in common: base malt and bittering hops. It doesn’t matter if the two styles are pale ale and Doppelbock or porter and Vienna, they can be made using a common base malt and at least one common variety of hop. In fact, many styles (for example, pale ale, steam, and Altbier) are very similar in terms of their grain bill. The critical differences lie in the yeast and fermentation schedule. Thus, a brewer can produce two different beers, even an ale and a lager, from the same wort, simply by pitching different yeast strains. A style purist, of course, will argue that to make a true porter you need to use British pale malt and to make a Vienna you need German lager and Vienna malts. Although this purist would be technically correct, no one will argue with the fact that you can make a perfectly acceptable interpretation of the style using North American two-row as the base malt.
The same is true for hops. People will say, “European lagers must use noble hops.” To which I reply, “Not necessarily.” I agree that using a finishing hop appropriate for the style is practically a necessity, but room definitely exists for an off-style bittering hop early in the boil. Consider, for example, the fact that many major breweries purchase hops from all over the world, regardless of variety and locale, solely for their “alpha” (alpha-acid content). Clearly, considerable room exists for innovation. This approach has its limits, however. You would not want to pick a hop that definitely clashes with a style you want to brew — Cascade hops for a Czech Pils, for example — but common ground can be found for just about any combination of styles, short of specialty beers such as Iambics or a very different beer such as stout.
| Example #1 — California Common and Porter | |
| Individual Recipes |
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| No. 4 Shay Steam * — California Common Beer Malts Gravity Contribution 6 lb Pale liquid malt extract 43 ¾ lb Caramel 40 malt 3 ¼ lb Malto-dextrin powder ~2 O.G. for 5 gallons 1.048 Hops IBU Contribution 1½ oz Northern Brewer (7.5% alpha- acids) at 60 min 30 ½ oz Northern Brewer (7.5% alpha- acids) at 15 min 5 Total IBUs 35 Yeast and Fermentation Schedule California lager yeast (liquid), primary fermentation at 60 °F (16 °C) for two weeks, secondary optional for two weeks at the same temperature. | Port O’Palmer — Porter Malts Gravity Contribution 6 lb Pale malt extract syrup 43 ½ lb Chocolate malt ~2 ½ lb Caramel 60 malt ~2 ¼ lb Black patent malt ~1 O.G. for 5 gallons 1.048 Hops IBU Contribution 1 oz Nugget (10% alpha-acids) at 60 min 26 ¾ oz Willamette (5% alpha-acids) at 40 min 9 ½ oz Willamette (5% alpha-acids) at 20 min 4 Total IBUs 39 Yeast and Fermentation Schedule American ale yeast (liquid), primary fermentation at 65 °F (18 °C) for two weeks. Alternatively, one week primary and two-week secondary. |
| Combined Recipe, No. 4 Shay Steam and Port O’Palmer | |
| 10-Gallon Batch — Extract with Steeped Grain (For a 5-gallon version of this combined recipe, simply divide all amounts by 2) | |
| Wort A — 10 gallons Malts Gravity Contribution 12 lb Pale liquid malt extract 43 1 lb Caramel 40 malt 2 1½ lb Malto-dextrin powder 2 O.G. for 10 Gallons 1.047 Hops IBU Contribution 2 oz Northern Brewer (7.5% alpha-acids) at 60 min 26 2 oz Willamette (5% alpha- acids) at 15 min 9 Total IBUs 35 | Wort B — 1 gallon Malts Gravity Contribution 1 lb Pale malt extract 36 ½ lb Chocolate malt 8 ¼ lb Caramel 80 malt 4.5 ¼ lb Black patent malt 5 O.G. for 1 gallon 1.053 Hops IBU Contribution ¾ oz Willamette (5% alpha-acids) at 30 min 48 Total IBUs 48 |
| The Calculations This recipe combination happens to use a 4:1 ratio between the base wort and the specialty addition (Wort B). As you can see, Wort A happens to be almost exactly the recipe for Shay Steam. When you combine 4 gallons of Wort A with 1 gallon of Wort B, the resultant wort (C) meets the recipe guidelines for Port O’Palmer. Using the equation from the text for determining gravities and IBUs of combined worts (VaXa + VbXb = VcXc), we find the following gravities and bitterness of Wort C: OGc = [(4X47) + (1 X 53)] + 5 = 48.2, or 1.048 IBUc = [(4 X 35) + (1 X 48)] + 5 = 37.6, or 38 IBUs | |
*Shay was a type of steam locomotive used in the timber town of Cass, West Virginia, where I used to visit as a boy. Engine #4 was the one I got to tend one time.Designing a Dual Recipe
Once you’ve picked the styles you want to make, the second step is to decide how you are going to brew them; here your equipment will influence the recipe. The third step is to formulate a recipe that will produce the beer styles you want using the equipment you’ve got.
The equipment limitation: When it comes to equipment, the limiting factor is the size of your boiling pot. I have the luxury of brewing in converted Sankey kegs using propane burners, which allows me to use full-volume boils for a 10-gallon batch. Most people use a standard 5-gallon pot, which limits the batch size that can be split. When conducting a concentrated boil, gravities above 1.090 become difficult to work with.
The first example given in this article (Example #1 — California Common and Porter) is for a 10-gallon batch, but all of the amounts in that recipe may be divided by 2 to produce an equivalent 5-gallon batch. With a 7.5-gallon pot (commonly called a Menudo pot), you can do a concentrated 6-galIon boil to produce a 10-gallon batch. I include an example for this case also (see Example #2 — Pils and Oktoberfest).
Ingredient selection: Once you have chosen your beers, examine the recipes for common ingredients. Usually this will be the lower of the amounts of base malt additions of the rwo recipes, and the minimum common hop profile.
Recipe formulation: The final challenge — here’s the fun part — is to create two worts that will combine to create the two final beers you want. For purposes of this article, let’s call these Wort A and Wort B. I usually make Wort A larger than Wort B. Often the recipe for Wort A will be complete for one of the desired styles (see Wort A in Example #1, for example). The specialty wort (Wort B) for the second beer is usually only 1–2 gallons and contains the added gravity, specialty grains, and/or hops to make up the remainder of the second style. The two different sizes are easily managed on the stovetop.
Calculating How Much to Add
So how do you decide how much of which ingredients to use in preparing Worts A and B? You can look at this process as if you were solving a puzzle. You’re trying to come as close as you can to the desired recipes/styles while maximizing the common ingredients. You’ll see in my sample recipes that this is not an exact process; there are no hard-and-fast rules that will guide you to certain success.
| Example #2 — Pils And Oktoberfest | |
| Individual Recipes |
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| Zatec Pils Malts Gravity Contribution 6½ lb Alexander’s pale liquid malt extract 47 O.G. for 5 gallons 1.047 Hops IBU Contribution 1 oz Perle (7% alpha-acids) at 60 min 19 1 oz Saaz (4% alpha-acids) at 30 min 8 1½ oz Saaz (4% alpha-acids) at 15 min 8 Total IBUs 35 Yeast and Fermentation Schedule Czech Pils or Bohemian lager yeast, primary fermentation at 50 °F (10 °C) for two weeks, rack and lager at 40 °F (4 °C) for six weeks. Prime and bottle at room temperature. | Denkenfreudenburgerbrau (Oktoberfest) Malts Gravity Contribution 7 lb Pale liquid malt extract 50 60 oz Caramel 30 malt <2 6 oz Caramel 80 malt <2 6 oz Caramel 120 malt <2 ½ lb Munich malt* 1 or ½ lb Toasted base malt, soaked for 1 hour and then toasted for 45 minutes at 350 °F (177 °C) O.G. for 5 gallons 1.056 Hops IBU Contribution 1 oz Perle (7% alpha-acids) at 60 min 19 1 oz Saaz (4% alpha-acids) at 30 min 8 1½ oz Saaz (4% alpha-acids) at 15 min 8 Total IBUs 35 Yeast and Fermentation Schedule Bavarian lager yeast, primary fermentation at 45 °F (7 °C) for two weeks, secondary (lagering) for six weeks at 35 °F (2 °C). |
| Combined Recipe, Zatec Pils and Denkenfreudenburgerbrau | |
| 10-Gallon Batch — Extract with Steeped Grain (For a 5-gallon version of this combined recipe, simply divide all amounts by 2) | |
| Wort A — 6gallons Malts Gravity Contribution 13 lb Pale liquid malt extract 78 O.G. for 6 gallons 1.078 Hops IBU Contribution 2 oz Perle (7.5% alpha-acids) at 60 min 31 2 oz Saaz (4% alpha-acids) at 30 min 13.7 3 oz Saaz (4% alpha-acids) at 15 min 13.3 Total IBUs 58 | Wort B — 3 gallons Malts Gravity Contribution 2 lb Pale malt extract 24 ½ lb Caramel 30 malt |
*See footnote on page 19.