Brewing Better Beer by Gordon Strong

Author:Gordon Strong [Strong, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CKB007000 Cooking / Beverages / Beer
ISBN: 9781938469183
Publisher: Brewers Publications
Published: 2015-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

Part III

Applying Your Knowledge

Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.

–Robert Heinlein, American science fiction writer

Once you have successfully mastered the basic techniques of brewing, understand your commonly used ingredients, and know how your brewing system responds, you are ready to solo. The rest of this book is devoted to lessons on mastering brewing by developing your own style, approaches, and methods.

The subjects in this part of the book aren’t necessarily linear; you can learn them in most any order. In fact, I encourage you to jump around and read the topics in whichever order most suits your interest. When giving advice to others, I try to adjust my conversation to skip over what is already known and to focus on the new material. I can’t really do that in this book, because the background and learning style of each reader will be different.

It’s probably more useful to make sure you have a background on beer styles and evaluating beer before trying to formulate recipes, so you may want to take those chapters in order. Competition brewing tends to build on all the other lessons in the book, so that may be best saved for last.

Chapter 5 contains three major topics. It discusses the background knowledge necessary to understand and work with beer styles, it contains tips on developing a good palate for sensory evaluation, and it provides lessons on how to critically assess or judge your own beer. These skills are foundational, since they help you understand what your beer should be and allows you to determine if it has met your goal.

Chapter 6 is a detailed discussion about recipe formulation, including how to be creative and develop new styles. It includes practical lessons on how I go about building a recipe and uses several of my recipes as examples. I cover different scenarios based on what kind of recipe you’re trying to make and how much information you have, including how to converge on your target during successive iterations of your recipe.

Chapter 7 is about troubleshooting common problems with your beer, both technical and stylistic. The focus is on faults that advanced brewers might encounter, not the typical new brewer issues. Much of the stylistic troubleshooting advice centers on identifying and diagnosing the process- or ingredient-related root causes for the problems you detect. Most advanced brewers can fix problems if they simply know where to look.

Chapter 8 covers topics related to post-fermentation handling of your beer, including how you might want to adjust it to match expectations. The topic of blending beer is covered in detail. The goal for the chapter is to explore the range of controls you have for tweaking your beer up to the point of consumption and learning how to fine-tune and adjust your beer to be exactly what you want.

Chapter 9 discusses the special issues associated with brewing for competition or for any occasion when your beer absolutely has to be at its best. You don’t have to enter competitions to get practical, useful advice from this discussion.

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