Modifying Your Beer After Fermentation
Posted: Tue May 31, 2016 10:08 pm
I have been playing with some interesting techniques lately to adjust my beer after it has fully fermented and been kegged.
One of the more mainstream ways has been making tinctures out of fruits instead of adding the whole fruit to the secondary. I recently used the zests of two grapefruits to flavor 200mls of vodka and let it sit for a week. Last night i played around with dosing varying amounts in 100ml of my berliner weisse to see if this was feasible. I was shocked at the impact a small amount of the tincture made on the beer. I used a syringe to add 0.1 ml at a time to 100mls of beer and recorded my results.
My taste threshold for picking up grapefruit in the beer was 0.4 mls / 100ml of solution, or approximately 74 ml of the solution in the 5 gallon batch. I went all the way up to 1ml/100mls and found that after 0.75ml/100ml the increase did little to alter the beer. So i pulled the trigger and dosed the batch with 140 ml of grapefruit zest tincture.
I'm working on doing mini mashes with 1lb of specialty grain and simmering the solution down to 1000ml's of water to try a similar process with some specialty malts. I have amber and special W done so far, i'm going to try melanoiden, carapils, and munich next.
Has anyone else experimented with modifications like this? I'll keep posting my results for anyone interested but i'm flying back to NL for my last three weeks so it will be a bit before i get to try any new malts.
One of the more mainstream ways has been making tinctures out of fruits instead of adding the whole fruit to the secondary. I recently used the zests of two grapefruits to flavor 200mls of vodka and let it sit for a week. Last night i played around with dosing varying amounts in 100ml of my berliner weisse to see if this was feasible. I was shocked at the impact a small amount of the tincture made on the beer. I used a syringe to add 0.1 ml at a time to 100mls of beer and recorded my results.
My taste threshold for picking up grapefruit in the beer was 0.4 mls / 100ml of solution, or approximately 74 ml of the solution in the 5 gallon batch. I went all the way up to 1ml/100mls and found that after 0.75ml/100ml the increase did little to alter the beer. So i pulled the trigger and dosed the batch with 140 ml of grapefruit zest tincture.
I'm working on doing mini mashes with 1lb of specialty grain and simmering the solution down to 1000ml's of water to try a similar process with some specialty malts. I have amber and special W done so far, i'm going to try melanoiden, carapils, and munich next.
Has anyone else experimented with modifications like this? I'll keep posting my results for anyone interested but i'm flying back to NL for my last three weeks so it will be a bit before i get to try any new malts.