How do I get lower Flavor Notes?

[Shockspawn]

I'm on the quest where you shall brew a beer without going over 4 in any flavor. I've tried some stuff out but can't really figure out how i should do it. Any tips?

[Angry Trash]

Originally posted by Shockspawn:

I'm on the quest where you shall brew a beer without going over 4 in any flavor. I've tried some stuff out but can't really figure out how i should do it. Any tips?

For me I just brewed it weaker. If the standard is 1.76oz for your primary flavoring steep for 50 minutes, then I just would use something like .4oz for 30. I would likewise assume you could boil off water and add more to dilute

[bschneider]

This one took me a few tries too, hehe. Keep in mind you can use any beer style, so deliberately pick one where the strongest flavor note is still low. I think I used a Blonde Ale, the strongest Flavor Note is Citrus at 6.8.

Now, just halve all the ingredients except water. So instead of 3 kg of American Pale Ale, you use 1.5 kg, but still 21 L of water. Same for all the other ingredients.

It won't be a great beer probably, but it'll fulfill the requirements of the job. You should be pretty safe this way, since Citrus should then hover around 3.4, even if you used a bit more than half the ingredients it shouldn't go above 4.0.

[Shockspawn]

Thx Guys I'll give it a try

[Essarex]

You don't even need to lower most ingredients that much, the key here is to use less sugar at the end. And of course picking a recipe with low flavor notes too, I used a Pale ale as well.

[Alex G]

If you let the hops boil for more than 10 minutes it will start to lose the flavor, so the more you let it boil, less flavor you will get

[Angry Trash]

Originally posted by MsBlueFox:

If you let the hops boil for more than 10 minutes it will start to lose the flavor, so the more you let it boil, less flavor you will get

To add to this/amend it : The longer you boil the hops you also extract more bitterness (based on its acid levels) and color (based on its SRM) while lowering its flavor. The 50m increment seems to be the general threshold for zeroing it out (I've had some success only boiling for 20-30m in small quantities for milder flavors)

[DumpyThumbs]

I made the recipe up on the fly, using the steps from other recipes. I used 1.5kg of base malt, american pale I think. Didn't add any bittering hops so the first 50 minutes of the boil were hop free. I added 2 hops for the 10 minutes, 5g each, based on having lots of flavour notes. Took them out a bit earlier than 10 minutes though, didn't want them added lots of those notes after all!

I split the yeast, using half each of two yeasts that had a long list of flavours, then fermented and conditioned as normal. Just before tasting, I added water to bring it up to 20l, just to make sure that any flavour that was there wasn't too strong!

Would have been an 'interesting' beer in real life, but did the job here and I suppose gets us thinking of how to control flavours, even if it's in a slightly extreme way!

[Auroch Matty]

You lot are amazing :)

[Taul Power]

I made the Irish Stout all grain recipe but used Pilsner malt instead of Stout malt and I cut the crystal and black malts in half. I only used the first hop addition and fermented with So-Cal yeast.

[jandrewgoodman]

Assuming this is for the high alcohol low flavor brew, the biggest problem I had was the standard flavors, keeping malty and sweet to a minimum. I can’t give you an exact recipe b/c by the time I finally succeeded, I was frustrated enough that I wasn’t really recording things like I should have been (I think that season wound up lasting 400+ days worth of iterative attempts), but I can give a few tips for what wound up working for me. I avoided hops until I reference them; early stages are malt only. Also, initial fermentation stages may need to be longer than 15 days for the higher gravities you’re targeting, particularly in step 1. Check the fermentable sugars to make sure your beer is done fermenting before going forward, as malty and sweet is your enemy.

1.) make something obnoxiously high alcohol. There’s that 25% ABV yeast you get that will do a great job of this. I wound up using a combination of sour malt and smoked malt (~2 kg each?) for this to keep my malty and sweet note as low as achievable with that yeast as well as a truly obnoxious amount of corn sugar (I think something like 8 kg). This beer will have flavors that are too strong for the contest, just leave it in your fermenter for now.

2.) brew a second beer, one that has a couple of kgs of a crisp and clean base malt with some sour malt and/or smoked malt if your notes from that weren’t too high in the last batch (no more than 5ish; your extra alcohol is so you can dilute to where you need to be) and some more corn sugar. Ferment this with a yeast that gives you fruit and spice (no crisp and clean or malty and sweet). One of the Belgian yeasts worked for me.

3.) With both of those fermented, it’s time to make your frankenbeer. Grab your largest pot(s), do a little math to figure out how much of each you think you can afford here (so if your malty note is around 10, you want no more than ~40% of your volume made up of that beer). Ideally you should wind up with a mixture that’s at most ~5 for anything with an excess of alcohol allowing you to water it down to get where you need. Get at least 40L into a container. Add water until your highest notes are in range.

4.) fine tune: if your roast notes are too low after dilution, coffee is great. If you’re short on notes, dry hopping is a great way to introduce some flavors now (I wound up adding 100g of cascader to the pot of frankenbeer b/c the flavor notes on it were perfectly balanced and waiting until I wound up with notes in the 2-3 range.

5.) push that into a keg and immediately sprint to tasting. It doesn’t have to be a good beer (and really I’d argue that the requirements of bland and high alcohol likely preclude good); it just has to be a beer that fits the brief, and frankly, the sour coffee and ester brew I turned in is exactly what I think they deserve for saddling me with this task.

6.) don’t dump your rejects if they’re close. If you wind up with a beer with not enough alcohol or a flavor note that’s just a little too high, it can still be useful for diluting a beer that’s got some margin on a flavor note, and diluting with weak beer is better than diluting with water for keeping flavors in line.

That should get you close enough that you’ll know what minor modifications will get you the rest of the way there. This was a nightmare task and was the first time I gave up on a job only to find out that the job doesn’t go away until you do it.