How to Brew Big – Making High Gravity Beers：如何酿造大–高浓啤酒.doc

How to Brew Big – Making High Gravity Beers by Brad Smith on May 9, 2010 · Want to brew the biggest beers and barley wines? Looking for high gravity ales? This week we take a look at how to brew the biggest beers. I’m talking barley wines, imperials, high end scotch ale and other highly alcoholic brews. Planning your Big Beer High gravity ales start out with a bit of planning. Homebrewing big beers is not the same as brewing regular ones. For starters, high gravity ales need malt, and lots of it. Use a tool like BeerSmith to adjust your original gravity to match the style you’re brewing. If you are brewing with malt extract, you may need 50-100% more base malt than you usually use. Adjust your recipe to match the desired gravity. For all grain brewers the situation is more complex. Scaling up the amount of grain used while keeping the batch size the same results in lower batch efficiency. This is because you are sparging with proportionally less water per pound of grain. Where you may get a 72% brewhouse efficiency with a regular beer, your high gravity ale may achieve only 60%. As a result you need to lower your estimated brewhouse efficiency when estimating the original gravity of your beer. This means you will need more grain than you would get by just scaling up a regular gravity beer. Beer Balance A second factor to consider when designing your big beer is balance. Here the bitterness ratio which is the ratio between the original gravity of the beer and IBUs of bitterness, becomes very important. As you add more malt to make your beer big, you need to add proportionally more hops to balance the beer. Otherwise the big malt will dominate your beer, making it too sweet to drink. To offset this, you need to calculate the bitterness ratio of your beer and compare it to the average bitterness ratio for your desired style. Big beers need big hops – its not unusual to have 50, 75 or even 100 IBUs for a big beer or barley wine. Big Beer Yeast While you may be tempted t