1. Fermentation Temperature Control in fermenter unitank
Yeast accounts for up to 70% of your beer’s flavor, so it’s important to keep it happiest (and hungriest) in its ideal temperature range to get the right fruity esters or spicy phenolics you’re looking for and no off-flavors. Ale yeast works best around room temperature, while lager yeast thrives in cooler temps (45 - 55F).
Make sure your beer fermentation tank stay in the ideal temperature range.
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2. Pitch the Right Amount of Yeast!
Over pitching, or adding too much yeast, isn’t too likely and doesn’t cause as many issues. Under pitching, or not adding enough yeast, is significantly more common. If you don’t add enough yeast, fermentation may not finish - or if it does, it may not provide the best flavors. Yeast isn’t foie gras, it’s not going to taste better when forcing it to eat up all the sugar. Overworked yeast won’t have enough energy to go back and consume the off-flavors they create and won’t eat up the sugar to carbonate your beer (if bottle conditioning) so not only could your beer be off-flavored or too sweet, but also flat.
3. Oxygenation
Love that wet-cardboard type of flavor in your beer? Good news, you can skip this section! But if this is a flavor you’d like to avoid, it’s best to know when NOT to introduce oxygen to your beer. Adding it right after you’ve cooled your wort (before adding the yeast) is essential to avoid effects similar to under-pitching. Yeast need oxygen to replicate, so think of oxygen as a necessary ingredient to create your very own yeast orgy. No oxygen, no yeast orgy. Which will lead to low cell counts and poor fermentation.
4. Full Volume Boil
Does your beer have a distinctive “homebrew” flavor? Maybe you haven’t noticed it because brewing beer that tastes like beer feels like such a big accomplishment and at first we don’t notice that tang of sweeter-than-it-should-be in our beer. In smaller 2-3 gallon boils, sugars condense and cause kettle caramelization, darkening, and more complex sugar formations (slightly bigger sugars), and sometimes the yeast cannot eat them. This leads to a slightly sweeter beer than what you’re targeting. Increasing your boil size doesn’t cause that darkening and it spreads your sugars out into little bite sized pieces that your yeast can more easily eat up. Hops also react differently in different depths of sugar and this way you’ll get more balance and a much better beer at the end. And another added bonus of leveling up: you reduce your risk of adding contaminants since you don’t need to top off your batch with water after the boil.
5. Actively Chill Wort
Wort chillers save you time, create a better cold break by getting the proteins out of suspension (creating more clarity and less haze to your beer) and it prevents contamination; the sooner you get your wort into the fermenter, the sooner the yeast can eat up sugar.
There are countless variables to brewing, and the best part of experimenting with your brews is you’ll always be rewarded with beer and the opportunity to learn and make even better beer next time with Tiantai microbrewery equipment.
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Emily Gong
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