Brewing a Big Beer (Brewer speak for high alcohol beers)

Most homebrew packs are good for 5 gallons of beer up to a gravity of about 1.060.  But 1.060 beers are for the lawn-mower, we want beer at 10%+ alcohol content which requires a starting gravity of about 1.100 or greater.  The yeast need some help by making a yeast starter so you have more cells to ferment that big beer.  As an alternative you can purchase additional yeast packs. 

This applies for both our All-grain and extract brewers.  High gravity beers have a higher chance of boil overs so watch out when that wort start to boil.  In addition your hop utilization (how much each ounce of hops contributes to bitterness) is reduced with these big beers which mean you need to use more hops than normal.  We recommend using brewing software or one of our made to order recipe kits so you end up with a delicious well balanced beer.

When we increase the alcohol content in our beer we also up the amount of grain.  In addition to increasing the amount of grain we also extract less sugars from that grain.  We usually experience an 8-10% drop in efficiency making big beers which requires even more grain.  This all adds up too crunching the numbers (or making a guess!) to make sure your grain bill will fit in your mash tun. 

Fermentation is likely to be more vigorous than your smaller beers. This vigorous fermentation causes a few problems you need to be prepared for.  First use a blow off tube instead of an airlock so that any Krausen that makes it up to the top of the fermenter doesn’t fill the airlock.  Second leave some extra headspace at the top of your fermenter so that Krausen has somewhere  to go.   Also you can expect a significant temperature rise during your fermentation because your yeast are working overtime.  You can put a wet t-shirt over the fermenter  or set the fermenter in a kids pool to help keep it in the correct fermentation range.