Making Beer Not Numbers
When I was new to homebrewing and for many years afterward I was obsessed with hitting all my my numbers. If my mash efficiency was off or if my gravities didn't match the recipe I would go into near panic mode trying to figure out how to fix it.
Reading through beer and brewing forums, Facebook Groups, and other social media platforms it seems that all homebrewers experience that same feeling. However I only see comments from a scant few homebrewers who are not bothered by missing a percentage point or a few 10ths on gravity readings. Those attitudes seem to be held by older brewers... or should I say homebrewers who have been at it for many years if not decades.
Today while going through posts on one of the popular Facebook Groups someone replied to a new brewer who was worried about the state of his beer fermenting in a plastic bucket but was afraid to open the lid for fear of becoming oxidized. The reply stated that the older brewer does not even see his beer once it goes into the fermenter until pouring that first glass from his keezer. Another member questioned that practice saying "how do you monitor your gravity and yeast's progress? Final gravity is important for a number of things, including ABV."
This lead me to take a look at my own homebrewing practices and it dawned on me that I am in the camp of someone who doesn't concern himself with numbers anymore. Where once I checked gravity readings several times during fermentation I don't bother anymore. Why? What can I do about it and do I really want to go through the bother of following this trick or that hack only to risk altering the character of the resulting beer?
Consider this; a recipe you find somewhere, anywhere has a lot of data points published with it. It's a veritable alphabet soup of measurements - OG, FG, ABV, SRM, IBU. But where did those numbers come from? The inconvenient truth is that you don't know.
They could have been generated as estimates by someone's recipe design software. They could have been the recorded results by the brewer who made and published the recipe. In either case it is unlikely that you or I, with our equipment, brewing processes, and ingredients, will match those numbers. And in the end how much difference does it make if those numbers don't match the published recipe? Probably not much if any at all.
I read the Brülosophy blog and watch their YouTube channel fairly regularly and I have watched them experience too many non significant results when comparing such variables to now believe that a small difference in FG or ABV are worth my time and effort to chase down.
Somewhere I read someone... perhaps Denny Conn... saying that he doesn't make numbers. When I started following the Tree House Brewing Co. YouTube channel I was struck by CEO, Nate Lanier's reluctance to talk about styles when he describes his beer. Most people describe Tree House's most famous products as "Hazy IPA's" but he just calls them IPA. These two things combined with my own relaxed brewing style fits perfectly where my head is at this stage of the game. I make beer... not numbers.
Not that I want you to abandon taking readings or to suggest that I don't take them myself anymore. I do. I just don't obsess over them anymore. Case in point - I made a Vienna Lager recently and the OG, FG and ABV were all off when measured next to the published recipe. The OG was supposed to be 1.041 but mine ended up at 1.035. The FG was published as 1.013 but I ended up with 1.008 which actually put my ABV higher than the 3.7% estimated by the recipe at 4.2%. And nobody who has had this beer notices or cares because it's a damn good beer and they enjoy it thoroughly. And isn't that the point?
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