Monitoring Progress

As you advance as a brewer, several benchmarks will reflect the progress of your skill development, and it can be helpful to watch for these. The cost per pint will be reduced as the reliance on small quantities of ingredients subsides and as mistakes and losses become less frequent. Brewing costs also generally drop as batch size increases and all grain methods are used. Mistakes and other unpleasant surprises become not only less frequent and less costly, but they also become much less likely to ruin a five gallon batch of beer. Everything is cheaper in large quantities, and the advancing brewer will find ways to buy, store, and sometimes even split large bags of grain, hops, etc. In our Brewing Science course, the cost per pint of beer drops by about half in the course of a semester, based on the decreased costs involved during the progress from kit brewing to partial and full mashes. You should also see and come to expect an increasing ability to come close to target gravities, and sometimes rather joyfully to completely nail the intended original and finishing specific gravities. Fewer and less drastic adjustments are required in terms of last-minute additions of extracts to try to reach the target initial gravity (see Appendix 3). Calculated Bitterness Units offer fewer surprises, and clean yeast cultures, spot-on carbonation, and balanced flavors should begin to become the norm.

The developing brewer is continually faced with improvisational choices, and must choose whether or not to cut corners or to change or simplify methods. Some of these are personal decisions about which two equally talented brewers may disagree strongly; one brewer may wish to measure everything and the next may prefer to approximate or estimate quantities—to wing it and use a handful of this and a pinch of that if the taste is right. One may be inclined to make innumerable pale ales while another chooses to work at and master a highly diverse mix of beverages. Nevertheless, some shortcuts are risky and should be avoided. Some of the sanitation work that becomes routine may seem unnecessarily time consuming, and waiting for temperatures to change can try a brewers patience; in these and similar situations it is best to think of the health and well being of your yeast cultures, and avoid doing anything that could put this in jeopardy. Establishing your own continuous yeast cultures can save you five or ten dollars a batch, but the losses can be significant if they become contaminated or otherwise compromised.

Brewing something new, bizarre, or unusual becomes less of an adventure; with an increasing knowledge base it becomes possible to predict or foresee what is coming even when brewing something very novel or unconventional. With technical advancement and increasing experience, the production of a strange or unfamiliar beer should not cause anxiety.

More than anything else, as skill increases the need for good notes increases and changes in patterns of results in the brewing notebook can be seen as well. Predictions should become increasingly accurate and expressions of results should be inclined less and less toward shock, bewilderment, and confusion. Beer tastings should also benefit from increasing experience. As the brewer becomes more competent technically, observations become more quantitative and more specific. Objectives should gain accuracy and the focus of notes should become increasingly clear, precise, and goal-driven.

The beer gets better, as randomness and good luck give way to experience and control, of course. It is no small consolation that improvements in notes, costs, and precision are accompanied by an increase in the abundance of excellent beer that becomes readily available. This of course leads to a better grade of feedback that you get from colleagues who taste it, but more importantly it results directly in an improved personal beer stash. Great parties ensue. The time may arise for completion of a more diverse list of beverages that have been mastered, for consideration of production on a larger scale, or perhaps even for some commercial brewing.