The Brew Bag Blog — wort

As a viable small business, we're about 11 months in and happy to report that The Brew Bag is growing nicely. When the reality that the market was underserved with a strong reliable brew bag way back in January of 2013, I thought I would be supplying home brewers with bags, and that's about it. What has happened however, is more than that. Home brewer's are an independent lot.  I know this because I'm one of them, and I talk to a lot of them on social media, the phone, and via this site.  An important aspect of home brewing...

This was my first AHA national conference, but it won't be my last. I left Grand Rapids with so much information to assimilate that I put it on a schedule. I assume that the BOD knows that the braintrust of speaker intellect would compel home brewers to react to all the information they absorbed, and then experiment to an even greater degree, as they seek to  create both unique and common beers that exemplify the pursuit of a great brew. Eventually, craft beer lovers worldwide will be the recipients of it all when they tip future brews that have been influenced...

The utilization is influenced by the vigor of the boil, the total gravity of the boil, the time of the boil and several other minor factors. The vigor of the boil can be considered a constant for each individual brewer, but between brewers there probably is some variation. The gravity of the boil is significant because the higher the malt sugar content of a wort, the less room there is for isomerized alpha acids. The strongest bittering factors are the total amount of alpha acids you added to the wort, and the amount of time in the boil for isomerization. Understandably then, most equations for IBUs work with these three variables (gravity, amount, and time) against a nominal utilization. As mentioned earlier, the utilization for alpha acids in homebrewing is generally accepted as topping out at about 30%.

http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter5-4.html

Many of the sparge brewers I talk to about BIAB scratch their heads when they hear that the brew in a bag method is a no sparge method. Nearly all of them say "but what about all the sugars that get left behind in the grain, aren't you losing valuable fermetables?" At issue is not whether no sparge "loses" fermentable sugar, but how much is actually in the boil kettle. While it is true that the grain bag after lifting from the mash tun has sugars remaining, at what point is sparging a zero return effort? The concept of brew...