I have 4L of märzen fermenting in my drinks fridge. 4L? Why so small of a batch? For rapid iterations. I need to brew over and over again to get good and to perfect the process. So every 3 weeks it will be another 4L, and every 9 weeks I'll have something to taste to see how badly I did 9 weeks prior. I also had to tweak the process to speed up the waiting period, which will effect the outcome but I won't slow it down until I'm satisfied i've learned and tweaked all I can. Then I can lager for longer.
Also, I don't have a complete 5 gallon (21L) setup. That requires a very large pot, a high output burner to heat it, and a much larger refrigerator with temperature control to ferment and lager it. I can't afford all that jazz right now.
So... this was my first time doing all grain brewing. And a lot of things went right, and then one thing went wrong.... which was really just me thinking something went wrong, then doing the wrong response, and so something did actually go wrong. But if I just followed the recipe it wouldn't have happened. I measured 1.021 SG pre-boil and thought that was too low. Turns out it was actually 1.037 if you correct for the fact that the wart was at 67C when I measured it. So adding 100g of maltodextrin was a bad idea. Anyhow, now I'm going to have an ABV north of 6%. Oh well. I'm happy to drink my mistakes!
The malt and hops smelled so amazing, better even than any beer, I wonder wny we don't just drink hopped wort from time to time.
