This dude's mad!

If you're brewing and interested in science, and funk and good writing about beer why are you not following The Mad Fermentationist?  I've posted about him before I think, but damn it this guy I want to come apprentice on a brew with him or something.  Some part for just pure curiosity, and the rest because I feel like there is so much I would learn from him.  On of his recent posts was on wort fermentability, he's linking to a few different article with regards to adjuncts and specialty grains effect on wort fermentability, and talking about other factors at play.

In any event I can say that I've seen some beers get into insanely low final gravity, the lowest I've recorded was 1.006 the recipe is here, and as you can see it was Marris Otter, crystal 40 and crystal 10.  All of the interesting bits to this beer where from oak and hops, but it was one of my favorite beers in so much as I drank the majority of the 5 gallons on my own in around 2 months.  I'm fairly sure I had switched to my igloo cooler for mashing by this point, and was doing 90 minute boils.

It's heady stuff to think about and going forward my mashing process will been taking longer than my boil times, and I'm working on getting above 75% efficiency. I think that I'm already quite a bit a head of that, because of my secondary runnings/side batches but I haven't been taking good notes during the process so I haven't been trying to do blended averages and efficiency calculations.  I need to do measurements of wort pre-boil and take good notes to get an actual idea of what's going on.  In total I ended up with almost 9 gallons of beer on the day of my American Strong brewing, but I used 6lbs of malt extract in the main portion and added specialty grains and 1lb of dry extract on the side batch that was 2.5 gallons but included some of the primary batch because it was too much for my primary fermenter ect, ect.  In short beer was everywhere and I didn't write down what I did so all of this is from my vague memory of what happened that day.