SMaSH (ish) recipe sanity check

[JamesF]

My plan, such as I could be said to have one at all, is to do a single mash and initial boil with Magnum hops, then split the wort into smaller batches at, say, sixty minutes, boiling each batch individually for a further fifteen minutes with a different hop variety, then perhaps throw a few more of the same hop in at flame-out for a fifteen minute steep though I'm really not sure about this last one. I should perhaps leave that for a separate trial. The aim of this one is to be able to make some sort of useful comparison between hop varieties keeping everything else as near as possible the same.

So my thoughts are:

7kg pale malt @66C (planned total volume in the FVs being about 36l)
35g Magnum at the start of the boil. I think this should work out at about 30 IBU if I've done the maths correctly.
Split at 60 minutes
20 IBU worth of the "test" hop boiled for 15 minutes

I've been thinking perhaps US-05 for the yeast.

I hope I should end up with a set of beers in the region of 1045 to 1050 at around 50 IBU using a range of different hops.

I'm not totally sure about the individual batch size at the moment. I'm thinking one to two gallons. One gallon looks good from the point of view of being able to try lots of different hops at once. Two looks better if I decide I really like some particular combination, but I guess I can always brew a decent length of anything that really appeals afterwards.

Any thoughts?

James

[hazelbrew]

nice experiment.

if you have 1 gallon demijohns then 2 gallons each hop, 1 as out of the boiler, the 1 dry hopped with the test hop

[JamesF]

Yes, that's a good idea.

James

[Chug]

I like experimenting too, yours sounds interesting, keep us posted.