As a dad with a 20 month old and one more on the way, time is a very scarce commodity for me. Brewing a beer can be a difficult thing to schedule. Carving out 5 consecutive hours can seem downright impossible among the craziness (yet joy) that children bring with them. So when I heard a Basic Brewing podcast about doing a beer in 15 minutes I was very interested.
The method revolves around a 15 minute boil. So overall the time will be more than 15 minutes, but it drastically reduces your brew time. The problem with a 15 minute boil is getting enough bitterness. So this method counts on hop bursting to provide bitterness and hop flavor and aroma in such a short time. In keeping with the theme of saving time you also use extract to save yourself the time of mashing.
I took one of my previous pale ale recipes and attempted to convert it to a 15 minute boil extract recipe fittingly dubbed “Lightning Pale Ale.” The recipe that I converted did call for dry-hopping. I intentionally did not dry hop for the first attempt because I wanted to see what the hop character would be from the 15 minute boil alone.
Recipe Specifications -------------------------- Boil Size: 2.95 gal Post Boil Volume: 2.86 gal Batch Size (fermenter): 2.50 gal Bottling Volume: 2.50 gal Estimated OG: 1.052 SG Estimated Color: 10.6 SRM Estimated IBU: 40.7 IBUs Brewhouse Efficiency: 72.00 % Est Mash Efficiency: 0.0 % Boil Time: 15 Minutes Ingredients: ------------ Amt Name %/IBU 3 lbs 8.0 oz Amber Liquid Extract (12.5 SRM) 87.5 % 8.0 oz Wheat Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) 12.5 % 0.75 oz Chinook [13.00 %] - Boil 15.0 min 22.9 IBUs 1.00 oz Centennial [10.10 %] - Boil 10.0 min 17.8 IBUs 1.00 oz Cascade [6.90 %] - Boil 0.0 min 0.0 IBUs 1.0 pkg Safale American (DCL/Fermentis #US-05)
The brew day for the beer went very smoothly. I was back in the kitchen for the first time in awhile and my wife quickly remembered all the reasons she was happy that I now brewed in the garage. From rounding up my equipment to being done with clean up was less than one and a half hours. That is less than 30% of the time I spend on an all grain batch on a normal brew day!
Unfortunately, this beer did not turn out as well as I had hoped. There is very minimal hop character currently present. The aroma is pretty sweet and malt forward. I can pick up a slight pine note in the flavor, but I really have to focus to find it. The bitterness could also stand to be bumped up a bit, but it is actually close to where I would want it. This beer definitely could have been helped with the dry hop, but I think it needed some other help as well (more hops in the kettle).
Because this method of making beer relies on hop bursting and putting a lot of hops in the wort within that 15 minutes to get the right amount of bitterness it is limited to hop forward styles. Generally IPAs and pale ales will be the target for this method. However, I would be curious to play with some various hop extracts that could provide bitterness without flavor or aroma. Extracts could be the key to opening up different styles to the 15 minute boil. This is definitely a method I will be toying with in the future even though the first iteration did not work out as I hoped.