2017 Brewing Stats

I did a quick analysis on all the beers I brewed in 2017 and found it interesting so I thought I would share it here as well. In 2017 a brewed a total of seventeen 5 gallon batches of beer (85 gallons total). If I average all the beers I brewed together it would be a low alcohol (4.2% abv), pale colored (7.4 srm), moderately bitter (25 ibu) ale. It would also most likely be brewed with english yeast (liquid), be mostly marris otter with flaked maize and english crystal, use mostly english hops and fall under the 'bitter' category of the bjcp.

Below are some additional summary stats including the min/max and standard deviation for all the beers I brewed in 2017. Not a lot of deviation from the mean.

Out of the 17 beers I brewed this year I brewed 11 different styles in total with 'best bitter' being the most frequent of course. Imagine the horror, I didn't even brew a single IPA this year...gasp.

I've obviously been trying to nail that style down which has it's pluses and minuses, but one minus is that I didn't get to brew some other styles I really liked this past year. For next year I'm going to try brew some old favorites including, saisons and oatmeal stouts.

Another thing I've been focusing on is lower alcohol beers, so even when I wasn't brewing a bitter which is traditionally low in alcohol, I was brewing other low alcohol styles or low alcohol versions of regular styles. Below is a histogram for the abv of beers I brewed in 2017. The sweet spot this year were 3.9% - 4.5% abv beers.

On to the ingredients. I ended up using a lot more different types of hops than I thought I did. I use ekg so much I didn't think there would be more than but a handful of different hops here but in total I ended up using 22 different types of hops this year. Bitters not withstanding, I tended to brew a lot of different styles so I think that contributed, plus trying some new english hops also helped.

I used 9 different yeasts this year 3 were dry and 6 were liquid. The yeast I used the most was wlp002 (shocker lol). Of the 9 yeasts, 4 (or 44% of the total) were from the UK. My lhbs carries white labs, hence only using them. I do want to check out some of the other yeast manufacturers this year now that I'm pretty familiar with what white labs has, especially their english strains.

I used 6 different base malts this year. I'm counting munich as a base malt (since it is) although most people use it a s a specialty malt. Whatevs. I used marris otter at the largest percentage followed by US 2-row and them german pilsner. Golden promise, mild malt and munich were all malts I had never tried before this year.

I did 3 SMaSH beers this year (german pilsner, kolsch and ordinary bitter), the rest had at least 1 specialty grain or adjunct and multiple types of hops. The adjunct I used the most was flaked maize by far.

For specialty grains, I used crystal 10 at the highest percentage followed by other types of english crystal malts (carastan, crystal light, etc.). However, if you add up all the english crystal malts it makes up the largest percentageof the total at 48%.