I'm looking to perfect a few this year, and I'm thinking about how I'll go about doing it.
Doing a single small batch at a time, changing one ingredient or variable at a time, is probably the most methodical and scientific.
However, that will drive me crazy and take too long. So I thought I'd brew 3 or 4 small batches, with 1 being the current recipe and the others having any number of tweaks to the malt, hops, yeast, whatever. Kind of a shotgun approach to get into the ballpark of what's good, then fine tune it from there.
As long as i don't stray too far from the original recipe during each test, i think the quantity of tests would outweigh the precision of the first method in terms of quick, useful information to refine the recipe.
How do the rest of you do it?
Doing a single small batch at a time, changing one ingredient or variable at a time, is probably the most methodical and scientific.
However, that will drive me crazy and take too long. So I thought I'd brew 3 or 4 small batches, with 1 being the current recipe and the others having any number of tweaks to the malt, hops, yeast, whatever. Kind of a shotgun approach to get into the ballpark of what's good, then fine tune it from there.
As long as i don't stray too far from the original recipe during each test, i think the quantity of tests would outweigh the precision of the first method in terms of quick, useful information to refine the recipe.
How do the rest of you do it?