Happy days! My new beer is done. This is a battle-tested recipe with lemons and ginger. This time I also had 10 g of fresh lemon balm in the seasoning infusion. This guy:
Works really great as a beer component, sharing to spotlight this herb with you all! There's a Wikipedia page that describes the many aromatic compounds it imparts. It's perennial (pic is from my garden), grows in a slightly invasive manner so you only need to plant very little to get enough for many brews. This was a warning :)
Another new twist was a helping of Weyermann spelt wheat malt. I expected the nutty spelt flavour from it, but the taste profile ended up so multi-faceted that I'll need more tastings to pinpoint it :D All in all, a distinctive flavour to this beer. Fermented to bone dry very smoothly.
Nice, Ill keep lemon balm in mind.
How big was this batch?
do you filter the beer at all when bottling?
Is your lemon balm separated from the rest of your garden or do you keep an eye on it and remove as needed?
How much longer do you ferment beer to get the dryness? I've fermented wine, but it rarely made it long enough to get rid of all the excess sugar.
As the others said, it comes down to how much alcohol the yeast will ultimately tolerate, if there is enough fermentable sugar to get to that point. I still don't do og / fg's, so my 'bone dry' was not a measured outcome, only perceived. I'm type 1 diabetic so I prefer no leftover sugar in my brews :)
In this case, six days of fermentation followed by a hasty cold crash of two days was enough. The yeasties at work were a standard Finnish fresh yeast, 0,25 € at any grocery store and known to produce 10+ % ABV sahti brews. Speed comes from having a fair bit (25 g) of yeast in there and making a starter with it. I also ferment under pressure and at the cool-ish temp of 16 °C. There is 23 L of the stuff with 6,7 kg of malt, pretty strong stuff.
I filter the wort into the fermenter with reusable coffee filters. The fermenter doubles as a keg, so I only bottle on demand.
The lemon balm is in a garden bed, so yeah, I do battle with it. Hence the warning :D It makes good pesto too, so the battle is not too bad XD
Drying is usually not so much matter of time as matter of OG and yeast strain. OG1090 mead dries to completeness faster than 1120 going to medium (and then staying there forever). With beer, it's harder to pintoint the turning point, as beer yeast is much more diverse. There is also matter of non-fermentable sugars content that will never disapper. And you've got to have vigorous healthy fermentation to make it in time to bottle with enough active yeast if you plan natural carbonation.
Also for beer you have some unfermentable sugars, so you can't achieve driness by just fermenting, you have to use enzymes to break them down completely to fermentable ones.
So scientifically speaking it is dependent on the "substrate" (what you ferment) and yeasts.