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.
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.