Home brewing beer is an increasingly popular past-time. From red ales to lagers to porters, brewing your own beer is more than a tasty trend as home brewers learn new ways to blend ingredients, alter alcohol content, and most importantly, improve flavor for some of the most delicious beers around. Are you contemplating a leap …
50 Ways to Make Brewing Beer at Home Even More Awesome Read More »
To be a good brewer and judge of other beers you need to be able to recognize off flavors in your beer and be able to know where and why these off flavors are there. There are many flavors in beer that the common drinker would think were “off” or out of place might actually …
So you want to brew as easy as possible, and as cheaply as possible. Well I’m here to help. The following is a guide to absolute bare bones brewing. We’re not going to buy anything we don’t have to, we’re going to ignore best practices, and we’re still going to make some pretty good beer. …
Lazy Homebrewing – Making Beer As Cheap & Easy As Possible Read More »
When brewing and extract beer you will usually be adding some specialty grains to the batch. These grains are used to add in specialty flavors like chocolate, rye and honey into your base beer. But they are also made for the extract brewer because Crystal malt only needs a short steeping time to extract the sugars. Crystal malt or Caramel …
When I first started out brewing I didn’t know a Brew kettle from a fermentation bucket. So I began like most do with an extract beer kit. The beers were turning out good and the instructions in the kit were very helpful in brewing my first beers. But the kits never really seemed to hit the mark …
Of course, you always have the option of kegging, but homebrewers start out with bottling because it has a cheaper entry point. Even if you do keg, you may still bottle some of your beers due to lack of kegs to put all your beers in. Some beers, like porters and IPAs, get a lot …
Sanitation is an issue for many brewers, but knowing which sanitizers to use, how to sanitize your system is one of the most important steps in home brewing. Knowing the ins and outs of sanitation will mean never having to worry about whether you’re doing it right again. Paying attention your sanitation will allow you …
As a homebrewer you need to be able to look at recipes and have an idea of how they will end up tasting, otherwise you are playing an expensive guessing game. The first concept, you have to understand when reading recipes is bittering. Bittering refers to how bitter your eventual beer will be. International Bittering …
From Recipe to Beer: Knowing How Your Beer Will Turn Out Read More »
When discussing brewing equipment I like to put things in three categories: there are things you need, there are things you kind of need (you don’t absolutely need them but most people will tell you that you do – we’ll call them useful items), and there are things that are nice to have. Here’s what …
AKA: How To Be Like Sam Calagoine. (The founder of Dogfish Head Beer) When I was starting out brewing, I found that one of the hardest parts was that I did not understand the terminology. Whether I was trying to read a book about brewing, a recipe, an article, or a question on a forum, …