Recent content by WouldBeBrewmaster

Sounds like acetaldehyde. Probably caused by contamination. Sanitize anything glass or plastic that touches your beer on the cold side with bleach, then rinse thoroughly with cold water. If you’re fermenting in stainless, give your fermenter a hot alkaline wash (PBW or similar), then sanitize...

Three points is nothing. Every batch of extract is not going to have the same amount of sugars. Only way to know what the SG if the extract you used actually was would be to see a Certificate of Analysis from the manufacturer (more than likely Briess). If anything aerating the wort ensured a...

Just bottled an Old Ale today that I brewed in the end of August. One of the clubs I'm in has been doing in-club comps each quarter, and Old Ale was the style pulled out of the hat for Q4. I primed the bottles with brown sugar. Usually I keg, bottles make it easier to give away as gifts, and...

Liquid yeast has gone up a lot in price since I started brewing as well. When I started brewing a vial of White Labs or smack pack of Wyeast was $8. Wyeast is now $10, while White Labs, Imperial and Omega are around $15. The latter three include more cells, designed to not need a starter for...

Biscuit/Victory/Amber malts are just base malts that are lightly toasted in a roaster. You may get a little sweetness, but really what you will get is a toasted flavor. Think a lightly toasted piece of bread. If you are looking for sweetness, use a Caramel or Crystal Malt.

For about three years that's how I brewed almost every batch; either as a 5-gal partial mash or 3-gal BIAB.

Never done it before. Back when I was doing small batch BIAB, our oven wouldn't go lower than 190F. If you oven can, I don't see why it wouldn't work. The simplest way is to heat your strike water to 12 degrees F above your mash temp, 162F to mash at 150F. Put your grains in and mash for 60...

Below are some best practices I put together for brewing beer kit beers on my blog. The first beer kit batches I ever made were for Homebrew Con 2019 Making great homebrew with a beer kit in a can or pouch When I started brewing in the early 2010's, my first recipe kit came with two cans of...

If you’re using base malt in an extract brew, you really need to mash those grains until they convert. Otherwise those base malts will leech proteins and create haze. There’s a belief that extract is low in Free Amino Nitrogen (FAN) which is why some people do a mini-mash. It’s not really...

Town in the US. Massachusetts specifically. The Ipswich Ale Brewery is one of the older craft breweries in New England opening in 1991.

Picked up an Ipswich sampler today and am enjoying the India Pale Ale right now. It’s been a fun beer to revisit; one I’ve been meaning to go back to for awhile. Most of the East Coast IPAs that were around when I got into craft beer are gone. Hazy IPAs have taken over. I looked up the beer on...

The cost of buying bottles is an excellent point. Depending where you live it’s getting harder to find commercial craft beer in bottles. Bombers are dead, and it’s only legacy craft brewers that still bottle at all. When I lived in an apartment where I didn’t have room for kegs, I didn’t mind...

Muntons Spraymalt (DME) is 100% malt. No adjuncts.

I published some tasting notes on my recipe. Next batch I will dial back the hops a bit to see if I can get similar hop flavor and aroma, while smoothing out the beer and scaling back some of the grassy notes...

That it is. I should have said "Southern Hemisphere" instead of Australian. Motueka also works really well in a NEIPA.