homebrew

". . . looked over the wall and peeped my neighbor's sick new brewery. Bro, he said he can turn water into beer!"

Generally it’s nice to brew with predictable ingredients in controlled conditions. You purchase your ingredients, follow your process, pitch your yeast, and leave your beer in a temperature stable environment. After some time the yeast consumes all the sugars and leaves behind its own flavor...

If you love barrel aged beer like I do, you have probably thought about brewing a big beer and adding those wonderful barrel flavors to your beer. Aging your beer on wood will add some complexity to your beer and introduce some great new flavors. Aging in a barrel is the most recognized way to...

It wasn’t that long ago that if you had offered homebrewers and craft beer drinkers a low-impact, low-alcohol beer with approachable flavor, they would have scoffed. Real beer was meant to be big, bold, adventurous, and preferably have a sizable ABV (Alcohol by Volume). Oh, how times have...

Being a fan of hoppy beers, I’ve tasted a lot of different expressions of IPA, IIPA, Session IPA, and in it sboom, the specialty IPA’s like White IPA, Red IPA, Rye IPA and, one of my favorites of that list, Black IPA or Cascadian Dark Ale. This style, according to the BJCP Guidelines, was...

One of the beers that made me enter the hobby of brewing was a nice and fluffy Paulaner hefe-eeissbier. It was the first hefeweizen I tasted and I fell in love instantly with the style: phenolic, estery, wheaty, refreshing, bubbly… simply delicious. Since then I tried to brew some examples of...

We’re in the depths of winter and folks might erroneously assume that fresh wine making produce was incontrovertibly thin on the ground. You’re invited to think again. So, with the wine cellar in likely need of substantive input, where does that leave us with several idle months ahead before the...

Beer is one of those beverages that has an important trademark: it is bubbly, effervescent and bright. CO2 is imparted by beer conditioning (by adding priming sugar) or by forcing CO2 into a keg, this element has a huge impact in our favorite brew, and can give very specific characteristics just...

The original London Porter was a smoked beer which utilized exclusively British Brown malt, smoked over Hornbeam. There was until fairly recently a general consensus that it was in its original form a mixture of a ‘mild’ beer (actually a ‘fresh’ or ‘green’ beer) and a ‘stale’ (or mature beer...

The term “lager”, like many brewing terms, comes from our German Brewing Brethren. It means “storeroom” or “warehouse”. They key reason behind the term is that lager, unlike ale, has a longer fermentation time which leads to a “cleaner” tasting beer than ales. Because the beer is so “clean” they...

Pleased with the HLT/heat exchanger project shown in a previous article, my friend Rick asked me to help him with his MLT build. We used the same techniques and many of the same components for this phase of his three vessel brewing system. This was the simplest kettle of the project, requiring...

Bottling day brings you even closer to your brewing goal of having your very own handcrafted beer to enjoy and share. Bottling can either be a pain or painless. Learning through the pain process I have a few ideas to share so your brewing day experience will be something to enjoy. What you will...

“If you’ve ever wanted to learn to brew beer from an expert, look no further. Award-winning homebrewer Chris Colby of Beer & Wine Journal offers recipes for every major style of beer to teach novice, intermediate and advanced brewers more about the craft and science of brewing. From classic...

We find ourselves in a golden era of beer. There are more breweries open in the United States than ever before, with more and more opening every day. Countless styles and amazing quality are at our fingertips, and tips of our tongues, in nearly every city in the country. As homebrewers, this...

Unless you were fortunate enough to have an experienced brewer bring you into the world of home brewing, odds are your first batch was on a very basic setup. For me it was a partial extract batch brewed in a borrowed stockpot, on the gas stove-top of my old college house. A simple yet effective...

Gruit…what is it? Well for those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it represents an entire forgotten past of brewing. For thousands of years humans have been brewing with whatever they could get their hands on. Before the 14th-16th century that included an extremely wide variety of...

Summer, the season of backyard barbecues and beer. Many people have their “go-to” summer beer, but with the rich history of summer beers and the plethora of options to choose from today, it can be a great time to try something new. It’s only fair to start off an article on summer beers with...

What is a Pseudo Lager? For the purposes of this article it will refer to the creation of a lager-like beer with greater flexibility by using an ale yeast. Defining a Pseudo Lager beyond this can get tricky; technically ‘lager’ simply refers to an extended aging of the beer at cooler...

So often we’ve tasted beers that have been over powered by the one ingredient that ends up giving it the hollow single identity so advertised on the label. Whether it is a label illustrating a personified ninja blackberry performing a front snap kick to a pint glass, or strawberry that has been...

The obvious answer, of course... With a little holiday gift money in my pocket and a few beginner questions answered, I energetically jumped into the wide world of homebrewing earlier this year. In the dozen or so extract batches I've made since, I've found the transformation amazing in my...