The right amount of minerals in your brewing water will help your yeast ferment beer… … but more is not always better… Too much and you can ruin your fermentation before it even starts… 0.1 to 0.2 ppm of zinc in your water nourishes your enzymes and yeast… push 1 ppm of Zinc and it becomes TOXIC ...…
NEVER Stop Learning! Everytime I brew beer I learn something new… I improve on what I already know, but I learn something new… I just did a review of my Berliner Weisse and I have to tell you I was a bit concerned for a while… I kept wondering how fermentation was going to go if I ...…
After I drank my first IPA, I started to ask everyone and anyone I knew, how was it that a brewer could infuse so much flavor and aroma into a beer… Soon enough a technique stood out… dry hopping… Not knowing any better, I began to wonder, why aren’t all beers dry-hopped? I began to fantasize that ...…
Should you ferment your beer in a glass carboy or plastic bucket? You could answer this question by going over the pros and cons of these two… … carboys can be dangerous if they break, plastic buckets will develop scratches and harvest bacteria over time, etc. … but I believe there is something else to consider that’s ...…
Extract brewing is easy and if you take advantage of it’s simplicity you can really use it to your advantage to master fermentation… Actually, I strongly suggest you use extract brewing to master fermentation before moving up to all grain… and if budget is an issue, I would strongly suggest you invest in fermentation equipment (temperature ...…
Jiro Ono is an 85 year old itamae (sushi chef), owner of the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a three-star Michelin Guide rating. A sushi master, who despite having an entire life devoted to making sushi, is still working at perfecting his craft… In other words, he’s still learning… Mr. X is an advanced ...…
I must admit that once I made the switch to all grain brewing I did not want to go back to extract brewing… that being said, there are a lot of things I learned about brewing while extract brewing that has helped me tremendously now that I brew all grain… One of the things I got ...…
When a new brewer goes on to pitch yeast on their first batch, there’s a universal feeling that the beer might not ferment… That the beer might be ruined… … but when the beer starts fermenting, boy does that make you do the happy dance and make you wait anxiously for that first sip… Truly a miracle… Possibly the ...…
Brewing beer is about getting sugar from grains… when we mash grains we convert the starch into sugar and we extract that sugar… that’s why brewers who use DME or LME are extract brewers… they don’t mash, they just work with the extracted sugar… The question how much sugar do you get from your grains is ...…
Brewer’s who say decoction mashing doesn’t make a difference don’t understand decoction mashing… Decoction mashing is not just a process used for undermodified malts… it does actually produce different flavors than traditional infusion mashing… Saying that decoction mashing is no longer needed now that we have well modified malt is like saying steel cut oatmeal is not ...…
One of the more common problems brewers face is finding a good recipe to brew, but being the wrong version… it can be annoying as an extract brewer to find a good recipe, but have only the all-grain version… or for an all-grain brewer to find only the extract version of a recipe. So in today’s ...…
Brewing mistakes are more easily detected in the works of others… Brewers are fast at pointing out what others are doing wrong, but never stop to look at their own brewing practices and figure out what THEY themselves are doing wrong… Renaissance genius Leonardo Da Vinci looked at his paintings through a mirror so the reverse image ...…
Individual knowledge grows linear. Group knowledge grows exponential. That is the power of a mastermind group… … and it’s one reason why I encourage anyone interested in learning more about home brewing to seek out a home brew club and meet other brewers… My advantage is that I get tons of emails every week and I get to ...…
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a brewer say “burn the BJCP guidelines”… The way I see it, the guidelines are like sheet music… you use them to learn the skill, but when you become good at it, you let your mind take over… You don’t see a rock star bust out sheet music while performing ...…
Sometimes in order to find what you’re looking for you have to go outside your world… or as they say, think outside the box… I’m often asked if decoction mashing is better than infusion mashing? … and the problem is that the word ‘better’ is not defined… Better for flavor? better for breaking down starches and dextrins? breaking ...…
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