Hot answers tagged brewing
13
I found How to Brew to be a very helpful book along with The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. I feel like it complimented Papazian's book well, and in some cases was a bit easier to read, or filled in any lingering questions I had. In the end everyone seems to go with Papazian's, but I think How to Brew was an easier read.
10
AFAIK, there are no benefits. They're all basically the same. Brewing sugar is corn sugar and while there may be chemical differences between it and other types of sugar, the end result in your beer will be indistinguishable. Sugars like piloncillo or demarara can add a bit of flavor, but the result of adding corn, cane, beet, or brown sugar are pretty ...
9
Top tier - Sparge Water
Middle tier - Mash Tun
Bottom Tier - Boil Kettle
The main benefit to having the vessels stacked in this manner is that you can transfer water/wort without the use of a siphon or an electric pump, everything can be gravity fed from top to bottom. Three tiers also allow you to easily fly sparge much easier than other setups ...
6
Are you talking about not adding any hops at the beginning of the boil and relying on only late addition hops for bitterness? This is a technique I have read about and tasted a few examples and the results were pretty good. This works well in moderately bitter beers where you want a lot of hop flavor and aroma.
Basically you eliminate the 60 minute ...
5
Kent Place Software produces some useful brewing apps for iPhone and Mac. They also have an iPad version in the works. I've used their Beer Alchemy Mac software for awhile.
BeerAlchemy Touch is their iPhone version. It's a bit pricey at $14.99, but provides wireless syncing between the mac version and the iPhone version, which is really handy.
Brew Math ...
5
It looks like you can boil the avocado, and skim the oil off of the top of the water, I'm not sure of the pectin content in avocado, as this could give your beer a permanent haze, so I would recommend mixing some pectic enzyme in with your "avocado extract" when adding it to your secondary to help get rid of the pectin. I found this article which seems to ...
4
Let me try to answer your questions.
1) Modern home brewers use airlocks to minimize the chance that airborne wild yeast or bacteria will populate the beer and produce undesirable characteristics. A brewer chooses a specific yeast strain for their beer because of the particular properties that that yeast strain has been cultured to impart on the beer. The ...
4
No matter when you add hops, you'll get some bitterness. That amount will decrease the later in the boil you add them. As Chris noted, you can add larger amounts of hops later in the boil (usually at 20 min. or less) to get bittering levels equivalent to the traditional 60 min. bittering addition, but the character of the bitterness will be different.
4
The Brewmasters Bible. I bought this book when I started out about 5 years ago. It was easy to follow then, having never brewed before, and I feel there is still a lot I can learn from the book now.
I don't have any other books to compare this too, but it served as an excellent starting point for me and I still find it to be a good reference.
4
You can certainly make great cider that way, but it's hit or miss. I've made probably about 6-8 batches using natural fermentation and my record is about 50/50 great cider/vinegar. A more reliable method is simply to pitch some yeast into it. Almost any yeast will give good results, but I've made my best ciders with WY4766 cider yeast.
4
I just bottled 5 gallons of cider I made (my first batch last year was excellent, and strong). I've definitely found cider to be easier than beer when it comes to the actual brewing. That said, if you press the cider yourself and/or add in apple picking for 5 gallons worth of cider, you've got a bit of work to do.
The recipe I used was specified by the ...
3
A similar question was asked here on the BN forum. It all boils down (no pun intended) to whether the wheat malt will have enough diastatic power to convert itself.
The answer to that is a little confusing to me so far. The charts at the Home Brewing Wiki here give diastatic power as percentages, but other references I've found use Lintner or ...
3
1) It would be beer. Beer is an alcoholic beverage made from grain, it doesn't have to be made from barley.
2) The most important thing to remember about wheat is that it has no husk. No husk = no filter bed for your grain when you lauter. No filter = stuck mash. It is possible to lauter an all-wheat mash, but it takes a very long time and is tricky. This ...
3
Your best bet is to pitch yeast into it instead of hoping for spontaneous fermentation.
Keep in mind that the sugars in apple juice are completely fermentable. Which means your end result will be a very dry beverage that will taste much like a dry white wine unless you do something to enhance the body. For a 5 gallon batch add 1-2 lbs of DME and a pound or ...
3
I'm a little late to the party, but the best one I've used is iBrewMaster. It's currently available for $7.99 for the iPod/iPhone edition and $10.99 for the iPad edition. Rather than regurgitate all the features, take a look in the iTunes store here and here for more details. Overall, it has worked the best for me in managing the process from start to ...
3
It's possible, but cilantro's flavor relies on several very volatile flavor compounds. If you end up with the wrong ones, you might end up with a soapy beer.
See Harold McGee's article from yesterday's New York Times about the various flavor compounds and how they affect taste.
I would be very careful about this. As a cook, I'm generally very careful with ...
2
Started doing hard ciders (apple, pear, hot pepper, peach, cactus pear, raspberry, pumpkin spice, about 60 gal total to date) last august and have learned a few key things. Using a juicer is just as good as using a traditional cider press. When you use the pressed stuff, you end up having the clarify the hard cider, while juiced apple cider is more clear. ...
1
Dextrose is 100% fermentable, but you need to slightly increase the amount of Dextrose to get the same result as Sugar, meaning for a ferment requiring 6kg of Sugar, you would use slightly more than 6 kilos of Dextrose. I cannot say how much extra because I'm not really sure myself. However in saying that, my first ferment with Dextrose produced a much ...
1
Or do I literally need to drink 10 pints a day over the next 4 days?
Nope! In general, beer will get better with age. Be leisurely, and as long as your sanitation was good, it will be even better in a month or six.
Very generic rules for aging:
Higher alcohol == better aging.
Aromatic hoppy styles == worse aging
So, for example, you could age a ...
1
I am planning to use my arduino to control my brewing process. Eventually also to log fermentation temperatures. I didn't realize an electric hydrometer was possible. I plan to look into it.
Right now I am only controlling my mash heating for my HERMS. Eventually I will be able to monitor temperatures with multiple probes simultaneously, Adding data ...
1
I've not seen any inexpensive density sensors either, which is surprising since they can be made from mass-produced components - a PZT actuator and a quartz tuning fork. The sensor works by producing a vibration and then measuring the resonance in the tuning fork to that vibration. The density of the liquid has a predictable affect on the resonant frequency, ...
1
I brewed a spin-off/inspired of Jamil Z.'s Evil Twin using his 20-10-0 addition schedule and it's still fermenting, but it smeels awesome and the fermenting wort tastes great. The hop aroma is VERY strong, which is fine for my beer, but may not be for yours.
If you chose your hops carefully and added them at 20 minutes only you would get a good bit of ...
1
Well, most of the ones I would suggest are already here (and I did upvote them) - so I'll throw out one that hasn't been mentioned yet:
Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiast's Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home by Sam Calagione (of Dogfish Head, but I didn't need to tell ya that, right? lol)
Some may say this isn't a book for beginners, but I would disagree. It ...
1
Proteins are essential for yeast growth. However, a typical finished beer only has around a half gram of protein per 12 oz. serving - which is pretty minimal, but also pretty much unavoidable.
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/introduction-protein-structure-111819/
Why is it a concern?
1
Brew Pal is an excellent program for storing recipes and doing some calculations for things like IBU and gravity, which is what I use it for. I purchased it the day after I bought my iPod, just because I wanted to support homebrew apps, turns out I love it and use it on every brew day.
It allows easy email export of BeerXML, which makes storing recipes off ...
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