Archives for May 2016

A Better Way to Think of Sanitation

May 27, 2016 by Leave a Comment

DSCN0716There are many ways you can improve at brewing. You can learn new ideas and try new techniques, ingredients, or equipment. You can work on perfecting the things you already do on brewday (or when formulating recipes, serving your beer, etc.). And in one case, simply changing how you think about something may lead you to being a better brewer.

You’ll often hear brewers ask if their beer is infected. (I’ll skip, for now, that it is much better to refer to beer that is soured or spoiled by microorganisms as contaminated than as infected.) There is really only one answer to that question. (OK, there’s two, and one is, “no, but it’s contaminated.”) And that answer is “yes . . . to some degree.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewed For Thought Tagged With: ,

Brewing Liquor For Amber Beers (10–20 SRM)

May 24, 2016 by 7 Comments
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One diagram of beer color, from Wikipedia.

Water chemistry is a topic that many homebrewers wait to tackle until they have been brewing for awhile. For those who don’t deal with chemistry on a regular basis, the learning curve can seem pretty steep. For those brewers, here is a quick guide to generating brewing liquor for amber colored beers (SRM 10–20), starting with distilled water. I’m using the word “amber” here fairly loosely, as 10 SRM is really a dark golden color and 20 SRM is almost into the brown range.

This rough guide can help you treat your brewing liquor, and improve your beer — without having to dig into much of the underlying chemistry.

I will put out three other quick water guides — for brown beers (20–30 SRM), black beers (30–40 SRM), and pale beers (0–10 SRM) — soon. [Read more…]

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Beer Foam (Part 5: Brewing Considerations)

May 20, 2016 by 2 Comments

DSCN2679Most of the time, brewers give comparatively little thought to foam. We brew our beers and foam appears on top of them. There is no single ingredient or procedure that creates foam, it simply emerges when a beer is brewed properly. However, there are things you can do when brewing that affect foam production and stability. It pays to understand these things, especially if your foam isn’t always what it should be. [Read more…]

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The Easy Way to Fly Sparge (Part 2 of 3)

May 13, 2016 by 5 Comments
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You don’t need a sparge arm for this, although you can use one if you have it.

Fly sparging can be made less complicated, and less wasteful of water, than the way it is presented by some homebrew books, magazines, or websites. This is a description of “my” way of continuous sparging. It’s “my way” in the sense that this is how I do it, not that I was the first or only person to consider it. I call it pulsed sparging, but some commercial breweries do this as their method of continuous sparging and don’t have a special name for it. [Read more…]

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Beer Foam (4: Foam Negative Elements)

May 11, 2016 by Leave a Comment

DSCN2673Just as there are elements that contribute to the formation and stability of beer foam, there are also elements that accelerate the rate at which foam collapses. Brewers tend to think of these foam negative elements as something to be avoided. If they are in excess, they are — of course — undesirable. However, if beer contained no foam negative elements, foam would continue to form as the beer released carbon dioxide bubbles. And if this foam were not collapsable, it would soon be an impediment to drinking the beer. As such, I would argue that foam negative elements are just as important to foam as foam negative elements, when present in the right quantities. [Read more…]

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