Beer — Page 5

Brewing Liquor For Dark Beers (30–40 SRM)

June 1, 2016 by Chris Colby 5 Comments

For brewers who want to start treating their water appropriately, but don’t want to wade through the requisite chemistry, here’s the second in my series of simple water guides. Today’s post is a quick guide to generating brewing liquor for dark beers, starting with distilled water as the base. I’ll discuss beers ranging in color from 30 to 40 SRM — porters, stouts, and the like.

I will post the remaining two water guides — for brown beers (20–30 SRM) and pale beers (0–10 SRM) — soon. I’ve skipped to dark beers because of an interesting quirk to making brewing liquor for dark beers. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Ingredients Tagged With: brewing liquor, carbonates, dark ales, dark lagers

A Better Way to Think of Sanitation

May 27, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

There 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: cleaning, sanitation

Brewing Liquor For Amber Beers (10–20 SRM)

May 24, 2016 by Chris Colby 7 Comments

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…]

Filed Under: Brewing Ingredients Tagged With: amber ales, amber beers, brewing liquor, calcium

Beer Foam (Part 5: Brewing Considerations)

May 20, 2016 by Chris Colby 2 Comments

Most 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…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: beer foam, foam, iso alpha acids, LTP1, pitching rate, protein z

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

May 13, 2016 by Chris Colby 5 Comments

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…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: continuous sparging, fly sparging, pulsed sparging

The Easy Way to Fly Sparge (Part 1 of 3)

April 29, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

A sparge arm

When I started brewing, continuous sparging (sometimes called fly sparging) was the only method for sparging a grain bed described on the homebrewing literature. Later, some homebrewers adopted batch sparging as their method of choice, and still later some homebrewers started using brew-in-a-bag methods.

A variety of criticisms have been lodged against fly sparging. I have an easy method of fly sparging that answers some of these criticisms — and the remaining ones are minor, in my opinion. (I’m convinced fly sparging is the best of the homebrew lautering methods, and I’ll explain why in a separate article. But for today, here’s the start of a “how to” article.) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: continuous sparging, fly sparging, pulsed sparging

NHC Round One Judging (2016, Austin)

April 5, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

Judging Pilsners with Corey Martin.

On Friday and Saturday of last week, the Austin NHC site held its first round judging. I, along with many other Austin ZEALOTS and other Austin area homebrewers, descended upon 4th Tap Brewing and judged over 700 beers, finishing the task a day ahead of schedule.

Every year I judge, I try to think of the bigger picture afterwards and see if I can identify any trends or find anything worth writing about from the experience. Then I write about it anyway.

Judging at a large competition, you get to sample a lot of beers. This year, I judged 6 flights over the two days, ranging from 5 to 12 beers in a flight, with 7 or 8 being the median number (IIRC). Plus, there’s always the “holy crap, you have got to try this” moments when another judge finds a particularly spectacular beer and shares it. And of course, there’s the groans when judges encounter a real stinker. So, each judge gets to sample a fair amount of beer and gets some idea of what the other judges are encountering. On the other hand, one judge’s experience can’t be taken as a statistically valid sample, so these are just my observations. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewed For Thought, Uncategorized

Beer Foam (Part 3: Foam Positive Elements)

March 31, 2016 by Chris Colby 2 Comments

Now that we have an idea about what foam is and how it forms in general, let’s look at some of the specifics of beer foam. A great place to start would be to analyze beer foam to see what it is composed of, and this is something brewing scientists did long ago. They skimmed beer foam, collapsed all the bubbles until it was a liquid again, and determined and ran tests to determine its composition. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewed For Thought Tagged With: foam, foam posiitive elements, lipid transfer protein 1, LTP1, protein z

Getting Your Beer Critiqued (II)

March 30, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

Looks like beer to me.

There are ways to to get a helpful critique of your beer, but — as with anything in life — what you get out of the process depends on what you put it in. In addition, being able to accept criticism is a skill some brewers need to learn.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewed For Thought Tagged With: beer critiqued, constructive criticism

Beer Foam (Part 2: Collapse)

March 30, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

Foam forms in a carbonated beverage when bubbles rising through the liquid begin stacking up on the surface. After awhile, however, the foam will begin to recede. There are three main processes involved in foam collapse.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewed For Thought Tagged With: foam, foam collapse