A Surefire Way to Improve Your Beers . . . And Why You Will Ignore This Advice

I once met a fellow brewer who had built his own RIMS system. He had two temperature probes in his mash vessel and had fiddled with the engineering of the heating loop and wort return. He had also tweaked his process, varying how the wort was heated, his pump speed, etc., and finally arrived at a point that he was proud of. He could hold his mash temperatures steady, within only 0.5 °F (~0.25 °C) over time or between different places in the mash (except for inside the heating loop, obviously). He could program virtually any step mash into his controller and the rig would carry it out. He was very proud of his accomplishment (as he should have been) and he offered me one of his beers. It was contaminated. [Read more…]

Five Habits of Successful Brewers

gold-number-5Brewing decent, drinkable beer is fairly easy. Brewing the highest quality beer is somewhat more difficult. Previously, I’ve posted a variety of articles with specific suggestions on how to brew the best quality beer at home. Today I’m going to look at a more nebulous aspect of becoming a successful brewer — your mindset.

The successful brewers I’ve met — both homebrewers and commercial brewers — are a diverse lot. However, they share a set of traits related to how they view their beer and their brewing skills. Hopefully, I can do this without venturing too far into phoney-baloney “motivational poster” territory. Personally, I think the “de-motivational posters” are much funnier. So with that in mind, here are the five habits of successful brewers.

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