Practical info for the smarter drinker
Not into beer but still want to ferment something? There are other beverages you can make at home – wine, fruit wine, mead (honey wine), cider, and perry (like cider but made from pears). If you want to go non-alcoholic you can make your own soda or root beer. Amongst the fermented beverages beer is …
Books How to Brew by Jon Palmer: The modern textbook on brewing, written both as a guide for beginners and a reference for experts. Palmer is an engineer so he doesn’t scrimp on the details, which is good for some but may be overwhelming for others. If you think you’re in the latter group, start …
This is the second decision you’ll face as a homebrewer – how to package your beer? On the surface it looks like bottling takes more time and effort compared to kegging, but there’s more to it than that. I have always bottled my beer. Kegging is certainly the quicker option for packaging your beer. Bottling …
The beer didn’t turn out the way you expected? Brewing beer above all is a process, and the process can impact the final beer product as much as the ingredients. Having a consistent and controlled process will help reign in variability in the homebrew. Then you can concentrate on improving your beer, without having to …
This is the first decision you’ll make as a homebrewer. These are the two basic methods of making beer at home – either use malt extract or malted barley (all-grain). Here’s a good analogy comparing the two methods: Say you want to make spaghetti, you have two options for pasta sauce: Buy pre-made sauce in …