Making a yeast starter is a great way to ensure your beer fermentation is fast and efficient. For most new home brewers, fermentation is begun by sprinkling a dry yeast like US-05 or US-04 on top of the beer in the fermentation bucket. This method is tried and true! Most new brewers are making […]
Archive | Homebrewing
Most Common Yeast Strains
We are in a great time in homebrewing history where there are a large range of yeast strains available to us all. For the longest time there wasn’t much more available than a standard dry yeast strain that came with extract beer kits. Times have definitely changed though and there is a large supply […]
The differences between home brewing and commercial brewing
Nothing is better than brewing a great beer in your very own house or apartment. There is a lot of pride that comes along with the hobby as there is nothing better than your friend’s astonishment and praise that “YOU MADE THIS BEER”. Often after the first great batch of homebrew, many people in […]
Overview of specialty malts used in homebrewing
For a large majority of North America, the concept of specialty malts is a foreign concept. Most production made styles of beer are essentially 2-row malt barley with a handful of adjuncts to change the flavor. Mainstream beer is basically a base malt. When homebrewers switch to more advanced extract or all grain brewing, […]
Overview of base beer malts used in homebrewing
There are possibly hundreds of different styles of beer a homebrewer could choose from and possibly endless variations in recipes. One thing that all beers have in common though is that they are all created using a base malt. When we are talking about the base malt of a specific beer, we are literally […]
What is the best temperature to ferment homebrew?
Through the entire brewing process, there is one specific point where your wort actually becomes beer. That specific process is fermentation. Prior to this step your beer is still wort (pronounced wert) and one key to a successful fermentation is the temperature of the wort. To understand why the beer fermentation temperature is key to […]
Brewing from malt extract
At some point in the home brewing hobby, everyone makes a simple batch of extract beer. Often the passion for home brewing starts as simply as a father’s day present the form of an extract beer kit. I imagine that very few new brewers have started by going straight to all grain. Extract brewing […]
What Yeast does in the brewing process?
For most home brewers, selecting a recipe and ingredients is the most exciting part of the brewing process with the drinking part of the process being the reward. Although I do love the drinking part of the process, one of my favourite parts of brewing is still the fermentation of beer. What the yeast does […]
What is Irish Moss?
I think that most people will agree that there truly isn’t anything better than a sparkling clear glass of ice cold beer on a hot day. While the quality of some of the mass produced beers there may be called into question, one thing big breweries do well is presenting a brew that is crystal […]
How to read a homebrew beer recipe
There is a point in every homebrewers career when we realise that using the pre-hopped cans of malt extract just isn’t delivering the kind of beer that we are after. The taste is not quite there and the appreciation of our beers just doesn’t quite seem to match the amount of effort that goes into […]