The Little Things: What Separates the Best from the Rest
What’s your secret?”
It’s a question we get asked all the time and even more often since winning the National Homebrew Competition’s Ninkasi Award in 2017. But even before that, when we were consistently medaling at our local homebrew competitions in Texas, people would insist there must be some secret knowledge or ingredient we possess to keep winning. Sometimes we mess with people and say we only brew with holy water or source rare malt from the deepest forests of Madagascar.
But for BYO readers, here it is, the true secret to brewing beer worthy of winning competitions. Are you ready for it?
There is no secret! That’s right, despite what you may be thinking, there is no one big secret that separates the average homebrewer from the person that always wins your local competition or is your area’s regional homebrewer of the year.
So how do they keep winning every time in a blind taste test, in different competitions, over multiple categories? The difference is in all “the little things” that he or she does that, when added up, make a big difference in the quality and consistency of their beer.
So, we thought it would be a good idea to level the playing field a bit and write down the most important little things we (and many respected homebrewers who we know) do to make consistent high-quality beers that are of an award-worthy quality. (Note that the purpose of this article is to help you brew beer good enough to win — not necessarily on how to win at competition, which often takes into account a number of other factors we will just touch on at the end of this story). The great thing about this list is that most of these points you’ve probably already heard before or even read about in this magazine. You don’t have to completely change your brewing process. Simply start implementing a few of these tips and processes to taste real results in your next batch. One last note of emphasis before we dive in; these are our tips that we employ, but by no means is there just one way to brew great beer.
Ingredients
Water
If there is one idea we could remove from the (all-grain) brewing world, even on a professional scale, it’s “if your water is good enough to drink, it’s good enough to make great beer.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. All the great beer styles of the world you’ve come to know and love started in one way or another because of the content of their water. Pilsners were invented in the modern-day Czech Republic because of the soft water profile available in that area. Same goes with stouts from Ireland, altbiers from Germany, and even our beloved IPAs in England.
Water has changed, and we drink locally-sourced, filtered water that comes from a processing plant and not straight out of the stream. But there are all sorts of extra minerals and chemicals that are added to the process that aren’t in the water naturally. Maybe you’ve noticed that for some unknown reason you make really solid porters, but your pale ales are lacking that essential hop punch; it might just be because of your water.
Furthermore, adjusting our water is the single most dramatic improvement we’ve made to the quality and consistency of our beer. The mineral content of your water affects the pH of your mash, which ultimately determines mash efficiency. Water also contributes to the overall taste of the finished product. It can make beers sharp and dry for hoppy flavors or smooth and round for malty ones.
The good news is you don’t need to memorize every word in John Palmer’s Water book just yet (although that is a great source of info). Here is a simple approach that doesn’t require much additional knowledge to get started:
1. Get your water tested to know what mineral content you have in your local supply or, like us, just buy or make your own reverse osmosis (RO) water.
2. Download a free copy of Bru’n Water by Martin Brungard.
3. Input your starting water profile, and then based on your recipe, select the color profile that matches your SRM and select the desired finish in the beer (full, balanced, or dry).
4. Calculate the minerals needed to match that profile. To start, try using only a few minerals like calcium chloride, gypsum, epsom salt, and baking soda to match the profile. Avoid the use of chalk as it doesn’t dissolve well in the typical homebrewer’s process.
As a general rule of thumb we typically don’t match a given city’s water supply when making a regional style (ie. Munich or Burton) as you really don’t know what those breweries are doing with the water once they get ready to brew. Once you get past the basics you can try using different water recipes to achieve those specific beer styles like Pilsners and dark milds. Give it a try — we think you’ll be amazed by the results.
Malt
Malt choice is obviously an integral part of any recipe, but don’t take for granted the source of your ingredients. Not all base grains are the same, even of the same type. Despite what some may tell you, there can be a big difference between maltsters. We have found that Rahr 2-row has the flavor profile we want in our beers as well as Weyermann when Pilsner malt is necessary, although others’ preferences may differ.
We see a lot of homebrewers simply go to the store and ask for 2-row. If you do nothing else, figure out which one you prefer to use and stick with that maltster so that when you try to make changes to your recipe you’re not attempting to hit a moving target. The same goes for specialty grains. If the first time you make a recipe you use Briess Caramel Malt 40L, make sure you use that again when rebrewing — it makes a difference.
Hops
When it comes to quality control, hops are probably the most common ingredient homebrewers fail to understand or control. Unlike malt, which has a very long-term shelf life, and yeast, which has the manufactured date right on the package, hops degrade quickly if not properly stored, and typically there is no date on the package at the homebrew shop. Most brewers simply grab an ounce of Mosaic® as needed and never think twice.
Think about this: John Mallett from Bell’s Brewery spends 3–4 weeks every year securing the right Centennial hops from hop farms to make Two Hearted Ale. He, and many other brewers, go and smell each crop yearly. Hops are plants, and as such they don’t taste the same every harvest, or even from one growing site to another.
For this reason, we buy hops in bulk from Yakima Valley Hops and Hops Direct. Here we know the crop year and can buy the same hops from the same farm if we find a crop we like. As a bonus, hops by the pound are typically priced 60–70% less than buying them by the ounce. You just need to be able to store them properly, and for that we use a vacuum sealer and deep freeze.
Yeast
Yeast is an area most homebrewers have a good deal of knowledge about but here is what we typically do for our batches. We always use liquid yeast. We find the variety of styles and quality of the finished beer superior to dry yeast, at least for now. Hopefully one day dry yeast will overcome liquid yeast as the shelf life and viability is much better, but for now, we stick to liquid yeast.
When buying from the store, make sure to choose a yeast that is as fresh as possible. For example, given a choice between Wyeast 1056 (American Ale) or White Labs WLP001 (California Ale), choose the fresher pack. Sometimes there are no substitutes, like with Wyeast 3499 (Belgian Wit) or White Labs WLP833 (German Bock), but most of the time you can find a comparable substitute for most strains.
Also, you don’t always need to make starters if you can buy the yeast fresh and double pitch, or if the gravity of the beer is low enough. We have had multiple beers that have placed and even won gold at the National Homebrew Competition (NHC) that were made without a starter. It is better to pitch two packets of yeast versus making a starter in too short of time (not having enough time for proper growth and decanting the spent liquid.) However, sometimes starters are unavoidable, like on high-gravity and lager beers.
Recipe Formulation
Drink BEFORE You Think
Before we ever start to design a recipe we have a very specific beer and flavor profile in mind. The best brewers can think up a specific beer and make a recipe just like a great chef. Good news, the only way we know to achieve this is by drinking more beer! You must train your palate to a point where you can taste a beer and analyze its complex and subtle flavors.
A good starting point is to drink the beers listed for a given Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) style before creating a recipe. For example, before we make a Trappist dubbel we will go to great lengths to drink side-by-side as many of the commercial BJCP-listed dubbels as we can get our hands on. When you try these beers together you notice the different nuances that really make a style, and also what characteristics set certain examples apart from others.
Start with a Proven Recipe and Think in Percentages
Now that you have tasted a number of examples and narrowed down the beer you are trying to create, try to find a recipe that closely matches the beer or flavor you are trying to emulate — a great place to start is in the archives of BYO or another reliable resource. Often the information in these recipes comes from the commercial brewers themselves trying to help homebrewers. For example, if you are trying to make a cream ale similar to New Glarus Brewing Co.’s Spotted Cow, start by making a clone recipe or combine the common ingredients in the different recipes you find. If you’re just trying to make a style, try a kit from your homebrew shop or choose a recipe from a reliable source.
When putting together the recipe for your equipment, think in percentages. Percentages make things a lot easier once you get better at recipe formulation. We hear many homebrewers talk about their recipes in pounds, but a pound of crystal 40 is relative to equipment and gravity, while percentages are constant.
Judge Your Beer and Rebrew
By this point you’ve made your beer and it turned out pretty good because you started with a solid or proven recipe. Here is the part we find most homebrewers skip — go back to the beginning. Drink your beer together with the beers you first tried when making the recipe decisions or against the beer you are trying to clone. How does it compare? Don’t limit yourself with phrases like, “well, I am a homebrewer, and this is commercial beer, how could they possibly compare?” That’s nonsense! Homebrewers have more flexibility and less constraints than the limits commercial brewers must stay within.
If you make a West Coast IPA, pour your favorite example and yours in a couple of glasses and drink them side-by-side. How are they different and what would you change? Maybe the difference is a small recipe tweak or maybe it’s process-related. Now adjust your original recipe accordingly and rebrew it. Make sure to do this within a short enough period of time so that you can remember how the original recipe tasted. Better yet, have both the original and rebrew at the same time to see how the changes made a difference on the outcome (remembering that the age of each may have some impact, especially for hoppy beers). Now just keep repeating this process and don’t stop until you’re happy with the result.
Avoid the “Ugly Baby”
Homebrewers love making beer and after they have made a few good batches we find many brewers stop drinking their own beer critically. We’ve all been there; you’re at a party or homebrew club meeting and someone hands you a Czech Pilsner and it’s terrible. I mean scrub your tongue bad. There are only two reasons this happens — either they don’t know what a clean example of the style tastes like or they have fallen victim to ugly beer syndrome — a beer so bad, so ugly, that only its brewer could love it. To avoid this, have as many people try your beer as possible and ask for honest feedback, enter competitions, or brew with a partner that will be honest about the results. The best brewers never stop drinking critically.
Repeatability in Your Brewing Process
This is probably the number one difference between the top brewers and the rest. The ability to make a great beer and then being able to remake the same beer consistently is the hardest part of brewing beer. Here are some steps to help lock down your process:
Ingredients
We touched on this earlier, but when trying to brew the exact same recipe over again, make sure the ingredients you use are consistent. Use the same water, use the same base malts, use the same hops, and buy the same and freshest yeasts. Don’t take for granted anything when selecting ingredients. If you’re buying anything in bulk, be sure to store them in optimal conditions and don’t be afraid to throw them out if they get too old.
Efficiency
Efficiency is a rabbit hole for many brewers, and admittedly was the part we struggled with the most when going from making average beer to winning medals. One myth to dispel is that the efficiency of your homebrew needs to be high; specifically mash efficiency. The only thing that matters when referring to efficiency on a homebrew scale is hitting the same numbers. It doesn’t matter if your efficiency is 60% or 90% as long as you are able to repeat it.
Efficiency throughout the brewing process does have a huge effect on the overall flavor of the beer. If the first time you made that award-winning pale ale you started with a pre-boil gravity of 1.038 and on the rebrew your number was 1.032 then the beer and subsequent hop-to-malt balance will be different.
We also find many brewers confused about the terminology. Mash efficiency is the amount of sugar you net from a given amount of grains in your mash. Brew house efficiency is the amount of finished beer you net from the entire brewing process. So, if you use BeerSmith, the number you input is brewhouse efficiency and contrarily mash efficiency is only a piece of that equation.
Mash Efficiency
Mash efficiency is the larger of the factors to focus on throughout the process. We implement a few simple steps to control the variables:
1. Mill your own grain. Many brewers have their local homebrew shop mill their grains and don’t even think about the quality of the crush they are getting. Milling affects the ability to lauter and the yield from the grist. If your shop adjusts their mill or if you use multiple shops and online retailers, the milling will be different. Additionally, once the grain is milled the shelf life greatly diminishes. A fresher crush is always better.
2. Build water for your mash. We mentioned this earlier in depth, but your water recipe ensures you hit proper mash pH every time. For example, beers with roasted specialty grains can have a lower mash pH if not adjusted correctly, which will result in less sugar extraction.
3. Batch sparge or no sparge. There is nothing wrong with fly sparging and it is more efficient than batch sparging, but there are more variables. The speed of your lauter and pH of runnings all affect efficiency. So, we use batch sparging and even no sparge frequently. We have found this makes hitting our pre-boil number much more consistent.
4. Control the mash temperature precisely. We have both a heat exchange recirculating mash system (HERMS) and recirculating immersion mash system (RIMS) to control the strike and mash temperatures. Both setups are beyond the basic homebrew setups and can get pricey fast. If you
must use a cooler or pot, be sure to preheat it with hot water before mashing in and avoid opening the top throughout the process. You might even want to go ahead and wrap the outside with a blanket or insulating material. Try to keep the temperature within 1–2 °F (1 °C) of your target number. The HERMS and RIMS systems also continually recirculate the grain bed throughout the mash, which gives you crystal clean wort and an even mash.
Measurements and Notes
It is very important that everything you do during brew day is repeatable. So get a good digital scale for your grains, not the one you use in the bathroom. For hops, use a smaller, more accurate scale. You can get a blade scale that is accurate to the 100th decimal place inexpensively and they last for years.
Also, take gravity measurements throughout brew day. Make sure to measure your pre- and post-boil gravity numbers. It might be time to retire that $4 hydrometer that came with your starter kit and get a temperature-adjusting refractometer or even a digital version.
Take note of and write down anything that is different on brew day. You might just be making the best beer you’ve ever brewed, and it would be a shame if you cannot remember exactly what you did to make it.
Boil-Off
One of the most challenging aspects of brewing is controlling the boil-off or evaporation rate. Especially when you are making beer outside. Where we live in Texas the seasons change daily. Humidity and temperature both greatly affect the numbers. So don’t boil as hard if brewing on a cold dry day vs. a hot humid day. If things are variable, we have a simple spreadsheet we use to chart the gravity from the pre- to post-boil numbers. Using this tool, we will check the gravity half way through the boil to see if we need to boil harder or softer the last half.
Drinking on Brew Day
There is an unsettling rumor floating around out there that you shouldn’t drink on brew day. Blasphemy! It is our firm belief that you must drink beer to make beer (aka: A liquid offering to Ninkasi). However, do everything that is critical to the brew process before hitting the sauce. Typically this means we measure all ingredients for the day and sanitize all of our post-boil equipment before cracking a bottle open.
Avoiding Off-Flavors
Infected beers or ones with off-flavors seem to derail many new brewers and even a few veterans. Here are some of the little things we do to help avoid the dreaded dumper:
Cleaning
Unfortunately, a large part of the brewing process is cleaning equipment. The best brewers learn to love cleaning and keeping everything organized throughout the process. The messy brewer seldom makes better beer than his cleaner counterparts. Take pride in keeping things well organized and squeaky clean.
Sanitizing
Nothing is worse than infected beer and new brewers seem to really struggle with sanitation. There are three easy steps we follow:
1. Clean everything to sight before sanitizing.
2. Sanitize items that don’t touch the boil for at least 15 minutes. Use the boil to sanitize anything that will touch the wort post-boil if possible. This includes spoons, tubing, pumps, and chillers.
3. Use a no-rinse sanitizer. We have been using Star San for years and never have infected beer.
Longer Boils
We got this tip from Mike “Tasty” McDole at Homebrew Con a few years back. Boil all your beers for 90 minutes or longer. Every batch for us has an uncovered 90-minute boil. It eliminates all Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS). It also breaks up the brew day a bit, allowing us time to clean the mash tun, have a few beers, or check those ribs on the smoker before the hops start going in the boil.
Yeast Health and Oxygen
We mentioned earlier that it isn’t always necessary to make a starter, but it is always necessary to pitch the proper amount of yeast. We typically use Brewer’s Friend Yeast Pitch Rate and Starter Calculator (www.brewersfriend.com/yeast-pitch-rate-and-starter-calculator/) or Mr. Malty (www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html) for this calculation.
In addition to the right amount of yeast, you need the right amount of oxygen. We use pure oxygen and a stone to infuse our wort with the proper amount. Typically this is one minute of pure oxygen at 1-liter per minute for normal gravity ales. Higher gravity beers require more oxygen. If this equipment is not in your process then you need to agitate the wort aggressively before pitching. This means shaking the carboy as hard as possible for a minute or two. We can’t understate the importance oxygen plays in yeast health and avoiding off-flavors.
Also, try using a yeast nutrient if you didn’t make a starter using nutrients already. Wyeast has a great nutrient blend that we add in the last 15 minutes of the boil along with whirfloc tablets for fining.
Controlling Fermentation
We cannot stress enough the importance of temperature control during fermentation. Typically, brewers do this with a dedicated fridge and temperature controller, but you can use other methods. Whatever you do, make sure that you keep your fermenting beer at a temperature within the yeast’s suggested temperature range to avoid unwanted esters and phenols.
Moreover, we almost always adjust the temperature of our beers during fermentation. Most yeasts benefit from a lower pitching temperature and slight temperature increase at the end of fermentation to help clean up any unwanted byproducts. Some styles also require temperature fluctuation during fermentation for proper flavor, like Belgian ales.
Have Fun and Brew Often
All these little tips and tricks aside, the best brewers love making beer and do it often. Tinkering with recipes, ingredients, equipment, and processes are what we love doing the most. Just like anything else, the more you do something the better you get at it.
Try to brew a few times a month even if it means throwing a little get together to get rid of some beer. The best part about homebrewing is sharing it with others. So get out there, have fun, and brew on!
Brewing for Competitions
OK, we said this story was going to be about brewing award-
winning quality beer, but here is some advice to actually win awards once you’ve brewed that deserving beer.
Make a Competition Brewing Schedule
If you’re serious about medaling at a competition you need to brew for that specific event so that each beer is at its optimal flavor when being judged. Don’t expect your 3-month-old IPA to medal over the same beer that is made fresh. This can often mean brewing a bunch of beers in a relatively short period of time as many ales are in their prime 3–4 weeks after fermentation.
To help with this, make a few bigger beers that age well like imperial stouts or dark Belgian ales that have a longer shelf life. We will typically make a few of these batches a year and bottle most of the keg just for entering in competitions.
Power in Numbers
This is one of the best kept secrets of award-winning brewers; power is in the number of entries you submit. Depending on the quality and size of the competition, even the best brewmaster will only place with around a third of their entries. So if you see a good brewer win 3 or 4 medals, he or she probably entered 10 or more beers unless it is a smaller competition or they got lucky.
This is mostly because of the variables within a competition flight. Quality of the judging and order in the flight are massively important. Maybe you had a perfectly balanced IPA that was judged right after a 100 IBU double dry hopped competitor making your beer seem too malty. Or maybe the beer in front of yours got infected during bottling and the judges did not fully cleanse their palate and overlooked your entry.
We try to only enter larger competitions. Usually the following holds true: The larger or more well-known the competition, the better the judging will be. This means the better brewer will usually find it easier to place at a larger competition than the smaller one. This is because the better judges can usually pick out the best beer no matter the placement or variables within the flight (there are exceptions, of course, as there are some smaller competitions in which the quality of judges are very high).
Go Big with Flavors
As a general rule, beers on the higher end of a style profile do better than the subtler examples. For instance, IPAs with higher hop flavor or witbiers with bolder spices tend to place more often. If you’re trying to make a dark mild, shoot for a really light porter; or for a pale ale make a small IPA. At the end of the day you are trying to separate your beer from the competition and big flavors usually do the trick.
Along this line, it is important to enter a beer in the category where it fits best, not where you intended it to enter. Let’s say you made a brown ale and it came out lacking the hop punch you were going for. Maybe that beer will do better in the amber ale category where it is a little big for the style. Better yet, enter the same beer in both categories.
An Element of Luck
Like most things, there is also an element of luck involved in taking home top honors at competitions. It could be the beer was judged inaccurately, or maybe it was competing against a perfect example. That’s all part of the deal when entering competitions. The best you can do is brew the best beer you are able to and then cross your fingers.