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September 2023 issue of Brew Your Own magazine. Cover Story: Expand Your Mashing Skills; mash thickness; and decoction, step, and parti-gyle mashing.
Your liquor-to-grist ratio impacts mash enzyme stability, wort fermentability, first wort gravity and volume, sparge water requirements, decoction and step mashes, and much more. Learn more about this often overlooked aspect of all-grain brewing.
Explore three historical mashing methods from different regions — parti-gyle (England), step mashing (Germany), and decoction mashing (Czech Republic) — and learn how they may benefit your own homebrews.
This beer is in the style of U Fleků, the best-known Czech example of this style, and uses the mash schedule from that brewery. It is a little different from the common schedules that I use. When pulling decoctions, take about 1⁄3 of the thick part of the mash to heat in your decoction kettle. Maintain the main mash at the current rest temperature until the decoction is finished. The recipe uses a slow, traditional lagering schedule.
It is possible to produce a Kölsch in less time, but Kölsch yeast is notoriously difficult to clear because it is a powdery yeast. Giving it sufficient classic lagering time does help it clear, and it also helps reduce some of the sulfur notes produced by the yeast. Kettle finings or post-fermentation clearing agents (even mechanical filtration) is recommended if the beer isn’t fully clear. Kölsch should be a brilliantly clear beer, so please pay attention to this important part of the style.
Create two recipes, but use the same grist for both. For the second batch, change the brewhouse efficiency setting to one half the first recipe (in this case, 65% and 32%). Each recipe has different sugars, hops, and yeast. But read the recipe — these beers are blended before they are fermented! You will likely have to adjust this recipe after brewing to use your system efficiencies based on your sparge techniques.
Hop water is the perfect beverage for those times where you can’t drink alcohol but still need your hop fix. Learn the secrets to brewing a great hop water with basic ingredients and equipment homebrewers are sure to have on hand.
A refreshing hop water that uses brewing yeast to maximizes flavors through the process of biotransformation.
Recently rediscovered brewing journals from a large Connecticut brewery dating back more than a century can teach us a lot about how beer was produced. Get an inside look at the journals and some of the popular recipes of the pre-Prohibition time.
Home Brewing Co.’s Assistant Brew Master Alphonse Gosch gives no information as to whether this beer was lagered at low temperature. He does say the beer was racked to casks after eleven days, which suggests it was not further processed.
This was a one-off brew that may look to have been a little harsh due to the quite high proportion of black malt and the low level of pale malt, but it proved to be a very nice brown porter when I reproduced it. My research has not turned up the meaning of “ULIA.”
The design of your taproom can be a crucial element of how your business will operate in the long run. Architect Dustin Hauck provides insight for breweries-in-planning on some of the key components.
Sometimes it takes persistence, patience, and gumption to help your greater community through charitable causes. But a homebrewer found out that the brewing community was gracious enough that all he needed was the gumption. He’s been on a whirlwind brewlanthropy tour ever since.
When a homebrewer ups the volume of beer they’re brewing each batch, they find a glass ceiling in terms of the yeast starter size they can place on their magnetic stirrer. This brewer decided to break through it with a mega-starter.
Nothing can ruin a homebrewer’s day faster than finding that they ruined a batch of their beer. Learn from others’ mistakes and ensure success with your next brew by reading these thoughtful ideas.
While our understanding and categorization of the German wheat beer family has evolved over the years, the acknowledgement of a strong wheat beer called weizenbock has been relatively static. Maybe that is because the prototypical weizenbock, Schneider Aventinus, is truly a world-class beer that is widely available and is well-known.
Weizenbocks will use malted wheat for at least half the grist, but there are many kinds that can be used depending on the desired color of the beer.
The blonde ale itself was made with a simple malt bill and low bitterness — a little lower on the bitterness scale than normal since the coffee, even though it was cold-brewed, would still add some sharpness.
For decades dry yeast manufacturers have recommended brewers rehydrate their yeast prior to pitching, but that advice has changed recently. The Wizard explains why. Also, learn why a brewery may use decoction mashing to produce a light beer and ways to heat up a fermenter.
Coffee beers are commonly associated with stouts and porters, but they don’t have to be. A reader sends the Replicator on the mission to track down a recipe for Sly Fox Brewing Co.’s Morning Brew Coffee Blonde.
Transferring beer should always be done with great care. Get some pointers for minimizing oxygen pick-up.
