October 2017
Article
Ninkasi Dreams
What a wild ride! The days since winning the Ninkasi — the award for most points in the final round of the National Homebrew Competition — have been an absolute whirlwind. Winning
Recipe
Fast Mead
This is a simple and straightforward mead recipe that should have your fermentation finished within a few weeks.
Recipe
Fourpure Brewery’s Juicebox Citrus IPA clone
Juicebox is a citrus IPA packed full of orange zest and aromatic hops and is packaged by Fourpure in kegs and cans. As the essential oils are held in suspension, it’s best drunk fresh!
Recipe
The Kernel Brewery’s Export India Porter clone
This recipe is based on some of the Barclay Perkins (1855) and Whitbread (1856) porters that were sent out to India nearly two hundred years ago. Of course, elements of the ingredients, equipment, and processes are different, and tastes have also changed over time, so in keeping with The Kernel’s philosophy, they have made a beer that contemporary beer drinkers want to drink, rather than a blindly faithful copy of a 19th century recipe.
Recipe
Weird Beard Brew Co.’s Black Perle Coffee Milk Stout clone
Black Perle is one of the first beers Weird Beard produced commercially and still forms part of their core range in bottles and traditional cask. It takes its name from German Perle with which it is single-hopped. It’s a sweet stout with a rich coffee backbone.
Recipe
Wild Card Brewery’s King of Hearts Blonde clone
This is a slightly modified version of the recipe for King of Hearts, one of Wild Card’s core range of beers. It’s a light and refreshing pale beer with fresh aromas and a clean finish.
Project
Immersion Lid Temperature Controller
I’d seen that some of the popular fermenter manufacturers make relatively costly drop-in immersion chilling setups for their conical fermenters. I knew I had to attempt to do this, so I began researching how I could create an immersion chilling system for my fermenter. I’m by no means a “handy” man, but I was able to put together a very nice custom system that actually works amazingly well, and was much less costly than an off-the-shelf system.
Article
Kveik – Norwegian Farmhouse Yeast
Stop me if you know this story; farm brewers ferment without access to commercial yeast, sterile culturing, or precise temperature control. Passing their strains down and sharing them, the mixed-cultures adapt to
Article
Counter-Pressure Filling Techniques
One of the first tasks in homebrewing I’ve noticed that homebrewer’s get bored with is cleaning bottles . . . and filling bottles . . . and then waiting for bottles to
Article
Managing pH with Brewing Water Adjustments
If you want to take your beers to the next level, master some of the ways to get your post-boil wort’s pH within the happy range of around 5.1–5.5.
Article
Build a Barrel Coolship Fermenter
Open fermentation can yield some amazing flavors, but requires the brewer to pay special attention to temperature, cleanliness, and fermenter shape. Some professional breweries cool their wort in vessels called coolships. Coolships
Recipe
Lagunitas Brewing Company’s New Dogtown Pale Ale Clone
This beer is pleasantly cosmopolitan, fusing European and American malts with American hops and English yeast to generate a firmly bitter and malt-balanced hoppy ale.
Article
Brewing with Wheat
When it comes to brewing, barley is king. But barley isn’t the only grain in a brewer’s arsenal; there are plenty of other cereals that are integral to many classic styles, including wheat.
Article
Brewing with Pumpkins: Tips from the Pros
Brewer: Will Meyers, Cambridge Brewing Company in Cambridge, MA In the past, when pumpkin beers took over craft beer shelves each fall, it was an array of various approaches to the same
Mr. Wizard
How do hops affect the final gravity of a beer?
Hops do not have a significant impact on wort or beer density because the concentration of hop soluble compounds is simply too low to make much of an impact on density. In
Mr. Wizard
Brew-In-A-Bag Water Chemistry
The first thing I do when discussing mash thickness is to calculate the liquor-to-grist ratio (water weight divided by grain weight) because this ratio is the basis for discussion related to thickness.
Article
Grisette
BY THE NUMBERS OG: 1.028–1.032 FG: 1.002–1.004 SRM: 3–10 IBU: 20–30 ABV: 3.1–3.9% I hadn’t intended to write about this style now, but it’s come up as a question several times over
Article
Improving Cloning Skills
Cloning — brewing a near-exact replica of a commercial beer — has a time-honored place among homebrewers. For one thing, it’s a great risk-aversion technique: If you’re brewing something new and you’re
Article
Brewing by Ratio
IF YOU’VE BEEN HOMEBREWING FOR A WHILE, there’s a somewhat predictable path determining where your recipes come from: You probably brewed a pre-made kit from a homebrew shop. Then, maybe you moved
Article
Modern Meadmaking
Mead, which is a fermented beverage made from honey, is arguably one of the oldest alcoholic beverages. Vessels found in China dating back to 7000 BC have organic compounds consistent with fermented
Article
London Calling
London has long been a place where people come together from across the globe to nurture novel ideas and create powerful movements. Influenced by European tradition, American innovation, and the rich diversity
