Topic: Ingredients
A Taste of the Season
Brewing with fruit can add amazing depth, flavor, and aroma to your beer, but fruits also present significant challenges. Selecting the correct fruit, understanding its fermented flavor profile, the practical considerations of
Brewing Sugars: Finding your sugary zen
Adding sugar to beer has been a bit of a pariah in the brewing world thanks to homebrew lore of old. It’s time to set the record straight on this brewing adjunct and put it back in its rightful place in our brewing kettles and fermenters.
Priming sugar uses
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The Intersection of Wine and Beer
Many brewers are first drawn to homebrewing for the creativity and experimentation involved, and one of the easiest ways to add a new dimension to an already-understood style of beer is adding
Two Brews: Tips from the Pros
Coffee beer doesn’t need to limit you to porters and stouts. We asked pros who brew a coffee lager, golden stout, and imperial stout to share their brewing methods.
Brewing with Coffee
By understanding coffee and all of its properties, a brewer can make the best decisions to brew a well-balanced beer that will showcase your coffee selection in your finished beer.
Turn Up the Heat
Not all pepper beers are scary hot. With such a wide range of ways they can be utilized in a recipe — not to mention the various techniques of how they can be used in brewing — peppers are a really interesting and fun ingredient to brew with.
Beyond the Barrel
Barrel-aged beers are wonderful, but barrels are also expensive, time-consuming, and take up a lot of space. With the wide array of oak alternatives available, they are also unnecessary. Explore the alternatives to barrels.
Master the Spice: Options and approaches to additions
One spice, two spice, red spice, blue spice. While mixing beer with spices offers an unlimited array of options, the approach to spicing beer can be handled in stride using a few key guidelines explained by Josh Weikert.
Spicing Up Beer: Tips From the Pros
Spiced beer can be a thing of beauty when done well; but brewers need judicious additions and well-married flavors. We sit down with two professional brewers who know what it takes to make a concept beer turn into reality.
Brewing with Spanish Cedar
Different from oak, the most common wood used in brewing, Spanish cedar imparts citrus, spicy white pepper, and sandalwood flavors, with aromas similar to a cigar box. It doesn’t have the oak tannins that conflict with hops, making it a good wood option for hoppy beers.
Fermentations Apart: Selecting different yeast for different jobs
Brewers often add adjuncts right into the main batch of beer before or during fermentation with the hopes that the characteristics of the beer will play nicely with the additive. But Michael Tonsmeire explains that fermenting the two separately may sometimes be your best approach.
