Topic: Mr Wizard

Bottle- and keg-conditioned ales must go through several key steps before they can be refrigerated and enjoyed. The first step is to estimate the volume of beer and to add an appropriate amount of priming sugar for carbonation. Most brewers use less sugar to prime an equivalent volume of beer in a keg compared with

I prefer to cold condition after carbonation, because you can remove yeast by racking the beer from keg to keg without worrying about having enough yeast in the beer at bottling time or having yeast that is too tired to work. The traditional method of lagering, in which the beer is transferred to the lagering

The process of adding nitrogen to beer is referred to as nitrogenation. This is somewhat of a misnomer since nitrogenated beers also contain carbon dioxide and the gas blend used for the process is usually 75 percent nitrogen and 25 percent carbon dioxide. This mix is used to dispense draught Guinness Stout and is easy

I prefer to package beer in kegs for several reasons. Besides being convenient, perhaps the best thing about a keg is that it’s very easy to change the carbonation level in a beer. In your case, you either added too much priming sugar or went overboard with your carbon dioxide pressure during the carbonation step.

The “crank and shake” method to carbonate beer, which has a scrumptious name, is widely suggested and is probably the crudest method imaginable for carbonation. It is simply bad advice given by a fairly large number of people. Carbon dioxide solubility is affected by two variables you can control; beer temperature and carbon dioxide pressure.

The easiest and best way to properly carbonate your beer is to exercise a little patience and to equip yourself with the proper tools. In the case of carbonation, a gas table (see carbonation table below) is a pretty important tool. With table in hand, you can select your desired carbonation level at the temperature

Chemical off-flavors are frequently encountered in beer and can be caused by numerous factors. The most obvious cause comes from traces of cleaning or sanitizing chemicals left on equipment surfaces after use. Chemicals containing chlorine and iodine are well known contributors of chemical off-flavors if the compounds remain on the equipment. Of the two, chlorine

Ahhh, the old root-beer beer. This reminds me of a time when I screwed up a beer experiment with the remnants of a root beer experiment. We had three groups in our brewing lab class and each group would brew a beer that had one ingredient or process step changed. The results were assessed both

The answer to this question has plagued brewers since beer was first conceived or however it came into being. Many famous scientists studied the spoilage of beer and wine, and Louis Pasteur developed the heat-preservation technique now called pasteurization for beer, not milk. If brewers only knew how long their beer would last after packaging,