Making Beer

• /Recipes Our Recipes

  • Bonus bread recipes!

• /Labels Making labels for your homebrew

Useful Information

General Brewing

• How to Brew. Sections one and two should be read before attempting to brew as we are skipping straight to using specialty grains (the extra effort is trivial).

• BJCP Style Guidelines

• Mr Malty has a few useful articles

• Hopunion Variety Databook has tons of useful info on different hop varieties¹

• Homebrewtalk Wiki

• Homebrewtalk Ingredient Guide

• Carbonation Calculator

Software

• QBrew recipe formulation tool and batch log. Available in Debian, and indispensable for the Free Software loving brewer. Lacking a few features compared to proprietary offerings, but bpt and ClintonEbadi are programmers...

• Brewtarget A newer Free Software brewing tool. Looks similar to QBrew, but apparantly shares no code, and appears to be actively maintained.

QBrew Gripes

Let's bitch about the missing features so that ClintonEbadi might suffer some C++ and add them to QBrew...

• No tool to replace hops in recipe with different AA% hops

  • Kind of a pain to manually recalculate hop amounts when actual AA% differs from recipe AA%. Equation is simple: weight × (recipe aa / actual aa), but why not have the computer do it?

• Recipe html export and printed versions do not list hop AA%
• Units for grains are limited to pounds or kilograms, the ability to switch to ounces or grams would be helpful for e.g. black patent additions

Location Specific

• American Brewmaster Our friendly Local Home Brewing Store

• Quality Brake and Inspection Center happens to fill up propane tanks (and for a good price: $17.50/20lbs as of 2010-11)

Water

• Town of Cary Water Quality Report.

• Water Adjustment Calculator and an alternative calculator

• All Grain Water Chemistry Somewhat applicable for extract brewing

Cary uses chloramines rather than chlorine for water purification. The homebrew shop was helpful and warned that this does not evolve out as gas during boiling like chlorine does, and results in band-aid like flavors in the final beer. To counteract this a quarter of a campden tablet must be added for each five gallons of water used. This will react with the chloramines and cause them to evolve out as sulfur and chlorine gases within approximately fifteen minutes. The water may then be boiled as usual.

For extract brewing water adjustment is not essential, but water in the Raleigh region is soft enough that there will be issues with hop bitterness not being properly attenuated. The LHBS provided Water Crystals (8:1 CaSO₄:MgSO₄) with a recommended rate of one or two tsp per five gallons. A teaspoon has a mass of 4g (3.55...g:0.44...g).

Sulfate:Chloride ratio of raw water = (approximately) 1.2:1.0 which is not particularly good for anything. This should be closer to 2:1 for bitter ales, 1:3 for stouts and porters, and 1:2 for milder ales (e.g. Justin's Brown Ale). Some minor adjustment with NaCl will be needed; since extract is being used and the NaCl content is unknown a conservative approach is best. ClintonEbadi suspects aiming for a ratio of 2:1 for bitter beers, 1:2 for more malt dominated beers, and leaving it alone for the others is the best approach for now.

According to BeerSmith our Magnesium levels are insufficient for yeast nutrition, and the sulfate levels are too low for bitter beers (like ClintonEbadi's Pale Ale recipe).

Based upon this information it appears that a good approach will be to add 2g of Water Crystals to all batches with an appropriate amount of NaCl to balance the additional Sulfate.

Another thing to be wary of is steeping roasted grains in soft water:

• Water chemistry also plays a role in tannin extraction. Steeping the heavily roasted malts in very soft water will produce conditions that are too acidic and harsh flavors will result. Likewise, steeping the lightest crystal malts in hard water could produce conditions that are too alkaline and tannin extraction would be a problem again. In this case, the terms Hard and Soft Water are being used to indicate a high (>200 ppm) or low(<50 ppm) level of carbonates and the degree of alkalinity of the brewing water.⁴

Future Ideas

• Cheap and Easy Batch Sparging Much simpler Mash tun design than one designed for fly sparging (and it can be converted to a fancier tun later if needed)

• DIY Wooden Beer Cases

General Beer

• Beer Sensory Science

• Beer Advocate a number of reviews include a description of the hop varieties and grains used--this may be helpful!

Available Equipment

So far all owned by ClintonEbadi and available for shared use.

Wort Production

• Bayou Classic KAB5 Low Pressure Propane Burner. 100,000 BTU/h super burner. MORE POWER.

• 20lbs Propane Cylinder Just a basic propane cylinder

• 2'x2' Paving Stone to provide a stable surface for the burner and protection for deck wood against drying out or scorching

• Polarware 30 quart stainless steel brew kettle. Basic, but workable for full five gallon wort boils. LHBS recommended the low end kettle and reserving funds for a future purchase of a fancy ten gallon kettle.

• Immersion Wort Chiller. Just a basic coiled copper tubing gadget.

• Smartpond 155GPH Submersible Pump for circulating ice water through the wort chiller.

• 48" Stirring Spoon That's what she said

Fermentation

• 6 Gallon Ale Pail

• 8 Gallon Glass Carboy

• 5 Gallon Glass Carboy for secondary fermentation

• 1.5 Gallon Glass Jug for minibatches or starters (volume not entirely certain--definitely larger than 1 gallon, but not 2 gallons)

• 64oz Glass Jug (Rogue Dead Guy Ale Jug) for starters

• Cooling system A pair of plant water drainage trays, tshirts, and a box fan... not as nice as a basement, but it actually works pretty well.

• Airlock enough for all fermentors and one starter jug (with stoppers for the carboys)

Siphoning &c

• Autosiphon Fancy and new with a smaller outer tube diameter

• 10' 5/16" ID Siphon Hosing

  • Split with a venturi tube gadget for wort aeration

• Faucet hose adapter. Because it's getting cold and outdoor faucets need to be turned off soon.

• Bucket Filler. Homemade hose end with siphon tubing attached to make filling five gallons of water a lot less of a pain in the ass.

Bottling

• 6 gallon bottling bucket with a spigot

• Bottling Cane with an auto shutoff and whatnot

• Bottle Capper basic wing capper

• Drying Rack Plywood board with removable legs and holes for drying bottles after sanitization

Science!

• Hydrometer for taking gravity readings

• Floating Thermometer

• Cylinder not graduated, but with a 100mL (maybe--have to double check this) line marked. Used when taking gravity readings.

• Wine Thief to take samples for gravity readings

Books

• Beer Captured. A recipe book of 150 clone brews. Helpful as a basic guide for various styles.

&c

• Sanitizer Bucket a.k.a five gallon plastic bucket from Home Despot

Things That Don't Actually Work

• Igloo Lunchbox Cooler The top being uninsulated turned out to be a serious problem: the cooler lost around 40⁰F within 30 minutes. It turns out, however, that a metal pot in the 170⁰F oven maintained around 160⁰F and did not get too hot after all.

NEEDED

• Blowoff Tube bpt's first fermentation revealed that for beers over 1.060 the airlock will indeed become clogged and could result in some unpleasant messes

• Nylon Hop/Grain Bag Reusable! There are three muslin hop socks left from years ago for steeping grains so this isn't a huge priority.