Whenever I find a particular beer that I love, I take note and try to replicate it myself. Lately I’ve been trying the same with coffee — I love Blue Bottle, and I’ve been trying to replicate the taste of their pour-over coffee for the last few months. It’s been quite the journey, which actually […]
Brewing
Homebrewing advice, including equipment, jury-rigged devices, recipes, experiments, etc.
DIY: Super Nintendo nostalgia on your TV
I’m going to put this in Brewing, as in your own homebrew Super Nintendo, since it’s the best category I have for now. When we were in Montreal, we stumbled on this cafe that had a Super Nintendo with Super Mario for customers. It was the coolest idea, video games while you enjoy your coffee. […]
Honey Smacks Honey Brown Ale
The following recipe was of my own design for our Brewminaries cereal beer showcase, pouring mid-August. I chose Honey Smacks and decided to make a brown ale to showcase the cereal and for nostalgia reasons, since when I was in Syracuse we used to drink J.W. Dundee (Genesee) Honey Brown fairly often, it being a […]
DIY: Roast Your Own Coffee (RYOC): Technique
Perhaps you love coffee and would like to experiment, you may be looking to replicate the fresh coffee you tried in some cafe, or you may simply be starting to question why you spend so much to buy roasted coffee from someone else. Coffee is an industrial product like beer, and also like beer, you […]
DIY: Roast Your Own Coffee (RYOC): Equipment
Roasting your own coffee is a fairly simple process that requires a minimum of finesse. Even better, time investment is only slightly more than making a batch of popcorn. Whether you’re looking to roast for your own daily consumption or to add flavor to a home-brewed stout or porter, here’s a primer on how to […]
Breaking the rules: Grodziskie, a Polish smoked wheat beer
Of all the beers I’ve tried over my life, for better or worse, none is more indelibly stamped into my brain than the Kosciuszko Polish Smoked Wheat from Yards Brewing in Philadelphia. Nearly ten years later I still remember its intense smokiness. Brewed alongside their popular Ales of the Revolution series honoring Washington, Jefferson, and […]
DIY: Hand-Pump Beer Line Cleaner
We’ve all been served from a dirty draft line at some point, leaving us with a flat, soapy flavored beer lacking any of the usual hops “bite” or maltiness that we remember. Since I pieced together my minimalist kegging setup, I have left StarSan no-rinse sanitizer in the lines to avoid this, hoping that the […]
A cautious approach to bottle carbonation
Photo, from L-R: Le Chouffe, Flying Dog, Weistephan 330 mL and Orval bottles lined up after weighing. In all my years of homebrewing, I’ve never worried about bottle bombs, i.e. when a bottle of carbonated home-brewed beer explodes, though in all those years I’ve always aged my beer and bottled to a standard 2.5 volumes […]
DIY: Dipstick for Measuring Water Level
Ever finish brewing your beer and add it to the fermenter, only to notice that the water level is way short of the mark? It happens to the best of us or at the least those of us that don’t have a brewpot with gradations etched on the inside. Making your own dipstick is the […]
DIY: Kegerator and Fermentation Chamber (Part II: Construction and Assembly)
This post continues where I left off in Part I: Concept and Equipment. Read on for the steps to constructing and assembling the kegerator and fermentation chamber from parts and equipment discussed earlier. If you’re in a pinch, you could also just skip right to the chase by reading on and grabbing the tools as […]