Tag: homebrewing
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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DIY: Kegerator and Fermentation Chamber (Part I: Concept and Equipment)
New York apartments are small, too small for mountains of bottles, that was my rationale for jumping into kegging my homebrew beer. Though to be totally honest, my motivation was a desire to professionalize my homebrew setup with temperature control and quicker grain-to-glass times. Combining keg, tap, and temperature controller in one mini fridge allows…
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Brewing 101: Making a Very Clean Soup (The Brewing Process)
If you enjoy cooking and you also enjoy drinking beer, you will likely enjoy beermaking. The basic brewing process is as simple as following a recipe for soup, albeit a very clean soup — essentially boiling water, steeping grain, and adding hops, keeping things sterile, then waiting. This piece will teach you how to begin.…
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Brewing 101: Building the Brewhouse (Equipment)
The beer brewing toolkit consists of a handful of inexpensive items, a few of which you likely already have in your kitchen. The list below is a comprehensive accounting of all the tools you’ll need to start out. Like any hobby, the more obsessed you get, the more money you can end up spending, though…
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Brewing 101: Suppliers
Cover image by Pierre-alain dorange (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons Finding out where to buy your homebrewing supplies the first time around can be a chore. Luckily, there are hundreds of homebrew shops, both online and brick-and-mortar. I tend to buy my equipment online and my ingredients locally to support the local…
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Brewing 101: Grocery Shopping (Ingredients)
This is second in a introductory series about homebrewing and I’m starting with the basics, ingredients, equipment, and process before delving into more complex topics. If you’ve ever talked to a German about beer, you’ll have been told that beer has four, and only four, ingredients: water, hops, yeast, and malted barley (sometimes wheat). Not…
Hops Trains and Backpacks 