How to make your own beer enhancer (and save money)

Sunday, November 20, 2016


How to make your own beer enhancer


The key goal of any brew enhancer is to help the beer have more body, a great taste and good mouth feel

If you just use sugar for the yeast to feed on, you will get a thin, weak feeling beer which can reduce the satisfaction of your drinking experience. 

Of course, you do not need to buy brew enhancer, you can make your own. There is no right way to prepare the enhancer as different ratios and different ingredients can produce different effects on your beer.

If you are going to make your own enhancer, here’s some ingredient ratios which you could use as a guide:

Beer style
Dextrose
Maltodextrin
DME
Light Beer 
60%
40%
0%
Ale, more malty beer
50%
25%
25%

The quantity to make is is 1Kg per 23 litre brew.

The beauty of using the dextrose is that it is apparently a more favoured food of the yeast when compared to ordinary sucrose sugar and so fermentation will commence more quickly. 


Whether that makes a difference to the end result, I don't know. 

You do not have to follow the above guide - you could simply make a 50/50 split of DME and brewing sugar (which is simply corn sugar).

Many beer supply shops will carry the ingredients you need. That way you can get the advantage of buying in bulk so to reduce your brewing costs. 

Check out the price of DME on Amazon.

Make beer in 4 easy steps

Monday, August 29, 2016
4 easy steps of making home brew beer


The 4 easy steps of making home brew beer



I reckon you might agree with me that making beer is actually pretty easy.

If elephants can figure out to bury watermelons underground so they ferment and then eat them to get drunk on, then humans can figure out how to easily make a genuinely good tasting home brew beer!

Here's how YOU can make home brew beer in 4 steps.

Beer brewing consists of four  simple stages, 5, if you count the drinking of your tasty beverage!

1. Brewing the beer

Quality pale malt extract and hops are boiled together with water for about an hour to sterilize the extract and release the bittering qualities of the added hops.

Often grains are steeped in the mixture prior to the boil to add additional color and flavor to the beer. 

If you're pretty series about making beer, you'll probably follow a recipe which gives you timings on when to add your choices of hops.

You will have of course used sterilized brewing equipment

2. Cooling of the wort and the commencement of  fermentation 

easy steps to brew beerThe wort that you have made is then is cooled to room temperature and siphoned or transferred to a fermenter where it is combined with additional water to achieve the desired batch volume. This is often 23 litres into a 30 litre drum. 

When the wort drops to room temperature, yeast is added to start the fermentation process, that is to say, to turn your mixture into beer. 

The drum is sealed airtight and an airlock is used to keep the fermenter sealed and allow for the release of carbon dioxide.

Fermentation will take one or two weeks, leave it for  longer than shorter time and make sure the wort is stored in a warm place and not in a freezing cold shed or the yeast will not ferment the sugars.

3. Priming your beer with sugar and the bottling of it 

Once your beer has completed fermentation (you can tell by checking for scum residue or by using a hydrometer) it can then be siphoned to another container to prepare for bottling.

This is when the beer is primed with sugar.

Sucrose or corn sugar may be used and the correct measurements are simply mixed with your very flat beer. Once the mixing is complete, the beer is transferred into bottles and each bottle is capped with a bottle capping device.

This is often done by siphoning or holding the clean and sterilized bottle to the tap of the drum. 

4. Time to let the bottled beer sit and age

Now the beer has been bottled, it needs to age so a secondary fermentation may occur. Given there is no way for the carbon dioxide that is produced during this fermentation to be released, the beer is carbonated. 

During this time sediments such as excess yeast and proteins will drop out of the beer and fall to the bottom of the bottle.

It is vital you let this process occur - if you drink your beer too early it's flavor will not have come to the fore and it may smell slightly.

Better to let your beer nature for a minimum of three weeks and even better six.

If you can wait that long, you will be rewarded with a delicious tasting home brew.   

5. Time to open those beers

The final step is of course the drinking. Drink cold, poor the beer carefully to avoid stirring up any of the sediment and have a great drinking experience!

Do I need to use carbonation drops for brewing?

Sunday, August 14, 2016
Do I need to use carbonation drops for brewing?


Do I need to use carbonation drops for brewing?

Usually I would try and sell you something when you come to this site but at the end of the day, we are all beer lovers so when some asks if they NEED to use carbonation drops, we're not going to say yes and then try and get you to buy some via this amazingly awesome beer site.

No.

Not this day*.

Today we give nothing but advice!

carbonation sugar dropsDo you need to use carbonation drops when bottling beer? 

The answer is no.

All they are is sugar rolled into a ball. Sweet, tasty sugar balls.

You can use sugar from the kitchen instead. I like to use a funnel and a teaspon and boom, the sugar is in the bottles, ready for beer to be added and capped.

But, you can of course use carbonation drops when bottling your homebrew.

This is for the reason of efficiency and convenience. Droping a carbonation drop into a bottle is a very fast method and can be less messy.

You also know precisely how much sugar you are adding to your beer.

It does however cost a lot to buy carbonation drops. In fact, in NZ a bag of carbonation drops (good for one bottling day) cost more that a 1KG bag of ordinary sugar!

You could try and buy them in bulk to make it more cost effective but I have yet to find any drops sold in bulk lots.

So do the maths and use the sugar and funnel method.

Or you could try another handy method and priming your brew with sugar.

Or you could just use jelly beans...

* We lied, just a lil bit.

↠ Where can I buy beer hops online?

Wednesday, July 20, 2016
where to purchase beer hops


Where can I buy beer hops online?


If you know a thing or two about beer, you'll know that hops is so crucial to making good beer that the Germans made it the law for it to be an ingredient of beer.

You are of course free to make beer whatever way you like but you're probably going to want to buy hops for your home brew at some stage, especially as you begin to experiment with new tastes and flavours.


So there are two questions you should ask - what hops should I use in my beer and where can I purchase hops?



First we will talk about what hops to use in your beer. Certain kinds of hops are commonly associated with particular styles of beer or beer from certain regions.

It's really up to you, the power of buying and using hops is yours! (Did you read that in a Captain Planet voice?)

Here's some commonly used hops that you can buy:
  • Pilsner beers have became nearly synonymous with the four so called 'noble hops'. These are varieties of hop called Terrnanger, Spalt, Hallertauer and Saaz. 
  • Saaz hops are closely aligned with the brewing of lagers, mostly for the delicous aroma that has become associated with the beer. As an aside, pilsner beers are known as traditionally coming from the Czech Republic.
  • If you're looking for hops that might help your beer taste a bit like the classic New Zealand beer, Steinlager, you might buy Green Bullet hops. 
  • America, the land of the free beer drinker, has become a home for hop production and many new varieties from old favorites have been developed. American hops are recognized and appreciated all around the world for their bold, and often intense flavors they imbue in beer. American hops are often described as being citrus like, however that's a most elementary description. Cascade hops are a very popular choice.  Chinook is another popular 'north western' hop.
  • The English Golding hop has become the signature hops of English ale.
  • The Fuggle hop is another popular hop used for ale beer. 
That's all well and good but where can I buy hops? I need to purchase some saaz hops, man! Is it OK to buy hops online? Yes, Timmy, it sure is OK to buy hops online!

There's two ways to buy hops - in person or online. If you are going to do it in person, you need to find a local specialty beer brewing shop.

So get on to Google and have a snoop around or ask your mates at work, chances are they are homebrewers!

Or you can buy or hops online. There are a mega ton of sites out there but we reckon if you know what you want, just order hops from Amazon. There are plenty of reputable beer brewing equipment experts on there and between them, they have a large selection of the best hops to buy.

If you've bought some hops and are wondering how to use them, check out our guide.

How to keep track of your home brew records & history

Monday, June 13, 2016

An idea to track beer making history

22/10/23: Fair Warning: I did this for a couple of months and then gave up. I just get experimenting and learning by doing. 

If you are looking to improve the results of your home brewing, you might like to think about keeping a record of what and how you brew.

If you write down what you did, what you used, when you did it and why you'll have a good basis on which to make an honest assessment about your beer brewing failures and successes.

If you find that you've pulled off a stunner of a beer, you might be able to remember just exactly how you brewed that beer. It could be the difference between remembering that you used a certain kind of hops in your brew or used a 50/ 50 split of them.

Or that you left the spoon in the fermenter.

I just wanted to share how I keep my beer brewing records. I use Google Sheets.

It looks something like this:

Beer brewing record keeping

This is basically an excel sheet that allows me to have a set of handy columns as below:

Date DownBrand of MaltMixed withDate BottledNotesFirst tasteFinal thoughts

Recording the date you got the brew down is hugely important because you need to know how long you've left the brew to ferment. Same for bottling. Has it been 12 days or three weeks? 

I also like to know what brand of kit I used and whether it was an ale or pilsner. And of course, did I use a brew enhancer or just dextrose? 

In my summary notes, I record my first taste experience and also final thoughts.

This is because I usually get stuck into the beer at the three-week mark but over time the beer will mature and take on different characteristics - that serves as a reminder to let the beer 'bottle condition' as much as you be patient for!

The beauty of using Google Sheets to record your beer adventures is that you can download the application to your smartphone.

This means you can quickly add records as you go (maybe you're just hiding in the shed?) and you'll reduce the need to remember to add notes to an exercise book somewhere else later on. 

This is just the way I do it, an exercise book is of course just a fine solution!

Once you are a more experienced brewer you might not need to record so much as you'll know everything.

Or will you? 

Guess who left the spoon in the beer fermenter

Saturday, June 11, 2016
Just a week after I wrote the 'I think I've contaminated my beer' post, this classic mistake happened. I'd just bottled a handy Black Rock NZ ale and went to clean the fermenter.

I found this spoon inside:

Spoon left in brew fermenter

My wife and I had been looking for that spoon for weeks!

I'd looked high and low and even behind the dishwasher with clearly no luck, and not even thinking that I had used the spoon to stir the beer wort.

I'm fairly confident the brew will be fine, a taste test proved it tasted like beer! Especially as I was a diligent brewmaster and sterilized everything before brewing.
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