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

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

The Brewer's Rite

From Grain to Glass: The 4 Stages of Creation

Demystifying the alchemy of fermentation. A comprehensive guide to crafting your first batch of liquid gold.

I reckon you might agree with me that making beer is actually pretty easy. However, to make exceptional beer requires a level of attention to detail that separates the hobbyist from the master. It is a pursuit that blends the strict laws of chemistry with the creative flair of cooking.

Consider nature's own attempts: if elephants can figure out how to bury watermelons underground so they ferment in the heat, returning later to feast on the alcoholic fruit, then surely humans can master the controlled environment of a fermenter. The process is ancient, elemental, and surprisingly forgiving. Brewing consists of four primary stages. It is actually five distinct phases if you count the sensory evaluation (drinking) of your labor.

1. The Boil: Sterilization & Isomerization

The brew day begins with the boil. Quality pale malt extract and hops are boiled together with water for roughly 60 minutes. This isn't just about cooking ingredients; it is about transformative chemistry. The rolling boil achieves three critical goals. First, it sterilizes the wort (sugar water) to ensure no wild bacteria survive. Second, it creates a "hot break" where complex proteins coagulate and fall out of the solution, ensuring your final beer is clear rather than hazy. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it releases the bittering qualities of the added hops via a process called isomerization.

Often, specialty grains (like crystal, caramel, or roasted barley) are steeped in the mixture prior to the boil, much like making a giant cup of tea at a specific temperature range of 150°F to 160°F. This adds color, body, and complex flavor notes like toffee or coffee that extract alone cannot provide. If you are serious about making beer, you will follow a strict recipe schedule for hop additions. You will add hops early in the boil for bitterness, in the middle for flavor, and very late in the boil for pure aroma.

Master Tip: Sanitation begins right now. While the boil kills bacteria, anything that touches the wort after the heat is turned off must be thoroughly sanitized. This includes your spoon, thermometer, and the lid of your kettle.

2. The Chill & The Pitch

The "Wort" (unfermented beer) must be cooled rapidly to room temperature. This is a race against time to prevent bacterial infection, as warm sugary liquid is the perfect breeding ground for spoilage organisms. Once cool, it is siphoned to a sanitized fermenter where it is often combined with additional cold, clean water to reach the target batch volume. This is typically 23 litres (5 gallons) in a standard 30-litre drum.

When the wort hits the "safe zone" (18°C to 22°C for Ales), yeast is added. This is called "pitching." The drum is sealed airtight, and an airlock is installed. The airlock is a brilliant yet simple device: it allows the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation to escape without letting oxygen or wild bugs back in. For the first 24 hours, the yeast will be in a "lag phase," multiplying rapidly and consuming oxygen before it begins to produce alcohol.

Master Tip: Store your fermenter in a stable, dark place. Fluctuating temperatures stress the yeast, leading to "hot" alcohol flavors and potential headaches. Do not store it in a freezing shed; yeast needs warmth to work!

3. Priming & Packaging

After 10 to 14 days, fermentation should be complete. You confirm this not by guessing, but by checking for a stable gravity reading over two consecutive days using a hydrometer. The beer is now "flat" and contains live yeast in suspension. To give it life and fizz, we must prime it.

This is when the beer is mixed with a calculated amount of sugar dissolved in boiling water to create a sterile syrup. Sucrose or corn sugar (dextrose) are preferred as they ferment cleanly without adding cider-like flavors. Once the sugar is gently mixed into your flat beer (avoiding splashing to prevent oxidation), it is transferred into bottles.

Each bottle is sealed with a bottle capping device. This creates a closed environment where the yeast wakes up one last time to eat the new sugar. Since the bottle is sealed, the CO2 produced cannot escape and dissolves into the liquid, carbonating your beer.

4. Conditioning: The Clean-Up Phase

Now the beer has been bottled, the hardest part begins: waiting. This is the "secondary fermentation" or conditioning phase. During this time, two things happen simultaneously inside the bottle.

• Carbonation: The yeast consumes the priming sugar, pressurizing the bottle with natural carbon dioxide.
• Maturation: The yeast "cleans up" various intermediate byproducts like acetaldehyde (which tastes like green apples) and diacetyl (which tastes like movie theatre butter).

Sediments such as excess yeast and heavy proteins will drop out of the beer and fall to the bottom of the bottle, forming a compact layer known as "lees." It is vital you let this process occur. If you drink your beer too early (so-called "green beer"), the flavors will be disjointed, yeasty, and possibly sulfurous. A minimum of three weeks conditioning at room temperature is good, but six weeks is often where the magic happens and flavors truly meld.

5. The Pour: A Sensory Experience

The final step is the reward. Chill your bottles upright for at least 24 hours to help compact the sediment at the bottom. When pouring, do so in one smooth, continuous motion, leaving the last centimeter of liquid in the bottle. This ensures your glass is full of bright, clear beer, while the bitter yeast sediment stays behind. Observe the clarity and color, inhale the hop aroma, and enjoy the profound satisfaction of creation!

© 2024 Home Brew Masterclass Series

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!

Do 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?

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

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:



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

Date Down

Brand of Malt

Mixed with

Date Bottled

Notes

First taste

Final 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

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:

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.