Santa kindly gave me a Refractometer for Christmas this year, which rocked because it was on my list of gifts for your favorite homebrewer. And just a couple of weeks ago I brewed up a doppelbock and got to try my new toy out. It was everything I dreamed it would be. Geeky. Easy to read. Rather badass looking. I was happy. Then I went to take a reading after fermentation had slowed down and got a sky-high reading. Wait? Did I under-pitch? Was the ...

I’ll start out by saying this is probably one of the least exciting aspects of homebrews. Bottling will never rank as exciting and so the process of getting ready to bottle? Yeah, not a lot of fun here. None the less this is a key part in sharing and enjoying homebrew and I guess it does have a kind of meditative quality. Meditative? Is that the word?

Anyway, let’s start with what bottles do you want: brown ones! Don’t even bother with ...

If your not a homebrewer and you want to get a gift for a homebrew you might have no idea where to start. So start here! Here is a list of a few things that most hombrewers would enjoy getting under the Christmas tree. Well, at least, these are gifts I would like to see under the Christmas tree. All of these gifts are fairly universal and would be great for everyone from the beginner to the advanced homebrewer. Unless of course they already have ...

Every now and then you may run into a beer or beer recipe that give Plato instead of Specific Gravity. And there's an easy calculation to convert between the two:

( Plato / ( 258.6 - ( ( Plato / 258.2 ) * 227.1 ) ) + 1 = Specific gravity

Well maybe easy isn't the right word, but to make it easier I made a little calculator to help with the math:

If you've ever wondered what goes into the making of Hahn Super Dry, you should check out their very imformative commercial. I also use a life sized panther shaped tank for my hopback. I mean, I wish I used a life sized panther shaped tank for a hopback. Who wouldn't? Now if you're looking for a more practical approach to making beer you may want to check out Sapporo. Although it looks like you need to enlist a lot more help to ...

I’ve been all-grain homebrewing for a while and have almost forgotten what it’s like to brew up an extract beer on the kitchen stove. And it’s awesome—the smell of malt and hops throughout the house. Who doesn’t love that? Oh yeah, my wife isn’t a fan. Anyway, one thing I’ve never tried: making a homebrew from a recipe kit, and I got a chance to do just that with my sister-in-law and her boyfriend—who have just entered ...

Last weekend I decided to brew up a lager. Not realizing that I didn't have space for the carboy in my fridge, I had to come up with a quick and easy solution to keep my fermentation temperature near 48 degrees. In one of my brewing books I remembered reading about submerging your carboy in a tub of water to keep the temperature lower than the ambient temperature and then running a fan to help give it that extra oomph. My coolest (as in ...

One of the main goals of this website is to spread the infection that is craft beer far and wide. Knowing that, I started to wonder how I came to love craft beer. When did it happen? How did it happen? What beers led me to love beer? What follows is my beer history (express edition). It’s kind of like a list of all my former girlfriends that I occasionally go back and visit. If you are looking to love craft beer or you ...