1. Blow out your wort chiller with an air compressor. If your garage gets cold,
the water in it may freeze, expand, and split the copper. This would suck.
2. Always do a blowoff. No real reason not to, they're like giant air locks so
there's no reason to take them off until the secondary. I have found the smaller
tubing gets clogged with really active fermentations. I use a milk jug with hole
poked in the top with a nail to relieve pressure. Many a day I can come to see the
water turn brown, those days I pat myself on the back for using blowoff.
3. A brew bench is great. If you can set aside a place to bottle, work on equipment,
and store things for easy access, you'll be more organized and find things when
you need them.
4. Always try to put some copper in your system. Wort chiller, lines, etc. When
the old brewery went from copper pots to stainless, they found the yeast weren't
as active in the higher gravity beer. They asume there's something in copper that
helps yeast through the process. Many brewerys put copper plates in stainless
kettle, just to get this effect.
5. Stay away from brass fittings, they contain lead. If cost is a factor, at least
pickle the parts before use to remove the surface lead. (Stay healthy)
6. Find a brewclub. Look around in your area for a homebrew club, you can get
mounds of information fom them. If you live in Idaho , send me beer mail. I belong
to the best club in the Boise , Nampa , Meridian , Caldwell area.
7. Brew often. You're going to learn something new on every batch.
8. Brew the same beer multiple times. You'll learn a lot from your process, and
flaws in what you're doing if you try to duplicate a beer.
9. Make a starter. Step up that yeast, and pitch enough to get it going. You
want the good guys to outnumber the bad guys at the gate.
10. Sanitize, sanitize, sanitize. You're making a five gallon sugar based petri
dish. It's the perfect place for bacteria to live.
11. Take a hop tour. Tour a hop farm, and learn about what's in your beer.
12. Leave that lid off when you brew. Cream corn flavored DMS may taste good to
you, but not me.
13. Adjust the pH of that sparge water. Make sure it's about what the beer is.
5.2 or so is good, depending on style. Too high a pH in the runnings will create
off flavors.
14. Take the pot off of the heat before adding extract. You WILL carmelize your
wort. Unless you're using a kitchen mixer, you're not going to stir it fast enough.
15. Never rack beer over carpet.... Just a bad idea.
16. Be patient... Yes I know you pitched three minutes ago and it's not bubbling
yet. There's a reason for that. Wait 48 hours after pitching before freaking out.
17. Never pitch yeast above 70F. Cool that wort first.
18. Replace all the seals on a new corny keg when you get it, even if they look
brand new. Especially the one on the lid. It will look new, but it's not. Smell
it. It's nasty.
19. Just because you read it, it doesn't make it true. If you want to know
everything about brewing, read one book and set it down. Never read another,
because once you read that second article you'll get confliting information.
(Other than Papizian telling you to get totally lit when brewing, I like that
one...Step 1. Have another homebrew, Step 2. Have another Homebrew, Step 3.
Rack the beer and have another homebrew..*Hiccup* .)
20. Share your beer with others and puff that chest out. Get opinions from even
the inexperienced. Even novices can taste most off-falvors, but they may not know
what they're tasting. Get every opinion you can.
21. Get a glass carboy. (I'm probably going to get flamed for this one) I'm too
cheap to keep replacing scratched plastic carboys, and I'm too much of a freak
about sanitation to let it go.
22. Keg kettles are cheap and easy to convert.
23. There's only one time to add oxygen, and that's to chilled wort, right before
you pitch. Try to keep it out of your beer at all other times.
24. Irish Moss... It rocks. It'll make clear beer without much work.
25. Add a little black patent malt at mashout. It'll also clear your beer and won't
affect flavor or color that much. The largest brewerys in the USA use this technique
on the of the lightest and blandest lagers out there.
26. Yeast nutrient... yeast love it. It's great for beer, but a nessicity for meads.
Honey doesn't have all of the stuff yeast need. It's best to step nutrients on meads.
1/2 of the nutrient in the boil. 1/4 of it four days after pitch. The last 1/4 in
four more days. You'll make mead the way professional meaderies do, in two weeks
rather than six months. (This tip is on the Brewer's Network from Rabbit's Foot
Meadery, also a good tip is to listen to these braodcasts)
27. Take great notes. The best thing you can do for your beer is to take great notes....
Especially gravities, temperatures, ingredients, and final taste.
28. Drink commercial beers, and lots of them. Try styles you haven't tried before.
Look for things you'd like to have in your own beers.
29. Learn to weld. It'll be cheaper in the long run.
30. Ask questions... specific ones, if you want specific answers.
31. Gravity is your friend, abuse it. Use it to every advantage. Pumps are expensive.
32. You can transfer beer with a CO2 tank. Get one of those blowoff two hole devices.
Put a racking cane in one hole and hook the other up to your CO2 tank. You can
push the beer right out. Uphill even.
33. Let it age... be patient again. Let beer age at least a month after bottling
before drinking. Depending on style maybe even longer.
34. Freeze fruit. Boiling fruit will take away a lot of flavor, but you can sanitize
it by freezing it. This will also puncture the skin. A rolling pin will help also.
The skin acts like a barrier and makes buying expensive fruit useless in a carboy.
Make sure you thaw it before adding to the secondary, then just rack right onto it.
35. Enter homebrew contests. Get advice on your beer and recipes. Plus puff out
that chest and gloat to homebrew friends if you win.
36. Get some brushes to clean out beer lines. They won't get clean by just rinsing
hot water in them.
37. Add grain to strike water and not the other way around. Make sure you stir
so it won't clump or get dough like.
38. Make sure those valves are closed before transfering liquids. Nothing sucks
worse than beer spilling out it you left a valve open.
39. Grow your own hops. Then trade them with friends that grow different kinds.
I grow Mt. Hood , Fuggle, Golding and Cascade.... It's best to not grow bittering
hops since you won't know the AA's, stay away from Galanea. Flavor and aroma hops
are good for growing.Good cost savings.
40. Get a mentor. Find someone who at least thinks they know what they're doing.
41. Sanitize with Star San. It's no rinse, won't stain like Idophor or bleach and
only needs 1 to 2 mins of contact time. By the way, bleach pits stainless, so if
you use stainless don't use bleach.
42. Tour many brewerys. Ask many questions, and ask for some house yeast.
You'll be glad you did.
43. Brew something your wife/husband/ life-partner/ roommate/ hamster likes. If
you're going to make the place smell like boiling wort and take up half the garage.
The least you can do is make a Merlot.
44. Make meads, wines, and strange beer styles. The more you learn about what
you don't know, the more you will learn transfers over into beer.
45. Cover that carboy in a t-shirt, a black garbage bag or the box it came in.
Light will ruin the beer. It does bad things to hops. Also try to avoid clear
bottles if you can.
46. Don't use twist off bottles. I know it "looks" like it makes a good seal, but
it doesn't. Your beer won't last two years in a bottle like that.
47. Hop flavor and aroma will fade over time. Overhop a beer if you plan on storing it.
48. Don't carbonate everything the same. I know Charlie says to use 3/4 cup of
sugar, but some styles are more carbonated than others. Look at what style you
are brewing and carbonate accordingly.
49. You can save the extra runnings out of the mash tun on light ales. Put it in
canning jars and use a pressure cooker to sanitize and seal. You'll have fermentable
wort ready for starters that will last for years.
50. When your birthday is close, let all of your friends know the address to your
favorite homebrew shop. Also make sure they're aware if the shop has gift certificates.
51. You can place a tire stem on a 2 liter bottle's cap. After counterfilling the
beer in there from your keg you can purge the air with your CO2 canister. It won't
last in the bottle that long, but it'll last long enough to get it to the party.
52. Skim that hot break. Just before the wort boils, a thick protien foam will form.
If you skim it now, you won't have to worry about it later.
53. Whole hops will filter some cold break, pellet hops won't. Filter through
whole hops for best results.
54. It's against Federal Law to ship through the US Postal Service. With UPS it's
just against their house rules. Not a tough decision.
55. Calculate attenuation before bottling any beer. Your yeast will have an
attenuation percentage on the packet or online. Make sure you hit this before bottling.
[(OG-FG)/(OG- 1)] x 100
56. To calculate how many calories a beer has. Here's the formula:
C = 851 (OG - 1) (OG + 3)
57. Never pitch onto an entire yeast cake. It's the only way to overpitch. Yeast
has a life cycle it needs to go through. Pour a little out before added the new wort.
58. Propane sure is nice, and even nicer if you have a backup canister. You don't
want to run out 30 min into boil.
59. A spray bottle with water is nice to have handy. A few spritzes will stop a
boilover in its tracks.
60. Always post gravities and not alcohol percentage. There's a million ways to
calculate it. Here's a few.
The Joy of Homebrewing Method by Charlie Papazian
ABW = (OG-FG) X 105
ABV = ABW X 1.25
Bee Lee's Method
ABV = (OG - FG) X 130.8
Beer Advocate Method
Get to Know Your Alcohol (By Volume) 06-18-2003
http://beeradvocate .com/news/ stori ... _read/518/
ABV = (OG - FG) X 131
Ritchie Products Ltd - Most widely used wine method
http://www.ritchiep roducts.co. uk/c ... ingABV.htm
ABV = ((OG - FG) / 7.36)*1000
(Zymurgy, Summer 1995, vol. 18, no. 2).
Michael L. Hall's article Brew by the Numbers: Add Up What's in Your Beer
ABW = 76.08 (OG - FG) / (1.775 - OG)
ABV = ABW ( FG / 0.794 )
Calorie content: C = 851 (OG - 1) (OG + 3)
Brew Magazine
Write Your Own Brewing Spreadsheet - May, 2005 by James Azotea
ABV = (OG - FG) * 0.129
These are the equations Daniels recommends in Designing Great Beers.
ABW= 76.08*(OG-FG) ]\(1.776- OG)
ABV= ABW/.795
61. It may be spelled wort, but it's pronounced wert.
62. Spray bottles make great containers for quick sanitizing. A few sprays, and
let it sit for a min or so.
63. Mix priming sugar with water and boil it and then cool. If you're short on
time, a cup of water and priming sugar can be boiled in the microwave. No excuse
not to boil it.
64. If you add the priming sugar to the bottling bucket first and rack on top of
it, you'll have to stir less. Also, to save on sanitizing and cleaning, you can
stir with your racking cane.
65. Proof your dry yeast for best results, but don't proof for more than 15 mins.
The yeast will wake up, look for food, find none and hybernate. It will take
longer to wake them up a second time.
66. When growing hops, cut down all but three bines on each plant. This will give
you a better yield.
67. CO2 will look like less when it's cold. If you keep the cylinder in the fridge,
you'll want to note this.
68. It's a good idea to wrap boxes of newly capped bottles in black plastic bags.
Just incase they explode.
69. You can carmelize sugar in water on the stove, and then add to the boil of a
Belgian for a really great flavor.
70. CaraRed 20L is a cool grain, and will add a deep saturated red color to a beer.
71. Make sure to aerate before you pitch. Adding oxygen at this point will get
you a faster start.
72. ProMash rocks. :) No need to say any more on this one.
73. If you have overcarbonated beer, place the beers in an ice chest with cold ice
before serving. The cold will reduce the CO2 levels.
74. If you have undercarbonated beer, you can chill the glasses in the freezer
and pour the warm beer into cold glasses. This will increase the CO2 levels.
75. Hops are bad for dogs. Fido will get really ill if you let him eat your used hops.
76. Used grain from a mash can be used to fertalize hops.
77. Used hot water from the output of a wort chiller can be placed in a washing
machine and use to wash clothes.
78. Bad beer can be aged, extremely dry hopped, or blended with other beer and
not be so bad. (or distilled into brandy, but that would be illegal)
79. Don't be afraid of dry yeast. There have been many advances in dry yeast over
the years. It's not inferior yeast anymore.
80. It helps to learn your conversion tables.
1 gallon (US) is equal to 3.79 liters
1 gallon (US) is equal to 4 quarts (US, liquid)
1 gallon (US) is equal to 8 pints (US, liquid)
1 gallon (US) is equal to 16 cups (US, liquid)
1 gallon (US) is equal to 128 ounces (US, fluid)
1 gallon (US) is equal to 256 tablespoons
1 gallon (US) is equal to 768 teaspoons
Celsius (C) to Fahrenheit (F) --> F=((9/5)xC)+ 32
Fahrenheit (F) to Celsius (C) --> C=(5/9)x(F-32)
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http://www.hopsclub.com - 2007