Home Brew Formula

The better home brew formula….

Suppose you could brew your next batch of beer following one simple taste-improving brewing method that makes your home brew so good, it turns you into a beer genius almost overnight…

Well that’s what this letter is about… how to brew batch after batch of deliciously ‘hoppy’ booze starting today…

Here’s the story…

Not long ago I had no idea where to start to brew my own beer at home…

I was clueless on what ingredients and equipment I needed for different styles of beer…

I researched forums online and dug into websites that were pretty much full blown complicated home brewing books… (which you may have seen)…

… and it wasn’t long before I was overwhelmed with information…

How hard could it be?

Add malt to water, boil, cool, pitch yeast and let sit for a couple weeks to bottle and drink, right?… Well, bringing a couple gallons of brew to a boil takes a while…

I lost my patience..

…and the second I left the pot unattended while I Googled boiling times…

I. WAS. SCREWED…

A Massive Boilover Destroyed My Kitchen…

Luckily I was close enough to yank the pot off the heat, which controlled the boilover and allowed me to keep brewing…

Added bittering and finishing hops and was ready to cool and pitch my yeast…

I submerged the pot into an ice bath but the ice dissapeared 15 minutes and my brew was still 100 °F hot…

I had no clue how long I could leave the brew sitting before pitching yeast…

Didn’t want to risk ruining my beer so I poured it into my primary fermentor… the cold water I used to top off to five gallons brought my brew close to yeast pitching temperature…

… and once I pitched the yeast and thought my gut-wrenching feeling of “ruining my beer” would forever disappear…

… things got worse….

36 Hours Later I Had ZERO Airlock Activity!…

I was using a plastic bucket and couldn’t see what was going on inside… I checked up on my brew every 15 minutes for the next 36 hours!

No Airlock activity!

No Bubbles!

No Fermentation…

… No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t stop feeling like I’d ruined my beer… like I had done something wrong…

I had no clue if fermentation was actually happening and decided to move the fermentor around and warm it up to ‘fix it’… but this was a big mistake…

Sometimes the airlock doesn’t bubble, yet fermentation IS actually happening… In fact the airlock did start to bubble shortly after…

… but it stopped bubbling after only 2 days!…

Turns out I transferred my beer prematurely and it gave my beer a sour green apple taste… “green beer” they call it…

When I asked the forums about this, they said I bottled too soon and that time would “clean up” the off-flavors…

But that just turned my beer into a gushing liquid no one in their right mind would drink…

… and when you brew undrinkable beer, the drain is closer than you think…

Frankly I wasn’t sure if brewing was for me… I brewed a few more batches, but was never able to brew the tasty beer everyone else swore up and down I would get by brewing my own beer at home…

When I told my home brew club about this, they said it must be “me” doing something wrong… that I wasn’t being patient enough or clean enough… but waiting more time only disappointed me when I poured beers that would fizz up like soda…

in truth, I had pretty much given up home brewing.

Then one day, almost by accident, I stumbled across a home brewer who shared with me one simple brewing method that allowed me to brew better than micro-brewery quality beer…

In fact, with this method…

I Never Had To Worry About Ruining Another Batch Of Beer…

Brewing became laughably easy, I couldn’t believe it…

I used to lose sleep over my beers not coming out right or tasting off… especially if I had friends with me trying out the first couple bottles…

But now, I could brew, pitch the yeast and walk away without worrying about the airlock bubbling and the beer fermenting…

The result?

My struggling home brew hobby changed overnight…

Beers poured deliciously clean, clear, with a creamy foam on top that rode the beer all the way to the last sip…

People were actually begging me to buy my beer… to open up my own micro-brewery…

I became like a beer chef… I would decide on a beer style to brew and know immediately which ingredients would give me the right flavors, aromas and colors…

Formulating recipes was easier than making a sandwich…

I even learned how to combine yeast strains to get different yeast characteristics not available to the average home brewer who doesn’t know THIS method…

I could brew beer and not worry about making mistakes like forgetting to add bittering hops, irish moss or some other silly mistake…

Yet, the beers came out malty, hoppy and could add a kick of booze as I wanted…

I couldn’t believe this myself and thought that all along maybe it was ‘just me’ worrying too much about my beers not coming out right and all I needed was to relax, have a brew and enjoy the hobby…

So I decided to share this method with a few home brewers and let them brew their next batch of beer using this method…

And you know what happened?

They Each Brewed Their Best Home Brew Yet…

It was amazing…

I had discovered a fool-proof method that lets home brewers brew tasty beers even if they haven’t brewed their first batch…

…. without having to learn chemistry…

…. without worrying about airlock activity or fermentation…

… and without ruining their beers…

In fact, with this method brewers purposely “spoil” a sample of their beer to test fermentability and control the dryness or maltyness of their beers to get the perfect body…

Counter-intuitive, right?

Listen, truth be told there are many places to go and read up on brewing your own beer… if you are willing to sit through thousands of hours of literature written by experts who love to talk about gravities, flocculation, and other brewing mumbo jumbo…

Seriously…

Why can’t the brewing instructions simply say “Pour The Yeast In”… and what’s with all these brewing experts insisting you learn chemistry lingo to understand their chemistry heavy language books?

Can’t they speak normal?…

Can’t they say that fermentation is just yeast eating sugar as opposed to “a sugar molecule is broken down by some freaky metabolic process into acetaldehyde, CO2, and what not…”

Horse Crap!… I’m trying to learn brewing not chemistry!!!

As much of a beer geek as I am… (and trust me, I get a hard on reading and talking about the little details of how beer pours with different carbonation levels or served in different glasses…) …

I rather chew on broken glass than read more brewing books with chemistry heavy language…

I rather just have someone SHOW me their method to choosing the right ingredients to improve the flavor and aroma of my beer… or just share their secret technique to ensure complete fermentation…

But I couldn’t find something simple like that…

… And that’s why I decided long ago to write down all my techniques and methods I used to brew anything from light grainy Pilsners, malty IPA’s to pitch black stouts…

Over 14+ months I took notes on brewing using this method and simplified it into terms like “Do This While Brewing and This Happens… Do The Opposite and This Happens…”

For example: Ferment towards the high end of the yeast temperature range and you get esters, ferment at lower temperatures and you get a cleaner beer…

… next thing you know, I had a full binder jam packed with Do-This-To-Get-These-Results type of notes that have helped me brew beers so good, my friends and family constantly hound me to hold beer tasting parties so they can drink my brew…

But most importantly… you don’t have to go through all the hassle of reading complex brewing books or watching BASIC videos that only get you going because…

I Can Teach You How To Brew Micro-Brewery Quality Beer Using THIS Simple Easy To Follow “Taste-Improving” Brewing Method…

Heck… better than micro-brewery and craft beer most of the time…

I can SHOW you how to kick up the booze level of your brew without watering down or giving your beer a cidery taste… how to adjust carbonation levels for malty beers and why it’s not the same for dry beers… even improve the mouthfeel of your beer so it is smooth on the palate without leaving a harsh bitter aftertaste…

And you can start with your very next batch at no cost or obligation…

See… after uncovering the secrets brew masters are forbidden to use at micro-breweries (because it would make it too expensive to brew beer and would virtually bankrupt the breweries)… that allow brew masters to substantially kick up the quality of beer… …

I have put together a home brew training program I call Better Home Brew Formula, which focuses on improving the taste of beer without having to learn beer chemistry… now it’s not some geeky formula where you plug in numbers or do any math nonsense…

Rather, it is a COMPLETE brewing method that shows you a series of techniques carefully organized to help you brew and improve the taste of your beer at every step of the process starting from choosing your ingredients all the way to serving the beer… and you can look at it for FREE if you want…

Here are some things you can pick up…

• Pitch yeast starter while in the “active stage” for shorter lag times (that means fermentation starts faster and stronger)… which reduces off-flavors and is part of ensuring complete fermentations…

• Why Airlocks Are Unreliable Indicators Of Fermentation… And Why Simply Pitching More Yeast To A Stuck Fermentation Is WRONG….

• A “no-brainer” ingredient selection method which makes it easy to get the right flavor, color and aromas in your beer…

• How to mix different yeast strains to get the right flavors and attenuation levels… (most brewers don’t even know this is possible)

• … Makes it easy to brew beer and improve malt flavor starting on your very next batch…

• The simple done-for-you cleaning that rids your equipment from beer-infecting bugs… (best method to avoid cleaning bottles one by one…)

• The two ways to balance the flavor of beer without making it too bitter… (you may already know the first, but no one talks about the second)

• …. Makes sure priming sugar is evenly distributed to carbonate bottled beer equally and prevent over-carbonated bottle bombs… (yes bottle bombs are real and are not fun to clean up)

• The Counter-Intuitive “spoil your beer” method that allows you to improve the taste of your beer… (and why most do this wrong…)

• 7 Ways To Hop Your Beer so you brew with the right hop bitterness, flavor and aroma (Hint: it’s not the typical 60, 30, 10 or 0 minute kettle hop additions…)

• How to get rid of off-flavors created during fermentation and get just the right fruity ester or clean profile from your yeast…

• What to do when your beer finishes with a high FG… (and why simply pitching more yeast is WRONG)

• The 4 step fermentation technique to control the dryness or maltyness of your beer along with yeast flavor and aromas…

And much much more…

Making Your Beer Crystal Clear

Beer is about a lot more than just a great tasting beverage. The fact that a culture has grown up around the joy of making and enjoying fine beer testifies how much beer has become part of how our culture works. The drinking of the beverage is only partially about the taste of the brew itself and very much about where you have your beer, what you drink it out of, how the beer looks in the glass and who you are drinking it with. And while you as a home made beer brewer cannot control many of those factors, you can control the quality and ambiance of the beer you make so it not only tastes great but is visually appealing as well.

If you pour a commercial beer from a bottle or a can, you may not be aware of how much those beer makers put into not just the taste but the affect of other senses have on the beer drinking experience. The way the beer pours, the aroma as you pour it, the head that wells up in your mug and how the beer looks in the glass all are just as important as the taste itself. The emphasis the big beer producers put on ascetics is so extreme that they even make the sound the can makes when you “pop a cold one” to be unique because they know that sound alone can prepare you to receive the taste of a great beer drinking experience.

The truth is none of that will change whether the beer itself is of high quality or is good to drink. But visual appeal matters. One area of visual appeal that you have some control over when making your own beer at home is clarity. Clarity simply refers to how the beer looks in the glass. If you can see through the beer and it is a consistent beige or amber color, that is visually appealing. But if things are floating around in the beer, even if they are perfectly harmless byproducts of the brewing process, that can diminish how inviting your beer is to enjoy and even diminish how enjoyable the beer is to drink even if the beer itself is of high quality.

A lot of the “stuff” that floats around is beer comes from the yeast that is crucial to the fermentation process that makes beer beer. Some yeasts are better than others about settling out of the beer during fermentation. Another source of visible material in the beer comes from what is referred to as non-microbiological particles or NMPs which are a byproduct of the brewing process. Again, none of these visible materials are harmful to consume nor do they reduce the value of the beer. They just look bad and hurt the clarity of the beer which is one way beer is measured for quality.

Many of the NMPs are introduced during the initial creation of the wort which is phase one of any brewing operation. The wort is boiled at a high temperature for a significant enough period of time to cause the proteins in the ingredients to break down and become part of the fluidity of the wort rather than remain in a substance state or a “floc” which remains visible in the finished product. To avoid this make sure your boil sustains a temperature of 215F for 90 minutes to assure complete processing of the proteins.

Another important brewing step that you can do to reduce visible agents in your beer is to cool the wort very quickly. By bringing the temperature down rapidly, the clarity is vastly enhanced as is the flavor and overall quality of the beer. The best way to accomplish such rapid cooling is to move the wort quickly from the brewing process to a very cool environment or using a specialized wort cooler to quickly bring that temperature down and eliminate many of the flocs that might be there if the cooling goes more slowly.

Seeking beer clarity can become a major passion of yours as a home brewer and there is a whole science to using clarifying agents such as Irish Moss to enhance beer clarity without diminishing beer quality or taste. Learning good techniques for making your beer clear and appealing is just another step in your ongoing quest to become the best amateur beer making possible. And that is a quest worth pursuing.

How to make your own home brew Click Here!

Kegging

When you first learn the craft of home brewing, one of the big steps is the transfer of the beer into larger bottles for fermentation and then smaller bottles for storage and to serve guests your delicious brew. This can be messy but it is an important step along the path to great tasting beer. And learning the beer transfer and bottling skills will be a big step as your sophistication at home brewing comes along.

There comes a time though that you can consider the next big step in becoming more skilled in your home brewing talents. And that next big step is into kegging your home made brews. But before you make that step, its good to know what you will need and the costs and efforts involves so you go into the kegging step with eyes wide open.

For one thing, kegging your own beer can get a bit expensive. There is another level of equipment including CO2 storage tanks, the kegging canisters and even a kegerator that can all add another level of cost to your home brewing hobby. But hopefully if you have been making your own beer for a few years before you make this step, you can see that the money you have saved on beverages has been significant enough justify making the next big step into kegging.

The first step perhaps of moving into kegging is to get the family on board, especially your spouse, as you may have done when you first started brewing in the first place. A natural progression, though, is to start your hobby of home brewing for the fun and the savings and then to go toward brewing when you become a serious home brewing zealot and you know the quality of your beer demands this step. So if your family has evolved and you are a home brewing family, they will be as excited as you are to learn this next step.

Along with the costs get a good feel for the additional storage space kegging will add to your beer making needs and requirements. Along with the equipment for kegging, you will also need additional refrigerator space. This might be the time to consider the purchase of a specialized refrigeration unit called a kegerator that is made just for chilling and serving your fine beer from the kegging setting. But if you entertain a lot and you are getting those rave reviews for the quality of your home made beer, such a purchase is a slam dunk decision.

The upside of kegging is that it does reduce much of the fuss and mess of using bottles and always having to clean and make sterile those bottles for the next use. And kegging gives you a lot of control over the levels of carbonation in your beer. That gives you even more options and freedom to adjust carbonation to use in the creation of unique styles and tastes in your beer. That is just one of many ways kegging improves the over all quality and diverse flavors you can achieve with your home made beers.

Of course there still will be a place for bottling your beer even if you have overhauled your storage and at home serving method to move to kegging. There is a real fun and pride when you can serve family and guests great tasting ice cold beer directly from a keg like you could get it in the pub. Btu you will want to keep some bottles around to create bottled beer for gifts or to take with you to a social outing. When you show up for that next big barbeque with bottles of your own home made and kegged beer, you will be the hit of the event.

Great Grains for a Great Beer

One of the great reasons for learning to brew your own beer is to learn more about the various grains and ingredients that makes one beer better than another one. When you first start your hobby of home brewing, you no doubt got connected to a local club or association of home brewers. They can help you learn the lingo and how to tell what the best grains are to use in your beer. But before you go to the first meeting, it might speed things up if you knew the basics.

The use of malts is at the heart of how grain contributes to a great beer. The difference between a light beer that doesn’t have a heavy malt taste and one that virtually tastes like a loaf of bread all go back to what malts you pick and the process that is used during the malting and brewing of your beer. There are actually a big variety of different grains that people commonly use when brewing their own beer and you may have to take some time to brew up a few batches using different grains to see which ones capture what to you is the perfect beer taste that will make your home made beer unique. But understanding how malting works is a good first step.

Now as a home brewing enthusiast, you will probably not actually take grain through the malting process yourself. But you should become familiar with how malting works and why there is so much variety to the outcome of the malting process. In that way you can use that knowledge when buying the malts for your beer so you can get a malt that will give you the flavor, color and intensity of beer that you are looking for.

The malting process starts with the grain to be used. The most common grains are barley, wheat or rye but others can be used from time to time. The grain is used from the seed form and steeped and germinated which gets the active part of the malting and brewing process underway. Germination, which from your high school science class you know is what happens when a seed sprouts out to become a plants, releases the store energy of the seed that was put there to jump start the growth process. We are going to use that energy and convert it into malt mash that you can use to brew your beer.

What happens during the germination process of those grains is that the stored energy in the seed is changed as it is released. When the starches in the seeds changes into sugars by the enzymes that are active part of the germination process, those sugars give us one of the core ingredients for great beer. It is at that exact moment that the germination process is suspended using kilns to dry the grains and all of that good sugar and enzymes that became active remain in the malt for use during the brewing process.

Obviously this description of the basic malting process is simplified but for our purposes it gives you a background into what happens before you buy the malts you will use in your home made beer. But based on this description, you can go on to get a feel for the wide variety of malt types. The more you know about malt, the better informed you will be about what malts you wish to use when you brew your beer. And those decisions will have a big effect on the taste of your beer. So for great tasting beer, use great malts and knowing one malt from the next is the key to knowing which to use for the best home made beer possible from your home brewing efforts.

What Beer Making Gurus Know

The great thing about brewing your own beer is that you can be good at it starting out and get great at it over time. You can make each and every batch tasty and enjoyable but at the same time always be driven to make a better brew. Part of the function of home brewing contests and being part of your local brewers club is that you get those tips and learn from the old pros at brewing so month by month and year by year, your beer gets better and better.

One important thing that the real beer gurus know is what great chefs know and that is the quality of beer comes down to the freshness of the ingredients you use. One area you can improve on freshness is with the yeast you use for fermentation. A dry yeast is simply not as fresh as liquid yeast so that is where one small change can dramatically affect the freshness of your beer. Use this same approach with the grains, the hops and all the perishable ingredients that you need for a quality home brewed batch of beer.

But just as even if you buy fresh flour for bread, you freeze it to delay it getting stale and use proper refrigeration for all of your brewing ingredients. First of all, only buy the ingredients when the day you are going to brew is very near. And use as much as you can up in one batch. You will get a natural instinct for how much of each ingredient you need for a single run of brewing and eventually get to where you can buy enough, use it up the next day with little or no left over and in that way always be brewing with absolutely fresh ingredients. But even then, make some room in your freezer and refrigerator to slow down the aging of the things that make up your beer. Grains and yeast can go in the refrigerator and the rest in the freezer for a short time. Use your ingrediants up quickly. Don’t stock pile.

Temperature control is a central issue with all home brewing gurus who seek absolute control over the quality of their product. That first step of brewing which is the boiling of the grains and hops to make up the “wort” is a heat intensive operation. But once the time of your boiling phase is done, bring the temperature of the wort down very quickly. By dropping the temperature from boiling to cooler temperature at a very fast pace, you will reduce the contaminations in your beer and your final product will have a vastly better clarity which is a sign of a great beer. This is one little trick of the trade that may take some effort and maybe even specialized equipment like an immersion chiller for your wort but it will be worth it in the quality of beer that results.

Keeping the temperature of your finished beer constantly under control during fermentation is also a central issue with beer making gurus to make sure their beer is of the highest quality. If you are a devoted home brewer and want to buy a refrigerator just to devote to fermentation, that would be the best situation because you could carefully control the temperature.

But there are other methods many home brewers use to assure their fermenting beer says at a steady temperature. You can select the best spot in the house where the beer will remain relatively cool all day. Then wrap the fermenter up using wet towels and then put a fan on the wrapped beer. This uses the humidity of the water and the coolness that comes from the fan to keep the beer in the best possible environment to create truly great tasting beer.

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