Barbãr | Brasserie Lefebvre

Belgian beers have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I live in the south of England, and the only Belgian beer you can get locally is Chimay which is priced as if it were unicorn blood*. Earlier this month, my girlfriend and I headed to London on a romantic day trip (pub-crawl-in-disguise) and in the evening we visited The Rake Bar, which I can only describe as beer-heaven. Here, I bought a selection of bottled beers from around the world to try when I got back home. The first of these beers was Barbãr.

*brewing-tips.com does not condone the unlawful killing of unicorns.

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Arrogant Bastard | Stone Brewing Co.

Today, America is the front-line in the battle for great beer. With craft breweries opening daily in the land of the free,  more and more people are saying no to the beerhemoths of brewing, Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. Instead, the American public are choosing quality beer from small local breweries. A beer revolution is in full swing, and heading the fight are San Diego brewers, Stone Brewing Co. Today we will be reviewing one of their most famous beers, Arrogant Bastard Ale.

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We’re back with a new addition to the Brewing-tips.com 10 gallon eHERMS brewery; a budget false bottom for the mash tun. Here’s how you can make one.

DIY Budget False Bottom

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This tutorial on how to brew beer using a kit was originally written by ‘tubby_shaw’ from thehomebrewforum.co.uk. It’s a superb guide on brewing beer at home using a kit, and is best suited for premium high quality beer kits.

Beer Kit Instructions – How to brew beer from a kit

Two can or all malt beer kits are the pinnacle of beer kit brewing, these kits are available in a wide range of beer styles and are the best that can be experienced in home brewing before taking up extract or grain brewing.

This kit is Bardon bitter from Matchless Homebrew.

Brewing beer from a kit

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What is Mashing?

Mashing is part of the all-grain brewing process. Put simply, it is the act of mixing malted grains with hot water to convert their starch into sugar, it is this sugar which the yeast convert into alcohol giving us beer. Mashing is half science, half art; there are many different ways of mashing grains, and everyone does things slightly differently to eachother. When you are starting all-grain brewing for the first time, it is best to stick to the tried-and-tested methods of mashing, and find one that’s good for you. In this post I will be summarising the four basic mash types, and with a little help from various online sources will try to explain what makes each one different.

Mashing Grains

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Hi brewers! I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought it was about time that I put another how-to guide up for all to see!

This guide was written by The Homebrew Forum member, ‘Oblivious’. It’s a superbly simple ‘how to’ guide which tells you how to harvest yeast for brewing.
You can find the original thread here.

How to harvest yeast for brewing

This is my method of yeast harvesting, this was done for my last brew a Saison with WLP550

After racking the beer to the keg pour the remaining liquid, trub and yeast into a sterilized container. I find one around 2 liters to be a good size. Place the full container in the fridge for a few hours.

Harvesting yeast

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We’ve all been there – that horrible moment when we suddenly realised we’ve made a big mistake whilst brewing a batch of beer. Whether it’s remembering, after three days of no fermentation activity, that we forgot to add the yeast on brewday, or realising that we forgot to put the lid on our airlock and that our beer’s been sitting exposed to all kinds of airborne beer-ruining bacteria overnight!

What do we do in these situations? Panic.

“Is it ruined?! What if it’s infected? I must tip it all away down the sink because I messed up and ruined my beer! ”

What should we do in these situations?

RDWHAHB!

RDWHAHB!

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We’ve all seen those fancypants brewing rigs with welded in sighting-tubes for gauging the volume of water or wort in the kettle, but what do you do if you can’t afford a fancy boil kettle, or don’t have the skills to fabricate such an elaborate volume-measuring device?

The answer is a lot simpler than you might think: Use a sanitised metal ruler!

Before you brew, fill your boil kettle up in small increments. Each time you add another litre of water (or whatever your unit of measurement is) – dip the ruler into the boil kettle and take a reading of the measurement. Then when you need to know how much liquid is in your kettle during brewing, simply dip the ruler in and check what volume was recorded at that measurement!

You could also do the same thing but using a wooden spoon – score a line for each litre and a thicker line for every 5 litres to make it easy to read.

Thanks for reading,
- Brewing-tips.com Staff

What is the difference between an Airlock and a blow-off tube?

An airlock is a water-barrier that allows co2 to escape during fermentation, without allowing airborne particles, bacteria or insects to enter the fermentation vessel.

A U-bend Style Airlock

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