Top10Tips

I thought it would be useful to generate a "Top 10" list because sometimes brewers, especially new brewers, get caught up in the minutia of brewing and overlook the obvious. Here are my Top 10 brewing tips:

1. Look closely at everything you do to your beer post-boil. This is the most critical time for a beer. Time and contact are your enemies. You want to reduce both to the absolute minimum. For me, it made the choice to go with a counter-flow wort chiller a no-brainer. A CFC chills and drains simultaneously. This saves a lot of time. The other issue is contact. This means minimizing the number of things that contact the beer once you turn your burner off. This includes ambient air. If possible, try to get a completely closed system from a lidded kettle to your carboy using as few hoses, devices, and connections as possible. Your sanitation practices are THE most important thing at this point in the brewing process.

2. Brew as often as possible. This is pretty basic but people overlook how important this is. Brewing often can have a profound effect on you as a brewer. You learn quickly and you will streamline all your processes. You will become proficient at making starters and getting through a brew day. Your equipment won't sit around and grow "stuff". Your ingredients will be fresher because you have to buy them more often. You will be able to experiment more. Your friends will love all the free beer you give away.

3. Brew 5 gallon batches, not 10. This tip actually enables you to accomplish #2 without inundating yourself with homebrew. How many times have you heard a homebrewer say "I'd rather brew 10 gallons than 5 because it takes the same amount of time". I've got news for you, no it doesn't, not by a long shot. If you brew 10 gallons, it takes longer because you have to heat twice as much water, sparge twice as long, bring twice as much wort to a boil, chill and drain twice as much wort, clean and sanitize twice as many carboys, make double the starter volume, rack 2 carboys at secondary fermentation instead of 1, clean twice as many carboys after racking, and on and on and on. Yes, it seems like while you are at it, making a larger batch is logical, but by making 5 gallons, you can vary your beer styles and have more variety in the same inventory space. I think variety and repetition are more important than volume.

4. Quit taking post-boil gravity readings. Weird, I know, but I was having trouble getting accurate readings post boil with all of the trub in the sample. Plus, I couldn't pour the sample back into the batch and it exposed the post boiled beer to one more operation which added to my infection potential. Promash has a really cool feature that gives you pre-boil gravity targets that take into account your boil-off rate and your desired post boil OG. By using a pre-boil gravity reading, you can completely ignore sanitation and even pour the sample back into the kettle. If you boil off the correct amount, your post boil gravity will be exactly what Promash says it should be. I quit taking post-boil gravities about 3 years ago and now rely completely on the Promash calculations to tell me what my OG is based on the pre-boil gravity reading.

5. Get a sight glass for your kettle. The ability to measure wort volume during the boil is very important to keep a fairly linear boil off rate. Your hop utilization (bittering) is calculated using wort gravity and boil time. As the boil progresses, your wort gravity goes up, and this affects any hops that are boiled during that period. If you boil off a lot of water at the beginning and then taper off at the end, the hop utilization will be slightly lower because the hops had exposure to a higher gravity wort for a longer period (higher gravities decrease hop utilization). By using your sight glass, you can judge the boil off rate all during the boil and make adjustments to the heat accordingly. I boil off 1.5 gallons of water in a 60 minute boil. I use the sight glass to verify that I boil off 1/2 gallon every 20 minutes.

6. Adjust your batch size to give 5 gallons of finished beer. What I mean is, by the time you drain into the primary, rack to the secondary, then keg or bottle, you will lose some beer. Adjust your batch size accordingly. For my system, I have a pre-boil volume of 7.5 gallons. I boil off 1.5 gallons in 60 minutes for a post-boil volume of 6 gallons (the sight glass comes in very handy). By the time I process that 6 gallons into finished beer, I end up with almost exactly 5 gallons. For recipe purposes, I brew a 6 gallon batch.

7. Duplicate your results. Your success as a homebrewer is not measured by how great your beer is, your success is measured by your ability to brew the same great beer again and again. How many times have you heard a brewer brag about the great beer he made 2 years ago? Why the hell can't he make the same beer now? I hate hearing this. If you can't brew it again, it must have been an accident and says nothing about your brewing skills. Being able to brew a predictable beer at any given time shows skill.

8. Ferment in glass. I don't care what people say, you are taking a risk every time you trust your beer to a plastic fermenter. Plastic takes on odors and is easily scratched. Scratches in plastic can harbor bacteria that can't be scrubbed or sanitized out. You will completely eliminate this possibility by going to glass. Yes, glass is more difficult to work with and can break if you get careless -just be careful!

9. Control your fermentation temperature. I can't tell you how important this is. Yeast can behave drastically different at different temperatures. This can mean the difference between an okay beer and a great beer. You don't have to build a Fermentation Chiller, you can use other methods like a wet T-shirt over your carboy and a fan or a plastic garbage can filled with water and some frozen 2 liter water bottles. Whatever your method, use the stick on thermometers to monitor the temperature, this will be close enough. Don't put thermometers into your beer! This is completely unnecessary and adds a risk of infection (the minimizing contact thing, see #1). At high temps, yeasts do goofy things and give goofy flavors. If you like Belgian beer, fine, it probably won't matter. Belgian beer is supposed to be goofy. But for most American styles, you won't get that smooth character unless you lower your fermentation temperature into the 68 F range.

10. Lastly, get good feedback on your beer from many different sources. Enter some competitions, join a homebrew club, or give away a lot of beer to your friends. The important thing here is to get good and constructive feedback. Sometimes, as brewers, we look at our beer as a parent looks at a child - we only see the good things and ignore the shortcomings. Getting others to taste your beer and offer feedback can really help to improve your brewing. Competitions are hit and miss, sometimes the judges aren't very helpful, they just give very short comments on a particular quality, like "needs more hops", or the infamous and completely useless "not to style". This doesn't mean that judges never offer good feedback because often times they do, I'm just saying, don't be too disappointed. Your friends and homebrew club mates can also fall prey to this and tell you "this is good" or "I like this", which tells you absolutely nothing. Sometimes they don't even like it and are afraid to hurt your feelings. Set your ego aside and tell everyone to give it to you with both barrels. You don't have to agree, it's just good to have as much information to choose from as possible.