Everything IPA – Understanding IPA Styles
The Modern IPA There’s no doubting the popularity of the modern IPA among beer lovers today. This beer style has some of the most diverse variations and brewing practices, making it a great style for homebrewers to experiment with. Quickly becoming the craft beer darling, a good IPA showcases a huge amount of hop bitterness and […]
Mashing for the curious idiot
Have you ever been talking about mashing to someone that knows nothing about brewing? You can sound pretty smart without knowing much at all – you can throw around the old “it converts the starches into sugars” line sure, but I’m certain you also know that squeezing enough oranges will give you a glass of […]
New Zealand Hops
Being a New Zealand company, we are proud of all things kiwi and there’s nothing better than our beautiful country side, perfect for growing delicious fruit, grapes for award winning wines and for us beer lovers, some of the most amazing hops found anywhere in the world. Hops are not native to New Zealand, the […]
Hints and Tips for Grainfather Mastery – Part 2
The Grainfather system is a very easy to use all grain brewing system that can achieve excellent results for even the novice brewery. Even so, there are key areas in which new and existing users can focus to fine tune their brewing with the Grainfather system and achieve even greater results. Our special guest David […]
Hints and Tips for Grainfather Mastery – Part 1
Many years ago the art of brewing was a lengthy and manual process driven activity. There were many aspects of the processes that could either make or break the final beer. Repeatability was the end goal once a successful recipe was found. But with so many processes and variables involved this became a task of […]
Sugar and Brewing
In order to make alcohol, the yeast needs sugar to convert. In wine, cider and some other spirits this sugar is easily available from the natural fruits, but beer brewing presents an additional obstacle by making brewers responsible for extracting the sugars needed for fermentation from grains, by converting starches that are naturally present in […]
Reading a Water Report
While there is a great deal of science involved in the entire brewing process, none of it seems to frighten new brewers as much as the science of water chemistry. Something about adjusting water ions using various salts just seems to be tough to grasp for a lot of people new to the hobby. While […]
Yeast Pitching Rates
If you are looking to improve the consistency of your beers from batch to batch and avoid the negative off flavours that can be created during fermentation, it might be time to look in to your pitching rates. Pitching rate refers to the amount of yeast cells you are pitching into your beer (or if […]
The top ten reasons to control your fermentation temperatures
For many homebrewers, temperature controlled fermentation is something they consider when all other elements of their homebrewery have been put together. Arguably though, fermentation control may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your results. Yeast are responsible for so many flavour compounds in beer that just by being able […]
