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 […]
Cloning a beer
Have you ever had a commercial beer that you really enjoyed and wondered, ‘how did they make that?’ Or have a beer you’re desperate to try that isn’t readily available? Or want to get a friend into brewing by helping them make a beer just like one of their favourites? There might be many reasons […]
Why does pH matter during the boil?
pH can affect your beer in a number of ways so it is well worth paying attention to the pH of your wort at several points throughout the brewing process. We are looking specifically at the effects of pH during the boil. One major reason that we try and control pH in brewing is to […]
What Is Efficiency?
Efficiency is a very important term in brewing as understanding your efficiency gives you greater control over your original gravity, greater repeatability and a better understanding of how much grain is required in your recipe. Efficiency is to do with the ‘potential’ of grain. Each grain you use in your grain bill has a ‘potential’ […]
Enzymes and their role in brewing
As brewers we know that the purpose of the mash is to target specific enzymes in order to break down the starches present into sugars for the yeast to ferment. But what is an enzyme? And how does it break down starch? And which enzymes should we be targeting? Well, an enzyme is simply a […]
Tips For Hitting Target Gravity
Hitting your target original gravity (OG) is important to brewers for many reasons – when you plan a recipe your OG will influence the balance of your beer, affecting the total alcohol, the balance of malt character and the perceived bitterness (missing your target OG can throw off your BU:GU ration and completely change the […]
Recognising Beer Faults
With competition season well under way we thought it would be useful to make this week’s Weekly Mash all about off flavours. Even if you aren’t looking to enter competitions, being able to recognise and remedy (or even better, avoid altogether!) these common faults is an important part of becoming a great brewer. Below we […]
Small Batch Brewing – What is it and why?
We recently looked into why you might want to brew with large grain bills. This week Dave from our UK office is looking at the opposite end of the scale and talking about why brewers might choose to make smaller batches of beer; “For a lot of brewers (myself included) there is a general assumption […]
Choosing a Yeast Strain for Your Beer
We’ve quoted this before but it’s worth reiterating that ‘brewers make wort, yeast makes beer’. Choosing the right strain of yeast arguably makes the biggest difference in how your end beer turns out so we thought we’d talk you through how to make the right selection. The most obvious distinction to make in yeast […]
