5 Tips to Successful Brewing

If you have gotten tired of domestic or other easily available beers, you may briefly consider brewing your own beer.  Brewing your own beer may seem like it could be a complicated process.  However, there are many websites on the Internet that have tips and tricks on home brewing.  Some of these websites are associated with companies that sell home brewing supplies.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that these websites are only looking to promote their own beer brewing supplies.

Regardless of the name, boiling bags are more commonly used for steeping grains in the mash water.  If you use a boiling bag, you can remove the grains from the mash water before it reaches a boiling point, without having to worry that you have missed some of the grains in the mash water.  Using a boiling bag can also prevent you from making a mess when you are trying to get the grains out of the mash water.

Boiling bags can be purchased at a company that sells home brewing supplies.  These bags can be made of many different materials, including muslin and nylon.  The muslin bags are less expensive and may only last for two or three uses.  The nylon bags are more expensive, but are meant to last longer.

Hops are one of the basic grains used for brewing, whether for mass-produced or home brewed beer.  There are two types of hops you can use.  You can either use the whole flower hops, placed in a boiling bag, or you can use hop pellets purchased from a company that sells home brewing supplies.  Hop pellets are hops that have been dried, ground up, and formed into a pellet.

There are advantages to each type of hops in your brewing.  Hop pellets are definitely easier to use.  However, the hop pellets can make your beer more bitter, so you will need to compensate in your recipe.  Hop pellets can also be used if you are dry hopping your beer to give your beer a stronger aroma of hops.

Both dried malt extract and malt extract syrup will need to be purchased at a store that sells beer brewing supplies.  The main difference between malt syrup extract and dried malt extract is that the malt syrup extract still has twenty percent of the water from the malt extract.  Dried malt extract has some advantages over malt extract syrup in that it can allow you to more finely tune the color and mouth feel of your beer.  That doesn’t mean that there is no use for malt extract syrup.  Because of the water still in the malt syrup extract, it will affect the gravity of your mash differently than dried malt extract.

Since beer is made of mostly water, the relative alkalinity or acidity of your water supply will strongly affect the results of your brewing.  If you are going to be doing much home brewing, you will want to get a copy of a water quality report from your local water supplier, whether it is your city or your county.  If you use a well, you can have the water tested for an idea of the water quality and acidity or alkalinity. 

Depending on the relative pH of your water, you may not be able to achieve the color or relative SRM you want for your beer, or even reach the correct pH to allow your beer to ferment properly.  Though adding grains to the water when you are getting ready to boil your mash water will bring down the acidity of the water, you may still need to alter the relative pH of the water to reach the correct pH to achieve proper fermentation.  You can adjust the pH of your water by using a pH stabilizer purchased from a company that sells brewing supplies online. 

When you brew your own beer, your beer will need a cooler temperature for proper fermentation.  Depending on where you live, it can be difficult to achieve the correct temperature in the summer time.  A temperature higher than 90 degrees Fahrenheit can prevent proper fermentation.  However, there are several ways around this problem.

If the temperature isn’t extremely hot, you can place your fermenter into a water bath to keep the temperature around the fermenter constant.  Not only will this keep the temperature lower, it will keep it from fluctuating between night and day.  If the temperature is going to get very hot, you can fill some containers partially with water and freeze them overnight.  Placing these containers of ice into your water bath will keep the water temperature lower and allow for proper fermentation.