BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog » Reviews

Homebrewing Holiday Season Gift Ideas 2009

Brad Smith — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:14:44 +0000

As we enter the holiday season, many of you will be assembling your gift lists for 2009. Here are some gift ideas for your favorite brewer from BeerSmith:

BeerSmith Home Brewing Software – $21.95 – Our own homebrewing recipe software
The Barley Crusher – $109.95 – Dual roller 7lb malt mill for crushing grains
Beer Starter Kit – $69.99 – Basic beer brewing starter kit for new brewers
How to Brew Book – $19.99 – A great introduction to brewing for beginners by John Palmer (interview)
The Auto Siphon – $11 – Makes siphoning from one container to another easy
Jet Bottle Washer – $12.99 – A personal favorite of mine – fast way to clean bottles
Home Kegging System – $99 or $159 complete with tank – Stop messing with bottles (keg article)
Blichmann Beer Gun – $75 – An easy way to fill bottles directly from a kegging system (article)
Designing Great Beers Book – $19.95 – Book on recipe design by Ray Daniels for intermediate/advanced brewers – a classic!
9″ Stainless Domed False Bottom – $24 – To convert your 5 gal Igloo Cooler into a Mash Tun (article)
2 Liter Growler – $32 – So you can pour kegged beer and take it to a friend’s house
Radical Brewing book – $19.95 – Randy Mosher’s eclectic book on a wide variety of brewing topics and styles (article)
5.2 pH Stabilizer – $13.99 – A great way to stabilize the pH of your mash for all grain brewers (article)
2 liter Erlenmeyer flask – $22 – For making properly sized yeast starters (article) or washing yeast (article)
9 Gallon Stainless Pot – $69.99 – Large enough to do full boil 5 gallon all grain batches
Wort Chiller – $65 – For quickly cooling your beer after boiling (article)
Beer Ingredient Kits – $Varies – You do need the ingredients if you want to make beer
New Brewing Lager – $19.95 – An updated version of Noonan’s classic book on brewing lagers
The BeerSmith Home Brewing Guide – Free! – Our free online guide to brewing with dozens of articles

(Many of the links above are to Adventures in Homebrewing, a sponsor of this site, though many brewing supply stores also carry these products)

If you have your own brewing holiday gift ideas for this season, be sure to drop us a comment below. Have a great holiday season – and thanks again for visiting the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. As always, you can subscribe for regular email delivery if you enjoyed this post.

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Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher – Book Review

Brad Smith — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:02:34 +0000

Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher is a homebrewing book that defies easy description. As the title indicates it is a book about unusual brews and brewing techniques, but in reality the book is so much more. Radical Brewing is witty, entertaining, and thoroughly enjoyable to read. It contains about 90 recipes from a variety of beer styles, but in between it is packed with dry wit, off-beat techniques including brewing with hot stones, chilies, homemade malts and more.

Radical Brewing opens with a “embellished history of beer” that defies description. A sampling: “5,000 BC: Formerly nomadic people of ancient Middle East settle down to avoid having to lug around heavy jugs of beer. Civilization begins.” He does not stop there – the entire book is packed with Randy’s dry wit and it makes it an enjoyable trip from cover to cover.

The book has a short introduction to brewing including some sound tips on technique, recipe design and tasting. However, Radical Brewing is not intended as a “How to Brew” book, so these chapters merely set the stage for what follows.

What follows is a Disney-world E-ticket ride through the world of off-beat beer and brewing. Randy presents chapters loosely organized by style to include British ales, lagers, big brews, herb beers, fruit beers, Belgian beers, non-barley beers, ancient beers, mead, organics, and a chapter on off beat beers. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on Belgians as well as some of his off-beat beer styles as these styles are not often covered in other brewing books.

Through each chapter, Randy goes well beyond a collection of recipes by interspersing offbeat brewing techniques, short anecdotes about beer styles, historical tidbits and other off beat facts all written in Mr Mosher’s dry style. The visual style of the book is also stunning. Every page is packed with margin notes, pictures, antique illustrations, old ads tip boxes and quotes. Its easy to get lost in the notes on the margin and forget the main content.

The final chapters focus on social brewing including brew clubs, matching beer with various foods, and tips on expanding your home brewery and even a few words about going pro. Again, Randy delivers a great collection of brewing tips, radical ideas and thought-provoking commentary.

If you have not figured it out by now, I really enjoyed Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing. He manages to somehow entertain his readers while simultaneously teaching them. The book is also unique in the way it expands the world of the possible. After all, Radical Brewing is not about conventional techniques and ingredients. It manages to shed light on seldom seen corners of the brewing world and energize even an old brewer like me to try something new.

I place Randy Mosher’s book in the “must have” category for an intermediate brewer and give it five stars out of five. Here’s the Amazon Link to the book if you want to pick up a copy. Thanks again for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. Have a great homebrewing week, and don’t hesitate to subscribe for free email delivery every week.

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The Beer Gun and Counter Pressure Fillers: Bottling Beer

Brad Smith — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 05:26:59 +0000

Kegging your home brewed beer is a great time saver. Once I started to keg my beer, I never went back. However, kegging presents a dilemma for the home brewer who wants to compete, as most competitions require bottled beer. Also you sometimes want to share a bottle of homebrew with your friends.

A beer gun or counter-pressure bottle filler provides the best of both worlds – allowing the brewer to bottle beer directly from the keg without losing carbonation. Virtually all commercial breweries use counter-pressure bottling systems to fill their production beer bottles.

Counter pressure bottle fillers come in many shapes and sizes. One common design is the T shaped filler shown to the right. Another popular alternative is the Beer Gun, a counter pressure filler with a simplified trigger system to provide one-handed operation.

How a Counter Pressure Bottle Filler Works

The premise behind a counter pressure bottle filler is to fill the bottle while it is under constant pressure to prevent foaming and loss of carbonation. The actual process takes place in stages:

In the first stage, the bottle is filled with CO2 to purge all of the air from the bottle
Second, the bottle is pressurized so that the CO2 in the bottle is at the same pressure as the carbonated beer to be added
Third, the bottle is filled, and CO2 is allowed to escape from the bottle as beer displaces it while maintaining constant pressure
Finally the filler is removed and the bottle is quickly capped

If the steps are done properly, the beer will be under constant pressure during the entire process and will retain its carbonation.

Recently the Blichmann Beer Gun has become a very popular bottle filler. The advantage of the beer gun is that it replaces a complex system of separate valves on the older T-fillers (pictured above) with a simple trigger system making single handed operation possible. This lets you hold the bottle with one hand and fill with the other. Using the older models usually requires two people – one to hold the bottle while a second person operates the valves on the filler. Here’s a video of the gun in action.

Counter Pressure Bottling in Practice

While the theory is straightforward, using a counter pressure bottle filler the first few times can be a challenge. Here are some tips I’ve learned to help keep things under control:

Keep the keg at serving pressure, and if possible use a filling line that is approximately the same as your normal serving line. This will assure that the bottle is carbonated at the correct pressure.
Chill the bottles in the refrigerator before using so there is no change in temperature when the beer contacts the bottle.
The bottles must be sterilized, which presents a challenge since they also should be cold. One trick I’ve used is to fill them with an iodophor solution before putting in the fridge, then dump before filling.
Make sure that the bottle filler is properly seated before filling. I’ve had more than one popout and make a big mess.
Fill the bottles nearly to the brim, as removing the filler will leave you with the correct amont of headspace.
Moderate spillover when removing the filler is normal due to the pressure release before capping.
Cap as quickly as possible after removing the filler to minimize the chance of air getting into the bottle.

If you have your own tips on counter pressure bottle filling, please drop a comment below. I also recommend reading our summary on kegging your homebrew beer. Thanks again for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. Please click on the BrewPoll vote button below or give us a thumbs up on Stumbleupon if you enjoyed today’s article.

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Home Brewing Social Sites: Beer and Web 2.0

Brad Smith — Fri, 30 May 2008 06:31:07 +0000

Sifting Through the World Wide Web

The web has become incredibly large. The Great Library at Alexandria, the main repository of the ancient world, numbered a half-million volumes. The Public library in New York City today holds an impressive 42 million items. However the World Wide Web now contains over 100 billion public pages, all of which were created in the last 18 years. Pages related to home brewing alone number in the millions.

Web 2.0 helps you sort find the gems in this huge pile of web debris. After several months experimenting with many popular sites such as Digg, Delicious, and others I’ve found relatively few of these new “Web 2.0″ sites have a significant brewing presence.

When making this short list, I purposely left out discussion forums, blogs and some of the discussion based brewing community sites as I intend to feature these in future articles. I have limited myself to just four web 2.0 sites I have personally decided to participate in:

BrewPoll.com Home Brewing and Craft Beer News

BrewPoll is a “digg-like” social news site that we helped to start a few months ago that ranks stories based on the number of votes they receive. Registered users can submit articles and web sites from around the web, and anyone can vote on stories. The site has over 170 stories and 100+ members in its first 2 months of operation. If you want the latest home brewing or beer news, this is a great place to start.

New stories appear on the “Upcoming News” page first until they accumulate enough votes to reach the front page. Be sure to visit the “upcoming news” tab and drop some votes there, as this is the only way that top stories will reach the front page.

The beer blogging community has embraced BrewPoll over the last two months and many of the most popular bloggers now have Brewpoll vote count buttons on their site, and there is even a wordpress plugin for it. It is an enjoyable way to get regular updates on a variety of stories on craft beer and home brewing from around the web. You can subscribe to regular delivery via email or RSS feed from the main page.

Twitter

Twitter is another unique Web 2.0 site. Twitter is based on the concept of microblogging – sending really short text messages out to a list of friends. In fact, each twitter entry is limited to 140 characters. You can link twitter to your cell phone text message system so you can also twitter on the go.

Twitter also lets you follow anyone you want, and posts from those you follow will show up on your twitter home page. The power in twitter is the ability to pick who you wish to listen to and get instant updates from them. In my case, I follow fellow brewers and beer bloggers to get the latest information and news stories quickly.

My twitter feed if you wish to follow me is: beersmith. Check out my list of followers and followed to find fellow brewers who twitter.

BrewWiki.com Brewing Encyclopedia

BrewWiki is a site we started about 2 years ago as a dedicated Home Brewing Encyclopedia. For those unfamiliar with the “Wiki concept” (see Wikipedia), a Wiki is a user-editable set of pages where any member can edit or add content to the site. The site therefore becomes a collection of knowledge created and updated by its members.

Wikipedia is an example of a comprehensive Encyclopedia. BrewWiki attempts to provide the same service, and in fact uses the same underlying software, but is much more narrowly focused on home brewing. Several other brewing Wiki’s have been set up by others including notables such as the Home Brew Talk Wiki, but BrewWiki is well organized, and has an excellent collection of brewing reference pages.

The main page on BrewWiki has a series of portals listed for major brewing topics and articles leading to hundreds of pages of user-submitted content. If you are looking for some great external resources on home brewing, try the brewing references page on BrewWiki. The club listing and supplier listing pages are also quite popular.

Stumbleupon

Stumbleupon is another interesting site with a significant home brewing presence. The basic concept is that you can “thumbs up” any web site you visit using a toolbar you install from the site. Another button lets you “stumble” to sites based on topics you are interested in. For example, stumbling from the Homebrewing page will take you to a number of pages on homebrewing. Popular sites (measured by thumbs up) get visited more frequently.

While I’m not in love with the whole “random stumbling” concept, more popular sites are featured more frequently. The reason I included Stumbleupon is that there are a number of active “homebrew stumblers” on the site that post fresh content and actively vote on sites. Also they have a separate tag/topic listed for “Homebrewing” which serves as a central place for homebrewers to submit stories. This blog has had quite a bit of traffic as a result of stumblers voting positively on our pages, and it appears it has more people interested in home brewing than I’ve seen on other major social sites. Here is my stumbleupon profile.

If you know of other useful Web 2.0 sites that are focused on home brewing, please leave us a comment. I plan to do additional articles in the future on top brewing discussion forums, brewing communities, blogs and useful brewing web sites in the near future. Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. If you enjoy our articles, you can learn more about our free email and RSS subscriptions here.

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The Barley Crusher Malt Grain Mill Review

Brad Smith — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:03:39 +0000

A high end malt mill is not a necessity, in fact it’s a bit of a luxury item. When I started all grain brewing, the local homebrew store was kind enough to crush the grains in their mill for me, and I thought that was great.

However I did have one memorable batch that changed my mind. I had not brewed any beer in a while, but had crushed grains for the next batch stored in bags in the garage. To be honest, some of the grains had been there a long time, and it was summertime.

Needless to say the batch did not turn out as I had expected. In fact it was quite bad. I learned an important lesson about something called oxidization. You see crushed grains begin to oxidize when exposed to air, and it gets worse if you apply a little heat in the garage. This is not a problem if you buy some crushed grains and brew a few days (or even a few weeks) later, but it is a problem if you store the crushed grains for an extended period.

After a bad experience with a cheap Corona mill, I did my homework and purchased a Barley Crusher a few years back. There are several different kinds of grain mills, but an adjustable dual roller mill is generally considered the best. Dual roller mills have two rollers that rotate in opposite directions and draw the grain through the gap between them.

A dual roller mill will crush the inside of the grain and leave the outside hull largely intact. The finely crushed grains give you great efficiency while the hulls act as a filter bed during sparging to prevent a stuck mash.

The Barley Crusher is a dual roller malt mill, and the gap can be adjusted by turning a knob on the unit. It comes in two hopper sizes (7 lb and 15 lb), and I ended up purchasing the 7 lb model. The mill itself is built like a tank – with cold-rolled steel rollers and machined-aluminum housing. BC Products offers a free lifetime warranty on the mill.

It has a nice long metal hand crank, though the axle can be driven by a 3/8″ drill motor. If you have ever crushed a lot of grains, you will understand why I wanted a mill that could be run with a motor. The hopper is aluminum as well, and the unit comes preassembled on a wooden base that has guides on it to fit over a standard 5 gallon pail. All you have to do is put the handle on it and start cranking.

In practice the mill works great – it is quick and as promised gives you finely crushed grains with the husks still largely intact. I used mine with the preset .039″ gap, which seems perfect for barley grains. After a bad experience with no mill, and then another bad experience with a cheap Corona mill, the Barley Crusher was a breath of fresh air.

I have not set mine up with a drill motor yet, but even with the hand crank I can finish off 10 lbs of grain while the mash water is heating up. You can remove the handle easily and use a 3/8″ drill motor to drive the unit instead.

The Barley Crusher 7 lb model retails for $114.50 (plus $21.50 shipping) and 15 lb model for $138 (plus shipping) on their site, but I did contact BC Products and arrange a small discount for our readers. If you want to get one through our discount program, you can order it from our discount site (sorry, US addresses only) at a discount price of $109.95 (plus shipping) for the 7 lb model and $132.95 (plus shipping) for the 15 lb model. Disclaimer: Barley Crusher Inc is an ongoing sponsor of the BeerSmith brewing sites, via the discount link shown above. The review unit covered above was purchased with my own personal funds and extensively used before BC became a site sponsor.

Thanks again for supporting the BeerSmith Blog – please subscribe or leave a comment or subscribe if you enjoyed today’s article.

Get a Discount on the Barley Crusher

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“Designing Great Beers” by Ray Daniels – A Book Review

Brad Smith — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:57:00 +0000

I recently revisited Ray Daniels’ classic work “Designing Great Beers“, a book written in 1996 and published by the Brewers Association. Though I originally read this book several years ago, I enjoyed it even more the second time. For those of you who don’t know this book, it is advertised as “The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles” and to a large degree lives up to that billing. Daniel’s book is engaging, packed with useful information and unlike many books has practical advice on how to design recipes for many of the most popular beer styles. Mr Daniels’ book is not for the rank beginner, but is targeted to the intermediate to advanced brewer interested in improving their recipe design. The book is divide into two major sections. The first includes a fairly lengthy introduction to beer design including chapters on major ingredient categories (malt, hops, water, yeast) and the role that each plays in the brewing process. These chapters are also accentuated with explanations on how to estimate key beer characteristics such as original gravity, color, bitterness and water profiles. He also reviews key brewing techniques like mashing and explains their impact on beer design. Each section is extremely detailed, well thought out and packed with information. For example the chapter on color explains not only how to estimate color by how various malts contribute to color during the brewing process. In some areas he dives quite deep into each subject, which is why I would not recommend this book for a beginning brewer. In part 2, Mr Daniels presents detailed chapters on 14 classic beer styles and how to design recipes for these styles. Though part one is good, the chapters in part 2 on beer styles were my favorites. For each style he describes the history of that style of beer, classic ingredients used and brewing techniques associated with the style. In a departure from most brewing books, he presents not a collection of recipes but rather detailed analysis of both commercial and top award winning home-brewed recipes. His analytic approach provides, for example, a profile of the main malt ingredients used for each style and the proportion of those ingredients used. For hops, he has analyzed the number of times each hop variety was used for each popular style giving you a solid guide to which hops are most appropriate for the style. Taken as a whole, his analysis provides a detailed guideline on how to design your target beer style that goes well beyond the typical BJCP style guide. For example, in the chapter on Porters his analysis shows that an average Brown Porter has 55% pale malt, 11% Crystal malt, 4% chocolate and 5% black malt. Roast, Wheat and Munich malts are also sometimes used. Goldings hops were the overwhelming favorite, with Challenger, Fuggles and Northdown also popular. Using the BJCP style guidelines along with Mr Daniels’ templates, it is not difficult at all to create outstanding recipes for any of the styles listed. Styles in part 2 include Barley Wine, German Barley Ales, Bitters, Pale Ales, Bock, California Common, Fruit Beer, Mild Ale, Brown Ale, Old Ale, Pilsner, Porter, Scotch Ales, Stout, Oktoberfest, Vienna and Wheat beer. It is not a stretch to call Ray Daniels’ “Designing Great Beers” book a true classic that belongs on the shelf of any intermediate to advanced brewer. I’ve found it not only an interesting book to read but also a great reference book that I frequently go to when starting a new recipe from scratch. I have to give this book four and a half stars (of five)!

Designing Great Beers – on Amazon.com

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