Our Blog RSS

Bottling may be the cheaper method for packaging your beer, but it can be time-consuming, inconsistent and messy. That’s why many homebrewers prefer to keg their beer! In this article, we look at how to keg beer and how to carbonate beer in a keg. WHY KEG? Bottling is relatively easy and cheap and doesn’t require too much equipment, but a 23 L (6 US Gal) batch involves quite a bit of work. You’ve got to clean and sanitise around 40 individual bottles, prepare priming solution, transfer your beer into a second clean and sanitised bottling bucket and syphon into...

Dry hopping is a process many brewers get immense joy from. It’s a cathartic exercise; from opening the bag and smelling that initial waft of amazing hop aroma, to the pouring of the hops into the fermentation vessel. In this article, we talk about the technique our brewer JK uses for dry hopping. This technique is fairly simple but with a lot of trial and error, JK found it to work the best. He dry hops in the fermenter while the beer is warm as he found that the essential oils are better solubilised this way. He dry hops at...

It’s often said that brewers make wort, yeast makes beer – so very true! In this article, our brewing experts talk you through the importance of beer yeast in the brewing process and the terminology used when talking about yeast.  As with the other three main ingredients of beer (water, malt and hops), yeast is equally as, if not more important. Yeast is a living organism that contains the magical little microbes that turn our wort into beer. Above all, a good quality, well treated and a sufficient amount of yeast should be pitched into every beer to ensure optimal...

Continuing on with our series on learning to taste beer, it is now time to put together all of the individual identified flavours and aromas to evaluate the beer in the glass. Like when developing your flavour and aroma library, it requires lots of practice. THE TASTING ENVIRONMENT This is important when learning to evaluate beer mainly to limit distractions and allows you to focus on picking out the individual flavours and aroma. The environment also becomes essential in a competition setting. The disturbances to limit are sounds, smells and previous tastes — a quiet room without external smells like...

For many people, beer tastes like beer and they like what they like. However, part of the journey of becoming a great homebrewer and potentially moving into the commercial sector is learning how to identify and evaluate the flavours and aroma in a beer and compare these to what the brewer wanted to achieve.  By doing this, you can learn to combine, manipulate and balance the flavours and aromas in your beer to make outstanding beers. IDENTIFICATION OF FLAVOURS Identification is the first step and is the beginning of building a flavour and aroma library in your mind. Some people...