This was one of the interactive presentations in which the speaker had made available five different types of beer which were handed out throughout the presentation. The idea behind this presentation was to see what the difference was between different yeast strains to see if one could tell the difference. With this talk being very […]
This year was my third Homebrewcon, though second one in person. Compared to Providence in 2019, it was a much smaller show but after 2 years of cancellations it completely makes sense. It was also our first time visiting the United States since 2020 to judge at the annual Amber Waves of Grain competition. With […]
How much sugar (extract) can we get from malt? When we first start learning to brew the numbers seem like magic and try out best to use what our software or lookup tables (such as those in Palmer’s “How to Brew”) for granted. It’s possible to generalize a grain into one of the known categories, […]
Yeast laboratories perform numerous tests so they can give us brewers details as to how we can expect yeast to behave. Along with the various flavours a yeast can provide, the lab also provides a range for which a product can attenuate. Punch this into our brewing software and we have a general idea of […]
2016 was a big year for us, since it marked my exit from the software industry and into brewing. I started attending the Niagara College brewing program in January and began to focus on levelling up my brewing by practicing a lot at home. V and I also spent a lot of time expanding our […]
Sometimes we want to step up our game and push our homebrews a little further in terms of appearance. We’ve gone ahead and taken care (and time!) to get all the labels off tons of bottles so at least our beers look a bit cleaner on first glance. Though, to take it further you want […]
Something that often comes up is needing to make adjustments and sometimes it’s just easier to pull out a calculator and do the math yourself. I have a clipboard that my brewday sheet goes on, and I’ll be sticking this onto it so whenever I need to make an adjustment to kettle volumes or figure […]
One of the styles of beer that I always reach for is the Bavarian Hefeweizen. In Ontario, it’s a bit of a hit or miss product; the ones that win me over often have more of an emphasis on bananas instead of cloves. A fellow home brewer once told me that the only way they […]
I’m relatively new to the beer competition scene and have only helped out at a couple. It’s mostly been to help with sorting or getting beers out to people when I’m stewarding. Until I judged for the BecauseBeer homebrew competition I was under the impression that only BJCP judges (or people with a BJCP ID) can actually […]
At the end of February I started up an experimental batch of stout where I’d be trying to get some salted chocolate flavours. Overall I’d say I missed that goal, but I’m still somewhat happy with the result and I learned quite a bit into how salt will have an effect on the flavour profile […]
Famous Last Worts 