BrewCalcs. Beer Recipes. A Recipe for Mead. A Recipe for Mead Elizabeth Scheyder This is a good recipe for beginners – the quantity fits in an empty gallon wine jug, and you won’t spend a fortune on ingredients or equipment. I can’t take credit for the recipe, since it came from a newsgroup called ‘mead-lovers-digest’, which I can’t find anymore. It’s attributed to Cher Feinstein, late of the University of Florida, so it has a good university pedigree, and is dated September 1989. Basic concepts about making mead: Making mead is really very simple. When you add spices to the basic honey/water/yeast mixture, it’s technically called a metheglin. You will be adding wine yeast (or sherry or champagne yeast) to do the fermenting. Ingredients: 2 or 3 cloves, lightly cracked 2 sticks of cinnamon, cracked dash of cardamom 2 to 4 teaspoons fresh lemon zest (just the thin yellow part, not the white part of the peel) 2 lbs. raw honey (get this at a health food store – don’t use a processed honey like “SueBee”) 1 packet of wine yeast* Equipment:
Brew Tips. Beer Recipe Design. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the basic principles of beer recipes design are often misunderstood and rarely well articulated. This week we’re going to look at how you can design a great beer recipes at home using a tried and true process. What follows is an what I consider an overview of the essence of beer recipe design. Starting a New Recipe When I build a new beer recipe, I almost always start by picking a target beer style. This is not to say that the style defines the whole beer as there is plenty of room for interpretation and creativity, but by starting with a beer style, you establish the baseline for the beer you are going to brew.
A good starting reference is the BJCP style guidelines. Choosing the Ingredients The next step in designing the beer is to pick appropriate ingredients. The BJCP style guide provides some information on typical ingredients used, but often does not have detailed breakouts of proportions. Brewing by the Numbers Brewing Techniques. Beer Info. How to Make Beer. Making a mash is not always necessary--you can brew a perfectly good lager or ale with prepackaged malt extract. But for this recipe, we're going all out, with an all-grain beer-- we extract the sugars from the grain ourselves. The recipe we're following is for a beer in the Belgian white or "wit" sytle. It's called "Wit Ginger, Not Mary Ann," and was published by the esteemed beer-brewing magazine, Zymurgy.
Ingredients: 11 pounds of grain 11 quarts of water Our grains include 5 pounds Belgian pilsner malt, 4.5 pounds of German wheat malt, 1.0 pound of flaked oats, and 0.5 pounds of caramel pils malt. Take the mash (all the ingredients above in a pot) and bring it up to 150 degrees F, keeping it at that exact temperature for 1 hour. * Test the mash: The point of mashing is to turn starches in the grain into sugars and extract them into a sweet liquor. Homebrew Kegerator. BEER LABELIZER. Beer 101 - Beer Education. Clean Bottles. How to Clean Bottles For Your Homebrew Posted on March 23, 2010 by mike Bottle cleaning for your homebrew can be a tedious process and really no matter how you cut it, it is going to be a time commitment.
I know when I was a beginner, I was wondering how I could save all these bottles I was drinking of craft brew for my homebrew. I started with some Dawn and water and spent a lot of time scrapping labels off with a knife and then sanitizing the bottle before filling it. The following is one avenue on how to clean bottles for your homebrew. I know a lot of people hate cleaning bottles, but I rather enjoy it. How To Clean Bottles For Your Homebrew.
Homebrew Gadgets. In the world of home brewing, ingenuity saves time and money. Homebrew gadgets come in all shapes and sizes, and not all are strictly necessary, but most of them make the brewing process a little easier. Here we will outline the benefits of ten homebrew gadgets that have helped brewing operations, as well as a few others we have heard about. Gadget #1: Racking Cane Most new brewers brew on bare bones systems for many months, and then finally invest in a racking cane, it really saves a lot of time and hassle. Most brewers never know why they didn’t get one when they started – don’t scrimp on this item, it is really useful. Gadget #2: Wort Chiller Beginning brewers sometime think that if they have the patience, they don't need to spend money on a wort chiller. Just leave the wort out overnight to cool naturally, right? Wrong.