Now that I have my water report for brewing, I am much more confident using salts to adjust my water chemistry. I thought it’d be a cool experiment to brew three beers of three different colors using neutral (reverse osmosis) water and the same salt additions to see how the mash pH varies. Why? To [...]

Adjusting your water chemistry is one of those things that can make a good beer great. Before you can adjust your water, however, you need to know what you’re starting with because everybody’s water is different. For that, you need a water report. The problem with obtaining a water report here in Denver is that [...]

One of the big changes in going from my old system to the Brutus 10 is the use of a plate chiller. Previously, I used an immersion chiller. Before that, I was an ice-bath guy doing extract brews. The immersion chiller and ice bath have something in common – they cool the entire batch of [...]

Not too long ago, Billy B. wrote an article about the types of brewers personalities there are. He made the comment that while we may find one personality fits us more than others, we all have a little bit of all of these personalities in us as brewers. I would like to appeal to a couple [...]

A handful of us homebrewing bloggers on HomebrewTalk got together and decided to do a group review of brewing software programs a la The Session. Devon over at Hollis Brewing Company is spearheading the effort and has links to all of the review posts. My assignment was to review iBrewMaster for the Mac platform. iBrewMaster [...]

I can remember when I first got into brewing, my brew days would be an almost spur of the moment ordeal. It would start with a phone call: Me: “Hey! I’m thinking about brewing. Interested?” Friend: “Sure! When you thinking about doing it?” Me: “Well, I just jumped in the car to go to the [...]

One of the great things about the homebrewing community is the contribution of individual brewers to the group as a whole. I’ve learned a ton from the successes and failures of other brewers, and hopefully the Academy bloggers have helped you in the same way. A while back I made a video on BillyBrew on [...]

Homebrewers typically use chemicals like Star-San to sanitize, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. Heat is another way that we sanitize via boiling the wort. But what about ultraviolet sanitiation (UV)? Riding on the coattails of our country’s germaphobia, UV is all over the place. Turn on the TV and [...]