BrewChatter BrewCranium

The Complete Guide to Bottling Any Fermentation

Even though bottling your homebrew is one of the original methods of packaging beer, it can be a little bit tricky.  Sometimes it seems that the world is conspiring against your latest brew, leaving it flat or half carbonated, and whether or not you’ve been at this brewing game for a while, there are enough variables in bottling and naturally carbonating anything, be it beer, mead, cider, sparkling wine or even kombucha, that it can be hard to chase down what actually happened.  This week we’ll talk all about the bottling process and the tools you’ll need to be successful!

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Hydrometer VS Refractometer: Measuring Your Wort

Although it seems like a very simple, very necessary step when fermenting your favorite homebrew, wine, mead or cider, what are you really measuring when you measure your favorite libation?  This week we’ll go a little more in depth as to how to use your hydrometer and refractometer, as well as some of the math behind specific gravity, brix and Plato and how to easily move between them.

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Converting Beer Recipes to Fit Your System

This week on BrewCranium, we’ll talk all about how to convert your favorite recipes down to your scale, and go through our process for making conversions to get the beer in our glass as close to the beer in our head as possible, while making the recipes reasonable and repeatable!

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How to Homebrew Your Best New England IPA

Hazy IPA’s are a big deal, and not only right now, but in general.  This whole new type of IPA has taken America’s favorite beer style, a beer style that while popular, has always been very polarizing, and made it easier to drink, more balanced and just plain JUICY.  This week we’ll explore what malts to use, the most effective hopping techniques, and how to choose the right yeast so you can make your best cloudy beer yet!

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Homebrewing with Yeast Starters: How and Why

Yeast is one of THE most important components in our beer.  It decides the overall balance of the finished beer, which qualities will be enhanced and suppressed, and easily accounts for 80% of the overall flavor profile of your beer.  The question is, why wouldn’t we want to make sure that these guys are being pampered?! This week, we will talk about what’s happening in your yeast starter, how to properly calculate cells like the pros, go over how easy this extra step is, and how much it adds to each of your beers!

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What Do You Get When You Ferment With Kveik Yeast?

With the recent popularity of the more available Kveik yeast strains, many of your are wondering what the heck that is!  Wait, you mean there’s a beer yeast that I can ferment with upwards of 80° F and still get a clean and delicious beer?  Join us as we talk about this versatile yeast, and go back a few hundred years to explain where it comes from!

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Kegging Your Homebrew: The Complete Guide

Kegging may very well be the best thing EVER for us homebrewers, and I’m pretty sure that it’s at least part of the reason that homebrewing is still a thing.  As fun as bottling can be, the boxes full of glass bottles that are waiting to be filled, the extra wait time while nature carbonates your bottle for you, and the extra time and process it takes to actually do it can all get really old, really fast.  Luckily, kegs are here and they negate all of that! This week we’ll talk about how to keg, carbonate and pour your favorite home brews!

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Homebrewing a Cream Ale: S & M Cream Ale Recipe Kit and Process

Cream Ale is a very fun, very light beer style that must have been made with BBQ’s and summer’s in mind.  This beer has a lightly sweet grain characteristic that plays so well with the mild spice and fleeting lemon characteristics of late addition Liberty hops.  Quite frankly, if you want something light and easy to drink, as well as something that you can have a few of without behind the drunk guy at your buddy’s BBQ, this is the perfect choice!  This week, we’ll talk about our home brew kit, what’s in a cream ale, where we strayed from the traditional Cream Ale ingredients, and how you can make your own incredible summer favorite!

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The Science Behind Kombucha

Kombucha is very fun and very easy to make, but what’s REALLY happening under that creepy looking SCOBY?  This week we we talk about making your own kombucha, adding fruit and flavors, and the science behind what is happening during this ancient fermentation process!

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