There are a lot of things to do before your brew day to ensure you’re prepared and not scrambling around at the last minute.  One of those things is to check the Alpha Acid (AA) % of your hops you’ll be using for bittering.

Most brewers are familiar with the equations, or at least the concept thereof, for how to calculate a beer’s IBU based on the AA of the hops you use and when you add them.  As you geek out more into this topic and research it, you can quickly find your eyes glazing over as people are babbling on about chemistry reactions and throwing around terms you’re pretty sure they don’t even know what they mean.

From the higher technical analysis of those more chemistry-smart than I, here’s the takeaway that seems to be of practical use.  When trying to substitute hops in a recipe, you should get particular about matching the IBU contribution from your bittering hop additions, and for the flavor & aroma additions, try to match the amount/weight.

Since hops have a range of typical AA% from batch to batch, you should always check the AA% of the hop you bought from the Local Home Brew Shop (LHBS) and tweak your recipe with your brewing software to get the proper amount of hops to add to get the IBU contribution your recipe is aiming for.

And more importantly, it’s a good idea to do this a couple days before brew day.  When you find your bittering hop addition that was planned to be 0.7 oz. of 4% AA Hersbrucker, now needs to bump up to 1.4 oz. since the Hersbrucker hops are running at 2% AA from the LHBS, you’re stuck.  Your little 1 oz. packet of hops that previously was going to have some leftovers, now is short and you need to get another one.  Discover that on brew day and you’ll have no option but to short-change your recipe on the fly and see how it turns out.  Sometimes this creates something unexpectedly good.  Other times it results in exactly what you would expect, which is not what you were aiming for when you planned the recipe.

My first attempt at a yeast starter was a failure.  I didn’t know why at the time, but it was obvious the flat, non-bubbling mixture wasn’t any kind of “starter”- it was completely dead.  I made it in an empty, cleaned 2L pop bottle so I could see through the bottle pretty easily.  I followed the directions for size, amount of malt extract, etc.  I was even frequently shaking it up in order to aerate.

The problem was I was suffocating it.  I kept the lid closed tightly, thinking it needed to act as my sort of airlock barrier to keep all the gremlins out that they make you fear as they drill into your head about sanitizing while homebrewing.

However, by keeping the lid on tight, there were 2 problems.  First was any CO2 created by the fermentation had nowhere to go.  So it would just build up gas inside the bottle and build pressure.  Eventually this would stifle out the fermentation reaction.

The second problem was I wasn’t introducing any new oxygen to the hungry yeast process.  As I later learned, in the case of the yeast starter, an airlock doesn’t work.  It solves problem #1 (pressurization and CO2 build-up), but doesn’t allow any extra oxygen supply to help keep the yeast propagation going.

So I learned the following routine with the lid was the best approach: 1) Keep the lid loose while the bottle/jug is sitting in a warm spot and fermenting, 2) Tighten the lid only when shaking it to aerate the wort (with the oxygen you’ve let in with the loose lid while it was sitting on a shelf.  After following this process, I’ve had good luck with my starters fermenting and multiplying yeast.

There are 2 kinds of homebrew competitions- one that has judges rate beers against the specific style guidelines, and the other where it’s a people’s choice, or popularity vote.   I entered one that was judged by a group of other homebrewers.  Standing by my table serving my Blonde Ale, I overheard a lot of comments by people holding their voting cards.  I witnessed a lot of people looking at my little sign saying “Blonde Ale” and walking on by without tasting it.  But the guy next to me with the Belgian Sour blah-blah-blah or the Dunkelweiss Dark Peanut Butter Coconut Ale, saw a lot more tasters.

Don’t get me wrong and think that I didn’t have fun talking to the brewers and figuring out how they made a great peanut taste in their beer without it being overpowering.  But I definitely noticed that the stranger the ingredients or crazier the style, the more people that were lined up to give it a try.

I would humbly suggest that my beer was very good.  Maybe one of the best I’ve brewed, surprisingly.  I was limited by the ingredients available, but I lucked out and made something really good.  But it wasn’t weird or strange.  It didn’t include any unexpected ingredients like peanut butter, black licorice, or gummy bears.  So as homebrew judgers walked along figuring out which ones they were going to taste, the plain sounding and ordinary got passed over.

Obviously no one could tell what my beer tasted like from the name.  But they could tell it wasn’t anything wild, exotic, or unknown.  So what I took away from the experience was that if I was going to win the people’s choice, I needed to have a description that lured people in.  And to lure people in, I needed something strange and wild.  So the takeaway I had was next time I brewed a Blonde Ale, I should throw some Jalapenos or Sour Patch kids into the mix and that might get people to wander up and give it a try.  Some advice for you if you’re entering a hombrew competition.

When you brew outside, there are a number of factors that are entirely dependent on the weather.  An important one is your rest temperature.  Your recipe/process may call for a rest at a given temperature for 15, 30 minutes, or even as long as an hour.  While brewing outside, the ability to hold that temperature is dependent on your weather that day.  Brewing in the summer on an 80 degree day, it might be a lot easier to hold 145-degree temperature than when  brewing on a 30-degree day.

The ability to hold temperature is largely dependent on the amount of grains being soaked (the more the grain, the more resistant the mash is to the weather outside).  The simplest way to stay in control is to wrap your mash tun in layers to keep the heat transfer down.  In the summer you may be fine simply turning off the propane heat and waiting the whole mash period, but come fall you probably need a wrap (towels work well), and come winter you definitely need a wrap.  An easy solution to this warmth is to get a good winter coat that’s big enough to fit around your mash tun and then throw that over it when you reach your rest temperatures.  It’s certainly a lot easier than turning on and off the heat on your burner to try to maintain a fixed temperature!