I like brewing outside in the winter, just like any other time of year.  Yes, I have to wear extra layers, and maybe I spend a bit more time inside keeping an eye on my brew through a window in my house, but I don’t let the weather stop my brewing.  Last winter I was making a batch and all was going well until I was ready to cool the wort.

I noticed something was up when I was grabbing the hose and it was noticeably very stiff and I had a hard time stretching it over to where my brew pot was sitting to hook up the wort chiller.  I turned on the water and got nothing.  There was water frozen solid in the hose.  I tried the other hose and found the same thing.  I then decided I would bring the hose inside and run hot water on it until I thawed out the icebergs.  That then took 30 minutes and was not fun.

So this winter, I bought a collapsable “pocket hose”.  I keep it inside with my homebrew kit and when it’s time for wort chiller action, I bring it out, hook it up to the faucet and am ready to chill.  It worked well, and was much better than monkeying around with a frozen garden hose at a time when I’m trying to chill my wort fast.

I sanitize my bottles in the oven.  It’s fairly easy, and I hate seeing residual “no rinse” sanitizer lingering in my bottles that I’m about to put my precious beer into.  So I cover the tops with a bit of aluminum foil, stick them in the oven, and set the oven to do a timed cook at 320 degrees for 2 hours and 15 minutes.  I do that the night before and they are ready to go the next day.  Or even sit around a few days because I’ve got the convenient aluminum foil “lids” on them.

My empties I keep in the basement in an open-top box, slowly accumulating as I work my way toward the next bottling day.  Whenever I empty a bottle, I always give it a good thorough 3x rinse with hot water and some sloshing around to ensure I get any residue out of the bottom.  So for the most part the bottles are clean, just not sanitized.

When it comes to my oven sanitizing process, since the bottles I’ve got coming in are already clean per my rinse procedure after I empty one, I don’t wash them or do anything specific with them.  In one instance I had a box of new bottles from the homebrew shop, so I knew they would be clean.  They had a bit of dust on them, so I figured I’d rinse them out just to wash out any accumulated dust.  I was surprised to find a nasty looking creepy crawly had taken up residence in one of my empty bottles in the basement.  Had I not done the “one last rinse” just before my sanitizing, that little guy would’ve been in the bottle as I unknowingly capped him with aluminum foil and stuck him in the oven for a couple of hours.  That would have been a “The last time I ever had homebrew story…” for someone had one of those come floating out as I was serving my family.

So if you store your empties open topped, even if they’re clean, be sure to give a quick rinse just in case something has decided to take up residence there!

I always brew outside, as I think most people do.  Or at least people brewing all-grain, since you need a serious heat source to boil that much water and indoor stovetops don’t cut it.  But that’s OK, because brewing outside is great, as you get to enjoy the out of doors.  Different weather seasons bring different brewing challenges, and the heat of the summer is no different.

The main challenge I encountered was getting my wort to cool down.  Oh the first 100 degrees was not an issue, but trying to get down to 65F or so when it’s 85F out was a challenge.  I’d be running the hose through the wort chiller and as I kept checking the temperature, I was disappointed at how slowly it was dropping the final degrees I needed.  It made me even contemplate backtracking to the days before my wort chiller and filling a sink up with ice water to put the pot into.

Then I read about making a pre-chiller for your wort chiller.  Basically you hook another chiller up and connect it to your wort chiller.  You plumb it into a cooler, which you then fill with ice water.  Then your garden hose water goes through the pre-chiller, which drops its temperature a few degrees before heading into your wort chiller.

I made mine pretty simply.  I had a small drink cooler, bought a small coil of soft copper tubing, length of hose and a couple screw clamps.  I wound the copper tubing around a bottle and made sure the inlet was hooked up to the end that would coil around and loop through the ice water before connecting to the outlet.  Small drilling in the lid and I was all set to go.

I had frequently wondered about my fermenting yeast starter I had gurgling away in a clear growler.  I thought, “A starter is nothing more than a jug of fermenting beer.  Since I know I don’t want to buy beer from a clear bottle because of the ability for light wavelengths to get in there and wreak havoc with the beer, I should also be concerned about my starter.”  I researched it a bit on the internet in various forums but found either inconclusive statements, or no one that really thought/cared about it.

So as I made them and let them sit on a high shelf to be in the warm part of the room, I was always a bit worried about how bright the room was.  Finally, I had a genius idea- “Why grab the clear growler for my starter when I have a perfectly good and light-impenetrable brown glass growler sitting right next to it?”  With this eureka moment I decided this was so obvious I didn’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  So I made a yeast starter in my brown jug.

Moments afterwards, I realized the problem.  The dark brown glass was so good at keeping light out that I also couldn’t really see in.  So as I pitched the yeast and did my frequent vigorous shakes to aerate, I couldn’t see what was going on in the jug.  I couldn’t tell if I had any kind of krausen forming, or if I was totally devoid of life.  I wouldn’t know if I had a yeast factory going until the day I dumped it in my beer, so I was suddenly feeling not so bright.

Then, since I’m paranoid of extract flavors sneaking into my beer, I always chill my yeast starter in the fridge for a few days to get the yeast to collect at the bottom and then decant off the extract beer water.  This is another time when you want to see what’s inside in your growler.  The last thing you want to do after nurturing your little crop of yeast over the last few days is to pour some of it down the drain on brew day.

So don’t do it.  Do your yeast starter in a clear or see-through container.  If you’re worried about the light getting to it (which I never really could find if this was something to be worried about or not), but it in a box or wrap it with a towel or something.

I used to relish opening my beer fridge a couple days before brew day and smelling that sweet aroma of fresh hops waft out as my packages of hops sat chilling in the fridge.  But after doing some brief research into hop storage, I found that wasn’t a good thing.  Here’s why.

To keep hops from degrading you need to keep them away from oxygen.  You can also slow the degradation rate the colder you store them.  For every 27 degree drop in storage temperature, you cut the degradation rate in half.  Because of this, hop producers recommend you store your hops in the refrigerator or freezer.

Aside from the storage temperature, keeping oxygen out of the packaging is even more effective.  If you can smell the hops when you open your fridge, that means the packaging is not airtight.  And if you can smell hop aromas coming out, you know that oxygen is getting into the packaging.

The typical Local Home Brew Shop (LHBS) takes bulk pellet hop packages and breaks them down into 1 oz. plastic pouches, “seals” them and labels them to sell.  However, Hopunion is one hop supplier that provides a superior package before it even gets to your LHBS.  They package in a light-proof, oxygen-barrier bag, and also evacuate the air and fill the bags with nitrogen before sealing.  So not only do you get a good barrier to prevent new oxygen from coming in, they make sure you don’t start out with any oxygen.

Of course the downside is you don’t get that fresh aroma when you open your fridge, but you can always use your partially-used hops for that purpose like a sort of homebrewer’s potpourri!

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!

My first starter homebrew kit came with the standard 3-piece airlock.  It always served me well, was easy to use, so I had no reason to question it.  But I made a couple of batches that made me realize the blow-off tube method of managing off-gassing has its place as well.

The first instance was a batch I made at a Big Brew Day event at a local brewery (Rochester Mills).  As part of the event, they provided everyone with yeast slurry from the production facility.  I provided a clean & sanitized growler and they filled it with yeast.  After I made my beer and transferred it into the fermenting bucket, I went and retrieved my growler of yeast.  It was almost completely full with thick yeast sludge/foam.  I dumped the whole thing in there, and had no doubts of this beer’s ability to convert.  It was truckloads more yeast than I’ve ever pitched before.

After fermenting for a day in the basement, I went down the next day to see a blowout disaster.  The airlock had backed up and filled with yeast/krausen, the pressure built up, and eventually popped the lid off my fermenting bucket and puked mess out around on the bucket and floor.

Thinking I had passed the worst of it, I cleaned things off, cleaned out the airlock and put it back on.  Checking again a few hours later, I saw foam starting to creep into the airlock again.  At that point I knew I couldn’t contain it, so I improvised and shoved a length of extra hose onto the body of the airlock and ran the hose down into a growler filled with water to keep the hose from being exposed to air.  Soon I had giant glugs of air going out through the water.  With the size of the hose, I didn’t have any risk of plugging up with foam.

The other instance I found the blow-off tube helpful at avoiding the blowout was a beer where I had my fermenting bucket really full.  I was going to be doing a large amount of dry hops, and to counteract the lost volume from all the debris I’d get, I put 5.5 – 6 gallons of wort into my fermenting bucket.  Once it started fermenting, I soon saw foam creeping down the tube.  It made it all the way to the water jug, but still due to the size of the tube, never plugged and never had the over-pressurization issue.  I’m sure if I had an airlock on there I would’ve plugged it and popped the top.

So the airlock has advantages of being simple.  But if you’re going to have a really active fermentation, or a large volume in your fermenting bucket, you probably should do the blow-off tube.