Education
Entering a Homebrew Competition
Reasons for Entering Homebrew Competitions Feedback Entering homebrew competitions is a great way of getting feedback on our recipes and brewing efforts. This feedback can take your brewing skills to the next level. Instead of just brewing good beer, you can use the feedback to brew great award winning beer. Competition Many of us are … Continue reading
Water- Clearly Your Biggest Ingredient
Beer contains approximately 90% water, and the importance of the liquor to final beer quality cannot be over-estimated. The subject is so complex that there are entire books on the subject, such as John Palmer & Colin Kaminski’s Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers. As outlined in Ray Alton’s “Water Water Everywhere…..” article in breWorld (01/03/99), Historically … Continue reading
Style Spotlight- Category 12, Porter
According to winning-homebrew.com; Porter is one of the beer styles in which many beer enthusiasts know the history. It is well documented in books and online. There is some controversy, however, as to the authenticity of some of its published history. Most of the controversy comes from the most widely quoted source by a writer … Continue reading
Style Spotlight- Category 3, European Amber lager
There are two malt forward, low hopped styles represented in Category 3: 3A- Vienna Lager, and 3B- Oktoberfest. Below is a great background and history of these styles as contained in Winning-Homebrew.com. In addition, there is a great discussion of these styles, along with award winning recipes, on episodes of Jamil Zainascheff’s Brewing with Stye podcasts- … Continue reading
Basic Brewing Termanology
Preforming his last duty as our Secondary Fermentor (before being affectionately adorned “ass of the month”), Chris Wiken provided a list of basic brewing vocabulary to the group. While this is not the exact list it should serve as a good reference point to FLOPS members. This was taken from lovetobrew.com, and a more exhaustive … Continue reading
The Importance of Yeast
During April’s meeting Andy broke out his microscope so that FLOPS’ters could view the magic of microbiology; specifically yeast cells. While yeast is invisible to the naked eye, it is arguably the most important and often overlooked ingredient in any beer. In fact, albeit no fault of the Germans as yeast hadn’t even been discovered … Continue reading
Calibrating Thermometers
Whether your measuring strike water, mash, or sparge water temperatures, hitting and maintaining your target is a critical piece of creating a great home brew. But how do you know know if your thermometer is reading correctly? Are you really mashing at 152, or is more like 148, or 156? All these mash temps have … Continue reading
