Home Brewing: A Complete Guide On How To Brew Beer by Houston James

Author:Houston, James [Houston, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Pylon Publishing
Published: 2013-06-22T21:00:00+00:00

Considering the aroma, do you first perceive hops or malt? Does it have that vague “sweet” smell? Or something like sourness? In light of the intended style, should it have any of these? Do you wish it had more or less hop aroma? Look over your hop additions and ask yourself what would be different if you changed the hopping schedule.

If it is a lager, does it have crisp, clean aromas, or did fruity esters sneak in somehow? Look at your records of fermentation temperature and think about how they seem to have affected the finished beer.

When you taste the beer, I think the main thing to focus on—assuming the beer is fundamentally sound with no faults—is the balance of hop bitterness and malt/sweetness. Does one or the other jump out at you? Is this what you were aiming for? Also make a careful evaluation of the mouthfeel. If it is a high-alcohol beer, does it have the thick texture to back up the booze?

Don’t just stop at saying you liked or didn’t like your beer. Name the things you liked and didn’t like, and link them to specific parts of your recipe and method.

Replicating your great beers

This entails making improvements based on the lessons learned from your last brew. If you make a good beer, but are never able to reproduce it, it’s hard to credibly take credit for making the beer. Rather than you being the craftsman who realized the vision, a happy accident that was cruising through the ether just happened to crash into your brew kettle.

Envisioning and designing a recipe is the “creative” component to home-brewing mastery, and being able to brew the same beer again and again and again is the technical yang to recipe designing’s yin.

If you can do this, the great beer is not an accident. It is yours. And if you ever have any dreams of brewing professionally, it is absolutely essential. The process is mysterious, but the point at which a brewer is able to make the same great beer over and over again is where the mystery stops being frightening and starts being beautiful.

So adopt this now as a good brewing habit: whenever you’re happy with a beer you made, you should be eager to brew it again exactly as you just did, or just a little better.

Conversely, when something falls short in one of your beers, you must diagnose and commit to memory what led to the problem, so it never happens again. We all enter the craft with a wide repertoire of screw-ups. Make your repertoire smaller.

The linchpin to all this is record-keeping. Forgetting what led to your successes is to invite failures. Forgetting what led to your failures is to invite them to return as they please. Whether you keep a notebook or a BeerSmith/Hopville digital log, just remember that the more information you record about your past brews, the better your future brews will be.

And remember, your records are only as good as your measurements.

How

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