Craft beer professionals share their homebrewing secrets

We identify with pilgrims — reckless religious journeymen risking everything to find fulfillment in undiscovered countries. We’ve met more than a few pilgrims on our beer adventures — wild-eyed warriors ready to redefine the spirit of beer. We certainly don’t claim to know anything about history or spirituality, but the American folklore of pilgrims can actually be traced back to our love of discovery, freedom and beer. Thanksgiving was, in fact, America’s first beer run. This might be a mind-blowing revelation, but the pilgrims were supposedly forced to land on Plymouth Rock because they were low on beer (the beverage being a not-very-alcoholic concoction drunk in impressive quantities during the Colonial era). Like all great things, Thanksgiving has a rich history soaked in beer, and every year we love to translate that tradition into encouraging and educating our readership about homebrewing.

In honor of thanks and giving, we reached out to a few of our favorite brewing professionals around the country to get their advice on the ultimate Thanksgiving treat — homebrewed beer. From California to Delaware, craft breweries from Dogfish Head to Founders and beer professionals from Homebrew Supply to Oregon Fruit Products responded with excellent insights for homebrewers everywhere. We thank them all for taking time out of their busy holiday schedules to participate, and we wish everyone in the craft brewing world a happy and safe Thanksgiving holiday.

Kitchen sink ≠ complex

Gerry Glass — Beer, like most good things in life, requires a pretty simple recipe.

Gary Glass, director
American Homebrewers Association (Boulder, Colo.)

As homebrewers advance in the hobby, they eventually start to experiment with creating their own recipes. Creativity and customizing beer to one’s personal tastes is really what this hobby is all about, and that is a beautiful thing. A very important lesson in creating new recipes is that complexity of character does not require a complex list of ingredients. As a beer judge, I frequently come across what I call “kitchen sink” beers — beers in which the brewer threw in every ingredient, including the kitchen sink, aiming to develop complex character. More often than not, kitchen sink beers end up tasting muddled rather than complex. If you were cooking a gourmet meal at home, you wouldn’t throw in every spice in the rack and expect it to taste good, would you? Don’t do that with your beers.

My advice to those new to recipe formulation is to get to know your ingredients. You can start by tasting different grains at the homebrew shop or making hop teas to get some sense of the flavors and aromas. That only goes so far because beer flavors are more about the interaction of ingredients that have been brewed together and put through the fermentation process. You can really start to learn the flavors of ingredients by limiting your recipes to just a few variables, like a base malt plus one specialty malt and one variety of finishing hop. Taking that to the extreme, you can do SMaSH beers — beers with a single malt and single hop — but those really can be boring. If you already have a favorite pale ale recipe and know the malt character pretty well, you can then experiment with using a different finishing hop to see how that hop variety compares with a previous batch. By keeping it simple, you can learn to create something complex.

Fear is the beer killer

Mark Safarik, assistant brewmaster
Dogfish Head Brewery (Milton, Del.)

Fearlessly explore the landscape of ingredients available to you. Beer is your canvas, your creation. Don’t be constrained by what others say it must or must not be. “Goodness” will always trump “style.” Being fearless does not mean you have to be foolhardy. Experiment with ingredients before you brew with them. Let’s be honest, brewing a beer requires a considerable investment of your time and effort. It’s easy to say, “Well, it’s only 5 gallons,” but who wants to spend their time making any quantity of bad tasting beer? Start smaller and play with each ingredient a bit.

Use a tea strainer or cheesecloth to make a concentrated tea with a potential ingredient and then add some of the tea to a commercial beer to see how the flavors work. Alternatively, you can steep the ingredient directly in a small amount of beer. This will open up a whole world of possible ingredients to try and allow you to separate the winners from the duds before you brew. When it comes to the quality of your ingredients, don’t make compromises. Use the freshest and highest quality, natural ingredients available. There is no better flavor chemist than Mother Nature. Taste and smell them before you use them because most aromas and flavors you detect will end up in your beer. Once you obtain your ingredients, use them quickly or store them properly. Treat them like food because they are, after all, food.

Above all, have fun. Avoid turning your hobby into a chore. Keep it simple. Learn from your failed batches and keep exploring.

Happy, healthy yeast

Wes Noble, shift lead cellar operator
Founders Brewing Co. (Grand Rapids, Mich.)

Yeast is the workhorse of every brewery. Even the highest-quality wort would be nothing without healthy yeast so here are a few elements to consider to make the best of your weekend brew day.

Oxygen — If you haven’t already, invest in the equipment to add pure oxygen to your wort. Oxygen influences yeast growth, and aeration by shaking is unlikely to achieve an adequate amount of dissolved wort oxygen.
Make a Starter — The four-week-old smack pack from your homebrew shop probably isn’t in the best of health, and a starter can increase the cell density of the slurry and restart metabolic processes necessary for fermentation.
Pitch Rates — One of the most critical control points of fermentation is pitch rate. Pitch rates drive yeast growth and flavor development. Instead of counting cells, I would recommend homebrewers develop a consistent pitching regimen that produces quality fermentations.
Patience — All brewer’s yeast will produce diacetyl. Healthy yeast will metabolize this excess diacetyl during the end of fermentation so long as they are kept at optimal temperatures. So many times beers get rushed into cold conditioning before the yeast has had a chance to reduce diacetyl. An extra day or two for ales and an extra week for lagers can make all the difference.

Try making beer with rain water

Chris Christoph, marketing director
Homebrew Supply LLC (San Marcos, Texas)

One of the greatest issues I had seen in my earlier brew days was waste. To be more specific, I noticed my water waste. I had never been a large proponent of conservation in the past, but as time went on it began to bother me. After a little bit of research I quickly noticed there was an obvious simple fix: Rainwater was the answer. With an average roof collecting 600 gallons of water for every inch of rainfall I had enough water for an entire year with even a small storm. Never having collected or used rainwater before, there was still little to no learning curve. The entire system cost me under $200 and was installed in a just a few hours. Here are some good DIY builds.

At first, I just wanted to use this water for chilling my wort, sanitizing and cleaning. This portion of the brew day was where the vast majority of my water waste was generated. When I dug a little deeper into using this open resource, I decided to actually brew with the rainwater as well. It seems odd to do because the water is essentially stripped of its properties, but I figured I would try it. Little did I know this would be the reason I would learn water chemistry, and boy am I thankful. I did have concern about the sanitation of the water, so I opted to run it through a reverse osmosis system before building my profile — this may cost another $200 or so. But the money saved, the knowledge gained and the dropped sense of guilt from wasting so much water has been worth every penny and second spent toward this project. I hope y’all enjoy it as well!

Did the Pilgrims stop on Page 1? No. Click Next Page for tips on yeast pitching, fruit flavors and more.

Brew the right holiday beer

Jason Ebel, co-founder
Two Brothers Brewing Co. (Warrenville, Ill.)

Well, the first thing you need to do is crack open a beer. Second, you need to brine your turkey. While it brines, it’s time to brew some beer. When I think of a beer that goes with Thanksgiving dinner, I want something lighter and crisper and not too filling. The meal is filling enough. I would try something like an English Dark Mild ale that will bring some of those dark malts in and cross the flavor profile of the dinner. Keep the alcohol light so you can have several without ruining your dinner. Leave the pumpkin for pumpkin pie. Don’t put it in your beer. Once you’re done with that, it’s time to start brewing for Christmas. Make sure you brew something with power and spice that will warm you up by the fire. It helps with those cold winter nights.

We spent two days interviewing the two brothers from Two Brothers Brewing. Click to reminisce.

Pitch rates are imperative

Joe Walts, quality control manager
Ale Asylum (Madison, Wis.)

It’s common knowledge that cleaning and sanitation are two of the most important skills a brewer needs to make consistently great beer. A close third, in my opinion, is fermentation control: pitching the right amount of viable yeast cells, giving them enough oxygen and controlling fermentation temperature until the rate of fermentation hits its peak. I’m going to focus on pitch rate today and save the rest for another time. I like to aim for 0.75 billion cells per mL of fermenting beer per degree Plato of original gravity for most ales, and 1.25 billion cells/mL/P for lagers and cold-fermented ales. Converting those rates into dry yeast weights or starter volumes from common homebrewing units would eat up this whole paragraph, but you can download a spreadsheet that will do the work for you at sites.google.com/site/republicbrewpub.

One thing to keep in mind is that yeast cells in a vial or smack pack will die as they sit in storage, so your starting cell count will rarely be the 100 billion cells typically advertised by the manufacturers. A ballpark estimation that yeast stored in a refrigerator will lose about 5 billion cells per week after the manufacturing date (this will get you closer to the mark without needing cell counting equipment). Most dry yeast manufacturers guarantee minimum counts of 5 billion to 6 billion viable cells per gram, but typical counts are much higher. They can be as high as 20, but assuming 14 has given me better results at home. Although dry yeast can be sprinkled directly onto your wort, your fermentations will be more consistent if you hydrate your yeast with 10 mL of 80-90 F water per gram of yeast. I like to pre-boil the water for sanitation and let it cool to the hydration temperature. Good luck and happy brewing!

Keep it simple, grasshopper

Brock Wagner, founder and brewer
Saint Arnold Brewing Co. (Houston)

Early in my homebrewing and in my cooking, I used to believe that more ingredients led to more complex flavors. While this can be true, I’ve discovered that the best recipes use the fewest number of ingredients to achieve the desired outcome. By using just a few carefully selected ingredients, the flavors come across the palate as bright. Using lots of different types of malt or hops or fill in the blank can result in muddled beer with all sorts of notes competing for your attention.

Here, the fun really begins. Now the quality of each of those ingredients becomes crucial. Make sure your hops are in good condition. Try different malts from different maltsters, and certainly don’t forget the yeast. I can’t tell you how many times finding the right yeast has been the glue to a recipe, allowing hops to shine, drying out the malt, or adding complexity to the nose and flavor. Our simplest recipes often turned out to be the most difficult to develop. They have also won more GABF medals than our more complicated recipes. Lawnmower, Weedwacker, Santo and Elissa are all single hop beers. Summer Pils relies on a German pils malt and uses an indulgent two hop varieties. Our first beer, Amber Ale, has two malts and two hop varieties. Happy brewing! And remember, you don’t have to throw in the kitchen sink.

Brock Wagner has shared a lot with us over the years. Here are some of his barrel-aging tips.

Fruit flavors can be fun

It's always handy to have a pantry of purees like this. — It’s always handy to have a pantry of purees like this.

Chris Sarls, CEO
Oregon Fruit Products (Salem, Ore.)

In the craft brewing market, we’re seeing an exponential rise in flavor experimentation. From sour beers to fruity ciders to hoppy meads, brewers are adding berries, citrus or tropical flavors to give the market something new and exciting. We love working with brewers this time of year when they’re looking for those classic holiday flavors — cranberry, cherry or our new blood orange, in particular. They love partnering with us because our product is consistent and can be stored in ambient temperatures year-round with little waste or spoilage.

Many of these fruit flavors would work well with just about any homebrew. There really is no right answer for which fruit matches a particular beer, so experiment. The great thing about homebrewing is that you can tap into your inner mad scientist and create some really interesting brews that will potentially be worth repeating. But like all good science, you have to be able to balance controls with variables. When adding fruit, try using a high-quality fruit puree that will provide the same consistent quality and flavors that so many of the craft brewers are using today when they use commercial purees. That way, when you find a formula you love, you can replicate it. And make sure to document everything because you never know when you’ll hit the jackpot.

Professionals need to be homebrewers

Steven Courier, chief brewer
SLO Brewing Co. (San Luis Obispo, Calif.)

Homebrewing is the single best action to take if you are looking to get any job in the beer industry. As the industry grows and matures, getting a brewing education is fast becoming a prerequisite to getting a brewing job, which is great. But you still need to homebrew. Nothing will bring you closer to your craft and expand your knowledge and feel for brewing than homebrewing. I have met hobby homebrewers with more knowledge and excitement for beer than some professional brewers. And I’ve met fresh-out-of-brew-school graduates with plenty of knowledge but without the skills to actually make beer. My advice is, yeah, definitely go to school, but homebrew too. And do it a lot, and talk about it a lot. Join clubs, chat rooms and competitions. Go to festivals, local breweries, non-local breweries, conferences and beer pairing dinners. And always talk about your last brew or your next brew or somebody else’s brew. Many brewers are open and excited to hear about your brewing because there’s a good chance they will learn something too. We learn so much from each other. Our industry has always been led by people who started out with a passion for homebrewing, and they recognize that passion in others. And usually they’re hiring. Sure, they’re hiring out of brew schools, but that delicious Imperial Stout you homebrewed over the Thanksgiving break will set you apart and demonstrate your well-honed brew skills.

Go easy on the spices

Derek Gallanosa, head brewer
Abnormal Beer Co. (Rancho Bernardo, Calif.)

When fall rolls around, it’s the season for pumpkin and spice beers. Through trial and error, I’ve learned one valuable piece of brewing knowledge pertaining to spice usage: Go easy on them. Spices are assertive and have the potential to consume the flavor of the beer. Gentle spice usage creates an aromatic, flavorful beer, without an overpowering essence. In my opinion, the best spiced beers have hints of seasonal flavors, while the base beer remains both recognizable and enjoyable. An example of a spice I use is star anise that takes on a sweet, yet strong licorice-like flavor. Instead of using an entire star, I advise using a half of one point for a five gallon batch.

On that same note — treat coffee as a spice. The rich and complex coffee flavor can easily overwhelm a beer, making a coffee stout taste like bitter, alcoholic coffee. To add to that, a beer heavily saturated with coffee creates a bell peppery, jalapeño aroma and taste. I like to use coffee lightly and add other ingredients to complement it, like cocoa nibs. This was my strategy in shaping the recipe for Abnormal Beer Co.’s Mostra Mocha Stout, a 5.1 percent oatmeal milk stout. This is one of our most popular beers — a big aroma and big flavor without being overwhelmingly bold and boozy. Using spices lightly, coffee included, will enhance the nose and taste of a beer.