73 articles in this section.
Needed to rack my 1 gallon mead batch into a clean demijohn tonight. Not wanting to waste all the delicious yeasty goodness at the bottom, I decided on to make up a 1 gallon batch of ginger beer and pitch the yeast slurry from the…
How pleasant to awake not only to the sight of snow on the ground, but two carboys each with a healthy head indicating a good start to fermentation.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to have a go at making a simple Oatmeal Stout. The addition of a proportion oats to a stout can significantly add to the smoothness and the texture. It imparts proteins, lipids and gums which increase…
It was a delight to see Fendog alive and well today and all fears of mass-poisonings have be alleviated. I’d like to think he came all the way back to hear me preach at church this morning but no, he’s taken a midharvest break to pop…
Brew day at the Lab as Fendog and I set up an IPA using the recipe below. Again, we used the church’s old Burco boiler (made more efficient after a good descaling). We must remember next time either to do the boil outside or use the…
Off to visit the Outlaws for a week tomorrow, so it’s a perfect time to set up a brew at home as the fermenter wont be anyone’s way for the coming week. (Space is at a premium at Chez Trenchfoot which is why most of the brewing takes…
The first consideration when evaluatign a beer is the appearance. Three things are usually taken into consideration:
I have discovered that there is actually specialist software to help you with your beer brewing! The two best that I have seen are Beertools and Beersmith . Both allow you to design, adapt and scale recipes, calculate final colour,…
When tasting beer, its imporant you serve it correctly to all the proper appreciation of the look, smell and taste of the beer. The first rule is simple : NEVER taste beer directly from the bottle or can it came in.
A good brew day today! We decided to go back to what we know and set up batch of Olde Badger’s Crack. It knocks the socks off any of the other brews we’ve attempted so far (which is not saying much). However, after the dissapointemt of…
Until I get the keg system and counter-pressure bottler that I’ll been praying for (How long, O Lord!) all the homebrew I give away is bottle-conditioned which most people are not used it. I’m sure any of you that are brewers are as…
Good time last night at the Beer and Cheese evening for Fendog’s birthday. The present my kids’ got him seemed to be his favourite:
Trying to decide what cheeses to get for Fendog’s birthday Beer & Cheese evening, I came across this useful chart put together by the Brewers Association. As with all charts it generalises somewhat but still useful.
The trouble with English beer festival is that they are full of English beers. Now, I’ve got nothing against English beer (I love it!), but it does get a bit samey. For example at the Charlbury Beer Festival we went to at the weekend,…
Saw a friend today to whom I had recently given a few bottles of my Mucky Pup Oatmeal Stout. He’s a new acquaintance and I hadn’t given him any beer before, so I was keen to hear what he though. I was delighted to hear that he thought…
Had a nice day yesterday at the Charlbury Beer Festival. Its not one I’ve been to before and I was surprised by its scale and slickness of the operation in such a quiet little Oxfordshire village. Its an open air affair at the local…
last 15 mins: 20 g Hallertauer Hersbrcker. 8g Irish moss. 11g crushed corriander seeds. 10g orange peel.
With the reduction in temperature today, it seems natural to turn my thoughts to the chilling of wort. Of the people I’ve chatted to recently about it, immersion chillers just don’t seem to chill the wort that far. As their name might…
What with the wearying demands of fatherhood and Fendog inexplicably active social life, there seem to be very few weekends when we can actually get together to brew. With this in mind, we have decide that all future brewdays will be…
Finally got around to my bottles of Chimay this evening. Decided to boil up all my gear to sterilise, and boil up the wort in one of my mason jars within the pan too. I made up a smaller starter, so’s not to drown the yeast – 400 ml,…
I’ve decided that in addition to the pale ales I’m doing for both weddings, that it’d be nice to do something a little bit different, which I could bottle, and maybe Basil and the Senator / the Stud and his Lady could keep say half of.
A new batch of ingredients and equipment arrived today courtesy of the Mentor! We have enough kit now for our next three brews and some tools he has specially designed and built.
Q’s mash tun in the foreground, and the propane burner with copper behind it
24 Things You Didn’t Know About Beer 24 Things You Didn’t Know About Beer infographic Related Posts Pouring Instructions for Homebrew Beer Labels Fendog’s Birthday Beer and Cheese Beer and Food Pairing Chart Share This Post Share on Faceboo
It’s Easter Day and what better way to celebrate the freedom that Christ’s death and resurrection has won for us than by brewing a batch of beer! As is my habit for Sunday brewdays, I mashed in just before setting off for church and…
Well as is a very common story in my life, my recent travels promised much but delivered little in the world of beer. I had planned to visit the White Bull Brewery in Juba during my trip to South Sudan for work, and then on to Moody’s…
Today was the big day – the moment of truth – me, the Fendog, and Bow-wow nipped over to the lab at lunchtime for our first taste of Olde Badgers Crack!
Finally, I got round to making my own mash tun this weekend. Since Fendog took most of our all-grain set-up back to the farm, I have had to make do with extract and partial mash brews. But I just managed to get a cheap cool box from…
We set up our first beer brew today following the Mentor’s instructions and using the ingredients he bought for us. He has been brewing for years but tends not experiement these days. This is his standard tecnique which is designed for…
Finally we got round to brewing our royal wedding beer today. Fendog came up from the big smoke and the rain held off sufficiently to brew in the back yard, but it still proved an extremely frustrating day. After some thought, we gave…
Not satisfied with entering the the Jerusalem marathon, Fendog has planned another charity event in aid of Confident Children out of Conflict .
With their monthly meetings on Wednesday evenings, Fendog and I have been unable to meet the Oxford Brewers group as Wednesdays find us hard at prayer and Bible study. Admirable, you may think. But one cannot help recalling the wise…
I’ve put together a label for the Slurry Tank Oatmeal Stout which is conditioning nicely in the shed. Have just realised these are going to be a real pain in the butt to cut out. I shall go back to rectangular labels from now on.
Work Christmas lunch today at the Red Lion. Haven’t been in there since it was done up. Its pretty nice and the food was good but the beer selection is poor and expensive. Was pleased with the secret santa present I got for the Canary…
Fendog came round tonight to help bottle the Oatmeal Stout. After my last two nightmare bottling sessions, I was glad of the help. It is so much easier with two, plus I managed to borrow the Geek’s countertop cappper so I had none of the pr
A fellow brewer from the Oxford brewgroup put me onto Beer Labelizer which, dispite the disappointingly American spelling, is a neat little site offering simple templates for you to design your own beer labels. Simply enter a few…
Check this out! In what these days is a rare flash of inspiration, I’ve come up with an awesome name for my barleywine: “The Audacity of Hops”. I think that suits it well as it is hopped through the roof, and has vast pretentions of…
This morning’s “Today” programme on Radio 4 featured an story on the initiative of British brewers to recreate the traditional journey of Russian Imperial Stout by ship from England to St Petersburg. A favourite of Catherine the Great,…
No, I’m not talking to my friend’s new manservant. I’m referring to his latest effort (if that is not an overstatement) at brewing beer with the Geek. When I talk about homebrewing, friends often say they tried it once (usually as a…
Ok, I live in the dark ages. I don’t have a TV. I don’t particularly miss it – its just full of sex and violence anyway, and I get enough of that in real life. Except the sex. One noticeable consequence lately though, is that the whole…
Woah! Returned home to find the walls and ceiling of the utility room completely splattered like an explosion in a sewage plant. And the fermenter was invisible inside a four foot high seeting pile of brown foam. It took ages to clean…
Another Brewday that took far longer than I was anticipating. The main reason: Fendog bailed on me. Some excuse about getting his nostrils plucked – a likely story. I courageously pressed on on alone. I racked the Windsor Knot into a…
In these times of austerity, and being a tight-arse as well as lazy, I am thinking about reusing the yeast from our current brew (the Windsor Knot IPA) in the next brew that I do.
A university in the North Carolina is aiming to sell its own beer and offer a degree in brewing after a class in the subject last year proved extremely successful.
Following on from my post last week about Beer in the Letters of Martin Luther, I thought I would share a few more interesting stories about the great Reformer’s love for beer. My favourite Luther quote is one that I expressed myself…
I mentioned in a recent post our intention of following the tradition here in Britain of brewing a commerative beer whenever there is a royal wedding. Hopefully, we will get a brewday for this on Saturday and I thought I’d share a few…
Today in 1546, one of our heroes of the faith, the great Reformer Martin Luther died. Luther was a man of startling contrarieties – a brilliant mind whose contribution to Christian theology is inestimable, he was courageous,…
Wychwood do a good job with their marketing. Their website looks really great and they have worked hard at the dinstinctive branding of their beers. As with all their products, Hobgoblin comes in a eye-catching bottle with an…
Spent a very pleasant evening last night with the Dandy whom I have not seen since his liposuction. I must say he cuts a fine figure in his new super-skinny jeans though I’m sure he must need some kind of tool to get them on and off.
As we head towards spring here in the UK, royal wedding fever will be hotting up along with the weather. Magazines and websites are already packed with speculation about the dress, the food, the guess, the presents, the ceremony…
Right, I think its about time for another in our series looking at some of our heroes of the faith – the great brewers in Church History. This week its St Arnold of Soisson (also known as Arnoldus), one of the many patron saints of…
Morten Meilgaard is an unsung hero of the brewing world. A brilliant chemical engineer and real ale enthusiast, he basically invented the language used to describe beer. Although human beings have been enjoying the taste of beer for…
The great thing about beer tasting, as opposed to wine tasting, is that you have to actually drink the beer not spit it out! Apparently this is because the tastebuds for bitterness (a key component of any beer) are located at the very…
Have you ever found a beer recipe that you really like the look of, but have found that you don’t have the correct variety of hops and can’t get hold of it?
Smell is critical to tasting anything. Since the senses of taste and olfaction are linked, smelling the beer gives the palate a sense of what to expect. If you don’t believe it, try holding you nose as you eat something, and you will…
When it comes to Christian brewers, or any brewing for that matter, nobody does it better than the Trappists. These dudes know how to party.
Still no word from Fendog about how the wedding brews went. Its not like him to stay silent. He hasn’t returned my texts and I fear the worst!
Today, I am going to start a new series of posts on how to taste beer. Hopefullly, this will build into a step-by-step guide on the art of beer tasting which will be useful to both the casual drinker and the expert brewer. The aim is…
This weekend I finally got around to bottling and kegging some of my brews. On Saturday I bottled I think the second full-mash that I’d made, which I think was a clone of Old Speckled, which I was considering for Basil and the Senator,…
1040 Return. Check mash temp. It’s 66, rather than 67 I hoped for. I ponder and figure it’s best just to leave it.