The Backyard Brewer

Add caption Today I want to talk about beer snobbery, yeah I know that’s actually becoming a thing. Who would’ve ever thought that the drink of the common man (or women) would be used to promote elitist values and ideals? Well maybe that’s a slight overstatement, but in some ways it might actually be coming true, but why? For starters I want to say that beer is the drink of many different peoples, from many different cultures and it’s not beholden to anyone or any culture. You could easily argue that their is a beer for anyone and everyone, from the common man or women right up to the Queen of England! (I’m sure she loves a good pint of bitter by the way) But seriously beer is just a beverage, put simply it is a concoction of ingredients that has been perfected over centuries, yea even millenia, and these ingredients have been selected carefully over time to create what we know today as beer in its many forms and guises. And the purpose of beer is simple, it is to lubricate both th

What is BIAB For those just starting out, brew in a bag or BIAB is a method of brewing that allows you to brew all grain beer in a single vessel. Traditionally beer has been and still is brewed in commercial breweries using several vessels called tuns, kettles and tanks, depending on their use and purpose. Home brewers for the most part have used scaled down versions of these with the most popular being the three vessel system. Typically the all grain home brewer would employ a cooler for a mash tun, an electric kettle or large pot for a hot liquor tank and another large pot as a boil kettle, and this system would require the brewer to move the liquor from the liquor tank, to the mash tun and then onto the boil kettle and finally into the fermenter after cooling. BIAB on the other hand allows you to mash and boil in the same kettle thus saving equipment and extra complexity. BIAB brewers can even utilise a single vessel and brew with either no sparging or reduced sparging by heating

My First Beer Brewing Kit! So you want to start home brewing your own beer but you're not sure which method will be best or easiest for you in the beginning. Maybe you've read somewhere that beginners should start with extract brewing and step up to all grain when they've mastered the fermentation and sanitation? Or maybe you haven't and you like me, pretty much just started googling beer brewing kits and made your decision without any external influence. Either way, most of us eventually come across the idea that beginners should always start with extract kits so they can get used to fermenting and sanitation before they add in the complexity of mashing, sparging and boiling.  But my first big issue with this idea is this. Neither of these processes are in my humble opinion all that hard that someone has to focus just on them so they can become a better brewer long term! The cleaning and sanitation side of things is pretty simple, you just have to make sure that y

My 30L and my 5L Fermenters This could seem like a strange thing to write about, but bear with me as I discuss beer volumes and what it means for the average home brewer and what it's starting to mean for me!  Firstly by the term "beer volumes" i'm talking about the amount or volume of beer that you or me the home brewer, produces on average over any given period. So this discussion is one about how much beer do we want to brew? And how much beer do we think we need? And how much beer can we reasonably consume over any giving period of time? These are all important and interesting questions as they determine what our home brewing setup is going to look like, as well as how much space we are going to need for both warm and cold storage and what type and size equipment we are going to purchase. And these questions often don't factor enough in our initial thoughts as we set off into the world of home brewed beer. More often than not these decisions are already m

Enjoy the first video on my new backyardbrewer YouTube Channel