Why It's Hard to Find Reliable Home Brewing Help Online!

If there's one thing I hate as a relatively new home brewer, it's that reliable help and information can be hard to find online, sometimes even really hard to find! We've all been there, your having an issue with a brew day or with a finished beer and your looking for a solution on Google but more often than not the information Google is giving you is just not helping. Why is that? Well there are many reasons why the information out there online and in print can be unhelpful, so in this blog post i'm going to attempt to discuss them all in a way that actually helps you and hopefully stays relevant for anyone who finds this post in the years to come.

You Don't Know What the Problem Even Is

Beware of the Internet! When problems occur the most popular place to look for solutions, especially if we need them urgently is the internet. Google and YouTube are the two biggest search engines on the internet and can be very helpful when you know exactly what to search for but often our problems are hard to articulate into words or we are not even sure what our problems are in the first place! I had this problem when I tried to looking for a solution to a strange taste I was detecting in one of my very first beers. Google spat out a whole bunch of beer off flavour charts and lists as well as randomly aged forum posts, which was as helpful as it could be. But was my problem an off flavour? Was it under-attenuation? Was it an infection? All I knew is that the beer wasn't very nice and it had a sickly sweetness to it. 

Eventually after reading the lists I determined that my problem was most likely an infection and I tipped the whole batch out not really knowing what it really was. I mean unless you can get an experienced brewer to taste your beer and tell you exactly what the problem is and how to either fix it or avoid it, how can you really be sure? It wasn't until a year later that I had another batch in the fermenter with a strange smell and taste that I recognized instantly as the same as that first batch. Having now gotten a years experience under my belt I suspected that what I was smelling and tasting was in fact Diacetyl and not an infection so I proceeded to do a forced diacetyl test to determine if it was. My forced sample was heated than cooled in the fridge and the first smell of it was horrific! To me it smelled like over cooked cabbage so I started to suspect that i was having an issued with DMS instead! Then I asked my wife to smell it, as she is not a beer drinker and would give me an honest opinion. I asked her to tell me the first thing she thought of and her immediate response was butterscotch! I quickly took another smell and sure enough I could smell buttery notes as well but for me they almost come across as cooked cabbage! I proceeded to do a VDK rest on the batch of beer, I turned up the temp, agitated the yeast and let it ride for several more days and the smell and taste rapidly diminished to an acceptable level. Then 6 days later we had a movie night with the kids, I cooked a bag of microwave popcorn and when i opened it, BAM, there was that smell again, Diacetyl!

And isn't this one of the biggest problems we have as new brewers? Not being able to actually know for certain, or even articulate properly what our issues are because we have no real experience with them, and we don't have access to real people with real experience that could help us. Now I know that many of us have access to great local home brew stores where they can take their beers to get help with them, and if you do than you are one of the lucky ones! But for those of us who either don't have that access or our local home brew shop has been less than helpful for various reasons, than this is one of the biggest struggles out there for the new home brewer.

Your Equipment is Different

The next problem we could face that makes finding reliable home brewing help online is our brewing equipment, or more specifically the differences between our equipment and that of those people who are trying to help us. Have you ever had a problem, lets say for example with efficiency in the mash, and you've gone online and asked for help only to get people answering who have completely different brewing systems than yours and who cant help you? This is quite common as there is a plethora of brewing systems in various sizes out there and they don't all work exactly the same way or with the same efficiency as each other. Now you will find similarities between brewing systems like the Grainfather and the Brewzilla for example in the way they operate but the small differences in manufacture can result in differences in how they perform in the real world. I for example use the brew in a bag method in a single multi-purpose vessel and I've faced this issue several times when I've tried to get help and advice online with efficiency issues and the majority of the answers I received were not very helpful because they could not speak to my specific setup, including my specific bag type and source or crushed grain etc. These differences are everything when it comes to working through brewing day issues. Now if you do use a common brewing system than you can always get specific help from groups online who are set up to help brewers of those specific systems, but these sites are generally good mostly for that specific equipment and less so for all of your other brewing equipment like thermometers, hydrometers, PH meters and even the ingredients you use.

Your Ingredients are Different

Speaking of ingredients related issues, there are so many factors when it comes to the ingredients you've chosen that make it hard to get help with specific issues related to your brew day and your beers. Just because a malt is a certain type like pale malt for example, doesn't mean its the same as that type from a different malt house! Pale malt will vary because of the barley type used, the malt house who did the malting, the year of the crop and its geographic location for example and if you are having issues with a specific brand of malt than it could be the malt that's causing you problems or it could be the way you are mashing or even your equipment and that's the culprit. Or it could be the mash PH is out or the water itself is the problem or its just that you live in different city with a completely different water ion profile. Now its easy to get general information regarding the mashing process and how it is supposed to work but getting specific information is much harder and it's usually through prolonged experience that you learn how to overcome these issues and what causes them to in the first place. And the best place to get specific advice on the ingredients you have purchased is from the shop you purchased them from. You will usually find that most home brewing stores will know their own brands pretty well and should be able to help you with them more specifically than random people on the internet!

Your Technique is Different

Next you eventually find that even if you used the same malt from the exact same bag as someone else, the way you handle and brew with that malt will add another variation that makes it harder to pinpoint problems if and when they occur. We are all individuals and even if we are told to brew a certain specific way, there will always been slight variations in the things we do that will have an overall effect in our brewing. Then there are different techniques that can be used for the same process in brewing which will have an impact on the final product such as force chilling versus no chilling after the boil which i will talk more about in the next point.

Your Geographic or Climatic Situation is Different

This may seem like a strange one at first but it makes a difference to how we brew and the beer we produce if we live in a cold climate versus a hot climate, or a dry climate versus a humid climate. Some of us even live in elevated areas and have to make adjustments for boiling which changes as we go up from sea level. These all have an impact on our brewing and one of the most common ones is those who live in dry climates and do natural chilling versus forced chilling for their beers. Natural or No Chill as its known requires recipe modifications in order to avoid excessive bitterness due to the lengthened time the beer will spend at higher temperatures as it cools slowly. Contrast this to brewer who force chill their beer rapidly at the end of the boil and you can see how two beers with exactly the same ingredients can vary greatly!

Your Information Source is Unreliable

Now that we have gotten many of the brewing related reasons as to why its hard to find help online out of the way its time to get to one of the most contentious reasons. To put it simply a large amount of the information on the internet related to home brewing is misleading at best and down right wrong at worst. And the problem is how do you as a new home brewer distinguish between the good and the bad online? The problem is threefold. 

Firstly home brewing is evolving and as it evolves some things will change. Home brewing equipment has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years and especially in the last 10, so that information on how to brew from the year 2000 may only be relevant with equipment that was used in the year 2000. Now some ways of brewing such as three vessel systems are still out there today like they were decades ago and so some things don't change much but others like single vessel electric systems require a different way of doing things and can cut the overall processes down dramatically. So when you find home brewing information online just remember to read it in its context and know what process or techniques are not needed or relevant for the way you brew.

Secondly there is also professional brewing information which you can find online and with this you have to remember that pro brewers do things differently largely because of the greater volumes of beer that they produce and the equipment they brew on which is designed with professional large scale brewing in mind and which as a result is fixed in place. 

Thirdly there are new discoveries are being made in brewing science all the time which result in new understandings and new brewing techniques. If you are looking for information for example on dry hopping then anything over 10-15 years old is probably now out of date as new beer styles that have risen since 2008-2010 have revolutionized the way we dry hop, including the timing and the amounts and this research is still evolving! Or take oxidation, which was always known to be a problem but has really come to the forefront in recent years with the rise of hoppy beers that have a greater susceptibility to rapid oxidation.

And then lastly a lot of information online is just plain wrong, and the vast majority of that will be found in all sorts of online forums, YouTube channels, chat rooms and Facebook groups! The problem here is trying to decipher the good information from the bad and the just plain wrong and it takes time and experience to do this, and many people will follow bad advice and never question it, and then they will offer it up online to anyone else who needs help. Even today I watched a YouTube video by someone with thousands of followers and years of brewing experience who took on a popular current beer brewing issue and proceeded to give poor advice based on their own limited opinions and not on the current scientific or brewing consensus. And that is sadly common place on the internet where people still hold onto outdated traditions, or believe debunked brewing myths and perpetuate bad advice and poor brewing practices or just plain offer up their own opinions as fact and advice for others. So with all this in mind where should you go to get the best help and advice you can for home brewing?

Preempt Your Issues Through Proactive Learning!

The answer is to preempt your future problems as much as possible by researching and learning now proactively before these issues occur in your brewing, and to do this there are plenty of resources both in print and online that will help you to avoid as many problems and as much bad advice as possible. And so to help you get started I've included a list below of books, podcasts and YouTube channels and websites that will help you to brew better and brew smarter today. The one place though that I don't recommend anyone go for brewing help is Facebook or internet forums, and the reason why is that they are just too hit and miss when it comes to finding reliable and helpful information when you need help or are having problems. That's not to say that you can't find help there but the chances of also getting poor advice are far too high for me to be able to recommend them to anyone starting out. Where Facebook and forums excel in my opinion is in giving home brewers a place to connect over a common interest and to shoot ideas off one another but not for brewing advice or help. 

Books:

• How to Brew by John Palmer
• Beer Brewing 101 by Mike Warren & John Krochune
• Brewing Elements Series (Water, Hops, Malt & Yeast) By Various Authors
• Simple Homebrewing Denny Conn & Drew Beechum
• Mastering Homebrew by Randy Mosher

Podcasts:

• Brulosophy Podcast
• Basic Brewing Radio
• Experimental Brewing
• Beer Smith

Internet/YouTube:

• Rockstar Brewer
• Genus Brewing
• The Home Brew Network
• Brad Smith
• Basicbrewing
• Dr Hans Brewery
• brulosophy.com
• byo.com

Cheers, and Happy Brewing!