The Backyard Brewer

 

 

 

Today I get to say goodbye to my old brew bag that's full of holes! It served me well for 6 mashes but it's time to retire it as I've got a new bag to try out that's hopefully going to be the last brew bag I will ever need! My old bag cost me $8 and was advertised as a "Top Shelf" polyester brew bag with reinforced webbing but sadly I only got 6 brews out of and on my last brew day it leaked nearly a cup full of grain into my kettle, so much for top shelf! The bag I just purchased is called the Brew Bag and it has flown halfway around the world to be here, and it cost me a whopping $82! So why on earth would anyone spend that much money on a nylon brew bag? Well I could buy 9 of the cheap ones and get at least 54 brews from them for the same cost, but there's also another issue I was having with my old brew bag, and that was poor efficiency thanks to the very fine 65 micron mesh that it was made from. It had the tendency to trap in a lot of sugars and m...

Brewing in a bag is a great way to get into all grain brewing cheaply and easily. You can use a brew bag for almost any mash tun you can find and it works by filtering the wort from your grain bed and allows you to remove the spent grain from the wort instead of the other way around. But brewing in a bag can also save you time, money and expensive gear by enabling you to use any suitable pot or hot water kettle or urn, so you can brew your beer from start to finish in a single vessel. And in fact with the right bag this method can be just as efficient as an off the shelf all-in-one electric brewing system for a lot less money, and you don’t have to worry about regular pump blockages which seem to plague a lot of the all-in-one brewing systems out there.  But I must place the emphasis here on getting the right bag, and unfortunately not all brewing bags are equal. For my first year of brewing in a bag I used the only bags I could find in shops here in Australia. They were cheap, gav...

Today I'm getting back on the horse after a disastrous brew failure last time round. To cut a long story short, I managed to ruin my last beer on brew day when I made a spur of the moment decision to add acid to my mash without planning it. I ended up with a beer that was undrinkable and a hard lesson about the dangers of making brewing decisions with no prior understanding. Lesson learnt. So today I'm going to remake that beer but this time I'm going to do things right, and the first change I've made is to purchase bru'n water and plan out my recipe additions properly. Bru'n water allows you to more accurately make your acid additions by taking into account your current water profile and grain bill. So instead of guessing or trying to look up info on google at the last minute I'm going into this beer with a baseline that I can test and modify going forward.   Bru'n water also takes care of your other water additions and puts it all into one spread...

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 ...