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 ...

  This is my first Pilot brew day video for my new YouTube channel. I hope you enjoy!

G'day Brewers! Today I've got my first video up on my YouTube channel and it's about how to dry hop safely in a pressure fermenter without making a huge mess! I hope you enjoy and it helps you with your pressure fermenting.

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 tha...

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...