Learning While Brewing

If you’re going to brew beer, I would recommend starting a notebook so you can take notes, make observations, whatever.  You can be disciplined about it or not.  But I wish I’d recorded more of my observations and little helpful tricks I learned along the way.

Brewing beer is a craft that is part science and part art - a combination of knowledge and experience, intuition and creativity along with the discipline of reading and following directions.  About a month later, you’ll find out whether you got it right or not.  And then the real fun begins.  There are about a thousand variables when brewing beer.  Figuring out what went wrong is part of the fun.  Really good brewers can taste a beer and tell from the flavors present what went wrong.  We’re not there yet, but we’re improving.  

Two years into this, and I’m still learning the simplest things.  This week, having brewed a dozen times, we realized that at the bottling phase, where a sugar solution is added to the wort, the sugars will be unevenly mixed (and you’re not really supposed to stir it much - you want to keep the air and bacteria out of it).  So we began filling bottles halfway from the spicket at the bottom of the 5 gallon bucket.  Hopefully, this will avoid exploding bottles and overactive carbonation.  

Another realization we’ve made recently: our beers don’t ferment properly in the summer because our kitchens are 80 degrees or so, 10 degrees warmer than proper yeast requirements.  You learn this stuff by reading books, poking around online, and by letting others taste your beers at local gatherings of brewers.

If you’re the reading type, read some books about brewing beer.  There are lots of websites that help as well.  But as you’ll see, the instructions given by the utmost authority in the “beer bible” will completely contradict the instructions you’re given by the people who sell you the ingredients.  Who is right?  You will have a crisis.  This is why you brew with friends.  You argue about it, make a call, and hope for the best.  

What you really should do is learn all you can about beer and beer styles in general.  For this I recommend BJCP Style Guidelines (yes, there’s an iphone app so you can have it with you at your local pub).  It lists, describes, and gives commercial examples of, all the different styles of beer.  This helps you know what you should and shouldn’t be tasting in different kinds of beer.  Without this knowledge, you won’t know whether you’re brewing good beer or not!