Waxing bottles looks bad ass.  I think almost everyone will agree to that.  So, when our homebrew club racked out the Russian Imperial Stout from the Maker's Mark barrel , Eric and I decided to bottle (who needs that on a keggerator?), label, and wax cap our share.  Coming up with a name is post all its own - as is labeling, so I won't talk about that here.  What most people want to know about is how to wax.  I found a very helpful post over on Passion Beer's website and we followed their example.   I'll walk you through our steps and give you our details.  We were going to wax about 48 bottles. 1.  You need crayons.  We used 12 Crayola crayons.  There were cheaper options, but I decided on quality.  I hear that when school supplies hit in the fall, these 8-packs are about 25 cents.  I ended up paying 79 cents for these.  But now I can do this seven more times. 2.  You need hot glue gun sticks. ...

So, you want to brew a pumpkin beer, eh?  Good for you - now that is is the fall season .  Let me help you out by spinning two tales for you to ponder. First, a brewer and his partner gather up ingredients to brew a pumpkin spice beer - a beer with no pumpkin in the mash or the boil; there is simply pumpkin pie spices added at flame out.  Nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice... you can already smell the flavors, can't you? Actual pumpkin in a can. On the evening before brew day, the two decide they want to use actual pumpkin in the beer - to add a little extra flavor and fermentables, to make it more authentic, and just for the overall experience of brewing with a vegetable.  The quickest and easiest way to do this is to add canned pumpkin - not the pie filling, they know.  They want to add actual pumpkin in a can, which should be readily available at the grocery store.  After a quick glance at the "If you want to add pumpkin" section of the instructions whic...

The more I brew, the more I learn about how I brew. I think that is true with most things in life, right?  The more you do something, the more you learn about it.  "Practice makes perfect," as the saying goes. But practicing the wrong thing can lead to bad habits and, even worse, bad beer.  So, I want to go into a little more detail about the opening sentence. First, learning.  It is something I have been somewhat obsessed with since I started brewing.  I have gobbled up information from books, forums, and podcasts.  Learning is a good thing.  It helped me know what the heck I was doing - at least in the general sense.  It gave me an overview of the process, a map, a view of the entire forest.  I needed to know how to hit temperatures, how to sparge, how to do the basics of brewing.  Learning, reading, and listening gave me a bigger picture of the process.  Those various avenues of learning were, and still are, extremely helpf...

So, the big brew day has come and gone.  (But that is not the big news.   What big news, you ask?  The big news I posted about on Facebook .   That big news is coming up soon.  Oooh, the anticipation!) Eric and I brewed our first all-grain batch of beer - a west coast amber ale based off the recipe in the book Brewing Classic Styles.  The recipe was simple and straightforward.  The mash was a single-infusion (meaning we get the grains and water to one temperature, 152 F, and keep it there for one hour), so that played in our favor.  Nothing too complex or difficult.  The hardest thing to control would be our (ok, my ) excitement. For a brew day, things went very smoothly.  We didn't have any major calamities or setbacks.  Impressive, right?  The only thing is, we didn't quite hit our numbers.  When mashing, we were under temp for a long while, but finally got the temperature up where it needed to be.  When we lau...

One of the best things about making your own beer is drinking your own beer.  And, if you are like me, when you drink your own beer, it will either be horrible or the best beer you have ever had in your life.  Ever.  You put your own effort into this beer which you are now drinking.  You want it to be good, and if it is good, in your mind, that is great!  But classifying your beers into one of two categories ("horrible" or "great") is not very helpful.  So, today I want to talk about objectively rating your own beer. There are many ways to rate beers, but a good way I have found is to just use the Beer Judge Certification Program 's method.   They provide a nice score sheet (which the judges use in competition).  I'm not a BJCP judge, but why reinvent the wheel?  The sheet is helpful and can help you be a little more critical of your own beers.  And as an example, I am going to use my IPA which finished up a couple of weeks ...

If you are just starting out brewing, most likely you are going to be brewing an extract beer.  Extract is a great way to get started.  It helps you focus on some pretty important things - like cleanliness and sanitation - before you go whole-hog into all-grain.  Plus, it is nice to step up gradually, gathering equipment over time instead of purchasing thousands of dollars worth of stuff at once. Extract is a great, simple way to make pretty decent beer.  But sometimes, you can just tell it is an extract beer.  More sophisticated palates can taste an "extract" flavor.  At first, I had no clue what these guys were talking about.  After a few batches, however, I began to pick up on what they were saying.  But have no fear, reader!  There is still a way to make good extract beer with minimal to no "extract flavor."  Here are some tips I use when brewing extract batches. 1.  Steeping Grains Steeping grains is a simple and easy way...