New Knowledge

I have been learning a lot from the experiments of the Basic Brewing Podcast and from my personal experimentation. First piece of information is the fact that I made a mistake or two on my first beer. It still turned out great, but I should have never added tap water at the end of the boil to make it so it equaled 1 gallon. What I needed to do was boil 5.5 quarts of water and expect to loose 1.5 quarts during the boil. You lose about .5 quarts for every 15 minutes you boil. Adding tap water can contaminate your beer because it has not been sterilized.

On another note, you do not need to measure the yeast so precisely. In the Brooklyn Brewshop recipes they always recommend to add half the package of yeast and according to Basic Brewing, the yeast are going to make a bunch of new baby yeast as soon as you get things going with the sugars.

One last thing, you do not need to boil dry malt extract for 45 minutes, just 15 in order to sterilize it. This means that if you are making a beer like my amber ale, with only dry malt extra and hops, you only need to boil the hops and malt extract for 15 minutes and you are done. This is going to make things much quicker next time I make that recipe. Well, that is all for now.

I am continuing to learn a lot about the process and having a great time. I will keep you up to date on what I learn.