Jay's Brewing Blog

I wanted to throw out another plum recipe since so many people are having an insanely great harvest plums.  Apparently in this area, it’s been one hell of a harvest for plums.  Well if you are tired of making just plain wine with your plums, here is a Sweet Plum Melomel. This melomel is best served […]

It is helpful to have some sort of guide when making any type of beer or wine.  When it comes to mead though, it is style that can be so abstract, and you have so much freedom, it’s nice to have some sort of guidelines to give a helping hand. This information can be found probably the […]

I’m always a bit surprised when homebrewers don’t keep records of what they brewed.  To me it vital part to the hobby.  Now to the extent of it, that’s always up for debate but there are a few things that I would try to write down when ever I make a beer. (You Don’t Keep Records?!) Sometimes […]

Mead in general is pretty easy to make.  Honey, water, yeast – and that’s just about it.  This recipe for mead is called a sack mead.  This mead is sweet, light and true to the mead heritage.  If you refer back to an earlier post you can find out about different types of meads that […]

Sometimes with beer recipes you’ll see next to the hops a number followed by AAU.  If you are new with the world of brewing it’s understandable that you might not have a clue what this means.  An example is below: 5 lbs Light DMe 6 AAUs Fuggle (60min) 10 AAUs Kent Goldings (15min) Safale 04 […]

Plum trees are blossoming right now.  Have too many?  Well that’s not a problem any more.  It’s time to take those extra pieces of fruit and make a delicious wine out of them.  This wine recipe is a dry plum wine. Ingredients  Yield: 1 Gallon 3 pounds black plums 2.5 pounds sugar Juice of 2 oranges 1/4 […]

It’s officially that time to start thinking about Russian Imperials.  In The Summer Time?   Yea, this is the time to make Russian Imperial.  The reason why you want to make your Russian Imperial stout now is because they take so long to mature.  Making a big beer now gives plenty of time for them […]

The Randal is an interesting piece of equipment that was created  at the dogfish brewery in Maryland.  It helps enhance certain flavors with kegged beer. So what is a Randal?  A Randal is pretty much a water filter that your kegged beer passes in and out of to pick up aromas of what ever you chose to […]

Sugar is sugar right? That may be true for other things but for brewing, that could not be further from the truth. When brewing beer, you need to know what you are adding because different types of sugars will give you different results, some wanted and others unwanted. Before we get into the different specific […]