Jay's Brewing Blog

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 […]

Some people really enjoy a chewy wheat.  Me personally I kinda like it on the other side.  When I make my wheat beers, I tend to make more that are on the American wheat side. So what is the difference between a German Wheat and an American Wheat?  The real big difference is that with […]

One of the cool things about homebrewing is that you can really make what ever type of recipe that you would like.  Also the thing that I particularly enjoy is that every beer has a story behind it.  Most beers just weren’t created just because.  It was either the time period, the ingredients available, the […]

I’ve been talking about how to making a Jockey Box for a while.  I still haven’t made one because I’ve been looking for some good directions.  I think I found them.  All of this information can be found here, I just tried to condense it a bit better but the general directions and the pictures […]

“What malt extract is better, dry or liquid?”  This is a pretty common question that homebrewers ask when deciding which one to use.  I unfortunately don’t have an answer in this post about which one is, “better” only because I don’t believe that there is one which is better.  At the end its preference.  I’ll break […]