Jay's Brewing Blog

Every once in a while I get asked how to culture yeast from a bottle of beer.  It’s not that hard, but it is time-consuming.  If you are interested in culturing your own yeast this is the post that you need to read. Which Beers Can Be Culture When choosing the beers that you want […]

Apricot wine is one of those wines that is really good for certain seasons, I enjoy it in the summer.  This wine has a yellow/orange color to it.  Apricot wine has tart flavor to it in my opinion but is pretty good as a spritzer. Yield 1 Gallon Ingredients 3 lbs Fresh Apricots 1.5 lbs […]

Homebrewing is an amazing hobby,  but just like most things in life, people end up getting into something that they really enjoy and the joy can diminish over time.  With homebrewing I’ve found it happens kinda like  writers block but, “brewing block”.  It happens to the best of us in the hobby and you go […]

When getting into the hobby of  homebrewing it might get overwhelming because of the new words and tools that are used.  One tool that you will surely see  is called a, “Hydrometer”.  So what exactly is it? What  A Hydrometer Is A hydrometer is a tool that is used to measure the density of liquids […]

  I sometimes hear when people get into all-grain brewing that they are not getting close to their expected original gravity.  You know that you are doing the all-grain process correctly, you are hitting your temperature as well as going by the books, yet you still are coming up with a lower gravity.  I know it can get frustrating – but if […]

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 […]

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 […]

A few post ago we put up a post about how the hardness of water effects your brewing efforts.  Well I wanted to find a, “dummy” map to help you out what your water might be like if you live in the USA and you didn’t want to send your water out. I found this […]

The water that you use for your brew will make the world of difference.  Most homebrewers don’t give it too much thought, at least I didn’t.  It wasn’t until earlier this week that I was helping trouble shoot a beer and we realized that something was overlooked.  Actually the biggest ingredient was overlooked, water. So […]

I hear about customers having bad experiences with their homebrew and really it can be boiled down to handful of different reasons, and by a handful I mean 9.  I was inspired after reading the beertools blog and decided to come up with my very own, 9 ways to jack  up your beer.  Just know depending on […]