Jay's Brewing Blog

Have you ever been in a rush to get a brew made then be able to drink it quickly?   Well, if you have been in situation you know that a lot of homebrew recipes will get thrown out.  They are just too high of a gravity.  That’s when small beers (pretty much session beers) […]

When homebrewers are looking at starting there fermenting they need to consider an essential piece of equipment, the airlock.  There are two different styles of airlocks.  I get asked a lot, “Which one is better?”.  It really depends on what you are looking at doing. The S-Shape Airlock This air lock is meant to show pressure. […]

A big fear with extract brewers when switching to all-grain is that they are going to have to start all over again with recipes.  Well fear no more, you can take your extract recipes and convert them over to all-grain recipes so you’ll never have to leave them behind.  I personally only know two different […]

The next part of the all-grain series is a basic overview of some main terms that are used to describe aspects of all-grain brewing.  While right now it may seem as you are looking at random puzzle pieces, trust me the picture will start to become more clear as we work through everything and get […]

If your thinking about diving into all-grain brewing and have been reading different articles online about how to do it, you have come across the last one that you will need to read.  All-grain brewing is really not that hard, in fact it’s easy. To make the switch to all-grain brewing we’ll go through a comprehensive step […]

So it’s time to start looking at the next step for the Dry Irish Stout.  I’ll put up pictures for it when I end up making it (this weekend hopefully) but I wanted to get the recipe out today so people can start working on it or at least have time to make some modifications if […]

A lot of homebrewers look to get the edge on homebrewing with a few tricks that make life that much easier.  One is a blow off tube if you are fermenting in a carboy.  One thing I should state before I dive deep into the blow off tube is, it’s easier to get the tubing […]

When making a brew there are a couple things that you can do to make a beer a bit more complex.  I recommend using specialty grains.  When using specialty grains and extract you are pretty much making a tea by soaking grains in a pot of water.  In order to use specialty grains in your beer you need to […]

When the cold weather comes around we start to get the phone calls about how the fermentation is  not starting or being sluggish at first.  Well if it makes you feel any better, it’s usually not anything you did.  Usually around this time of year it’s because of the weather and the cooler fermentation temperatures. In […]

There’s a lot of ways to bring out a nice hop aroma in your beer.  One of the best way’s to do so in my opinion is to dry hop your beer.  So what is dry hoping? Simply dry hoping is adding hops in your beer unusually while it is in secondary fermentation.  Some myths that I […]