Jay's Brewing Blog

Every year there is so much pressure to have a beer for Saint Patrick’s day (March 17th 2013) . If you are a homebrewer your friends are most likely looking for you to come up with something great.  If you are doing bottles, well you are flirting with disaster if you are making it now.  You can […]

This is one of my favorite beers. I love this beer when it is hot out, I like it when it is cold out – this beer is simply easy to drink.  It has a white head and an amber body.  For a while it was near impossible for me to ever make this beer […]

A nice pale ale is always appreciated.  What I like about Pale Ale’s is that they are so easy to drink, and most of the time even non-craft beer brewers still like them. This one features some aromatic malt and it really adds a well balanced flavor to the beer.  The crystal malt is of course […]

A great beer to have on tap is an ESB. So what is an ESB?  ESB stands for Extra Special Bitter.  It’s a British style beer and one that is very much like our Pale Ale.  A normal Bitter is about 3.8%, the extra special ones are  above 4.8%.  This particular one is 5.7%.  ESB […]

It’s a good time of the year to start making bigger beers as well as darker beers.  If you decide to make a big beer it will be ready some time next year around this time.  So it’s one of those pay me now or pay me later  things.  Trust me when I say, a home brew […]

There are many reasons why you might want to try this recipe, if you are a hop head though, you might as well as go back to browsing other post on this blog because you’re not going to like this one.  Maybe that’s a bit harsh, I should say that this is child’s play for […]

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 […]

Sometimes you just don’t nail your brew when it comes to the tasting part.  To your defense, there’s a lot of things that could have happened. It’s best not to have a camera around when tasting a bad batch of beer because your face will make some very odd expressions.  Regardless there are off flavors that […]