Welcome again after a short break. So far, you were able to get acquainted with the basic brewing process, the equipment that is necessary to brew at home and the ingredients that are needed. Today I decided to write a few words about what to do to achieve a perfection in brewing. Let's start :)
Every time you brew you should keep in mind three very important things. Those things are preparation, cleanliness and record keeping. If you are good prepared, then you can avoid all the surprises that can ruin your work. You don’t want to realize in the middle of the process that you don't have any yeast, do you? Sanitizing and cleaning may be considered as a part of preparation but they are very very important. Some people say that good brewing is 75% cleaning. It is difficult to disagree with this statement. And lastly, think what kind of brewer would you like to be - a lucky one or a consistent one? Something that would make the difference between luck and skill is good record keeping.
Before the brew day will come, make sure that you have all the equipment and ingredients that you need. Preparing the equipment is mostly a matter of cleaning and sanitizing it. But you can also consider what you are going to do during the brewing. Check the recipe and make sure you have all needed ingredients in proper amounts. Do you need to buy water or the one from your tap is good enough? Think which equipment needs be sanitized and which needs only to be clean. Go through each and every step of the process in your head and make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything.
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When you are good prepared, your brewing process should go smoothly, easily and pleasantly, giving you a lot of fun.
Every good brewer should take care about cleanliness. Remember that the terms clean, sanitize and sterilize are not the same. Clean means free from stains, dirt or foreign matter. Sanitize means that all spoiling things like microorganisms etc. are reduced to the negligible level. And sterilize means to eliminate all forms of life, either by physical or chemical means. Usually, the sterilization is not necessary. But sanitizing is very important and means that everything that touches the cooled wort must be sanitized. It is very common to use sanitizers. I wrote some more about them in [this] post. They are meant to be used on clean surfaces and this should be sufficient for homebrewing purposes.
Good notes are your best friend. You should always do notes about what ingredients you use, what were their amounts, what temperatures and times were used in your brewing process. If you don’t like the traditional methods like pen and paper, the internet is full of brewing spreadsheets and software that can be a big help. As a homebrewer, you should be able to repeat good batches and learn from poor ones. Let’s say that you did a bad batch and you are asking another brewer for some advice - you can be sure that they will ask about all the brewing details. And by brewing details I mean your ingredients and amounts, time of boiling, the method you use to cool down the wort, the yeast type, the temperature and time of fermentation, etc. If your beer tastes strange, there are many possible causes of that. Without keeping track of everything that you did you won’t be able to figure out what gone wrong and fix it next time. In the future, I will prepare a post about possible causes for most of the common problems.
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This post wasn’t too long, but it contains really important information. I strongly recommend to learn it if you are going to start your adventure with this beautiful hobby :)
See also:
HomeBrewing - the basic process description
HomeBrewing - the needed equipment
HomeBrewing - THE INGREDIENTS
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