Top 12 Mistakes New Home Brewers Make

Here are a dozen things that can help the new home brewer when starting out. These are common issues that can easily be avoided and help make a better beer.

12. Using 5 ounces priming sugar

Your Local Home Brew Store (LHBS) will often sell pre packaged priming sugar for bottling, which is just what you want for a five gallon batch for most beers (1oz/gallon). However, many batches of beer may start as five gallons, but after transferring the beer off the yeast cake, evaporation, samples you take, and any spills that may happen, the final bottling volume of beer may be considerably less than this. If the full 5oz of priming sugar is used, this can create an overly carbonated bottle of beer that could potentially just spew out foam when opened or poured.

 

 

11. Relying on Airlock / Not waiting long enough

Getting excited about your first few batches of beer is common, but moving them along too quickly in the process can be a mistake. Getting anxious to bottle your beer before it has fully fermented can result in blown bottles down the road. Relying on just the airlock as an indicator that your beer is done and ready to be bottled is a common mistake. Even after your airlock has stopped is it a good idea to let you beer age for a while. The extra time won’t hurt it. The only way to truly tell that your beer has stopped fermenting is by taking a hydrometer reading a couple days apart to make sure the specific gravity is not changing.

 

 

10. Squeezing the bag after steeping

Steeping grain is something you can do to greatly improve an extract only beer. Most ingredient kits are built with a healthy amount of steeping grain and a muslin bag (sock) to hold it all (1-3 pounds). After steeping the bag of grain in some warm water you should pull it out and discard it. However, it is a natural tendency to want to squeeze this bag of grainy goodness to get all the sweet liquid from it, but this is not a good idea. There is a bitterness (and not the good kind you get from hops) that reside in the barley husk, that can be very noticeable in your final beer.

 9.Starting with a complicated beer

It is true, that for many beers the brewing process is very similar, but as a beginner it is easy to get excited and want to go for a complex and high alcohol beer such as an Imperial Stout, Belgian Tripel or Double IPA. These beers can have extra steps or ingredients, or just a bunch of hop additions to keep track of, but the biggest reason not to start with one is time. Big beers need time to age properly and you don’t want to wait 3-6 months to find out you did something wrong. Worse, if you only have one equipment kit, you will be taking up space in your secondary fermenter for three months and not brewing more beer. Start with some beers that will be done in a month or so, if for no other reason than to fill the fridge before you start aging your 10% monster brew.

 

 

8. Not following the recipe/Just following the recipe/worrying too much

Some people get stuck doing exactly what the instructions say which leads to some anxiety when the inevitable problem/situation happens that forces them off that course. Others throw caution to the wind and start adding a bunch of extras like 50% more extract or hops than the recipe calls for. Both of these extremes will produce beer, but brewing should both be fun and produce good beer. Getting too worked up about getting everything just right can reduce the amount of fun you have while you are getting into a new hobby, and throwing your beer out of any recognizable style can possibly make the beer something you don’t want to drink. So don’t worry while you are brewing your first beer, just have fun while trying to brew a recipe that is tried and true so you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.

 

 

7. Not removing brew pot from heat

You will probably have a boil-over eventually, but there is a really easy way to help keep this from happening. If you remove your kettle from the heat source before you add your extract the slower thermal change will help keep this from happening (at least less violently). There is also the added benefit of not scorching your Liquid Extract as you add it, since there won’t be a direct heat source on it as sits on the bottom of the pot before you get it stirred up and in solution.

 

 

6. Not aerating the wort adequately

To make it simple, your yeast needs only a couple of things to sustain a healthy start to fermentation; sugar and oxygen. The only time you should intentionally add Oxygen to your beer is when you are adding (pitching) your yeast. Feel free to shake, aggressively pour, or slosh your wort (unfermented beer) at this point in time, as this will introduce the Oxygen that your yeast needs to reproduce at a healthy rate.

 

 

5. Wrong temps

Temperature control is what making beer is all about. It is a little less critical in an extract/grain kit, but controlling the temperature at every stage of brewing is what leads to consistent results and minimal off flavors. Just as a rule of thumb for ales; 155°F (Steeping), Aggressive boil, 70°F (pitching yeast), then 60-70°F (fermentation).

 

 

4. Not keeping records

This might not seem as important as some of the other things, but if you don’t keep notes of - what you used in your recipe, how much yeast you added, and what temperature you fermented at and for how long, you could find yourself wishing that you had down the road. These are just some of the notes you need to record per batch so you can dial in your recipe for the best beer the world has ever seen, make the same beer over again... or heaven forbid, help you sort out what went wrong.

 

 

3. Chlorine

Many municipal water supplies have a good water profile for making beer. Hard water can be good for some beers, soft can be good for others, but chlorine (or the more stubborn form, chloramine) is not good for any beer. Depending on the amount you get in your finished beer it can lead to a plastic or even band-aid taste, which can be very unpleasant. Using fresh spring water is ideal, but you can also treat your water with campden (metabisulfite) to help the chlorine “gas-out”. Just one campden tablet can treat up to 20 gallons of water.

 

 

2. Incorrect pitch rate

Adding yeast to your cooled down wort (pitching) is pretty straightforward, but adding the correct amount is a really easy way to reduce “off flavors”, and unfortunately this is commonly overlooked by the home brewer. There are benefits to having a quick start to your fermentation, and adding correct amount of yeast cells to your batch can make that happen. Your LHBS can give you the long explanation on how to calculate the correct pitch rate, but for a 5 gallon batch of beer over 5% alcohol, you will benefit from either one packet of dry yeast, or two packs (or vials) of liquid yeast. You will need even more than this for even higher alcohol beers, or any lagers.

 

 

1. Cleanser vs Sanitizer

Back in the old days of the 1990s and earlier, home brewers would use soap to clean and either iodine or bleach to sanitize, but this combination was hard to deal with and replaced worrying about bacteria to worrying about off flavors from soaps and chemicals. These days home brewers have access to products made specifically for their hobby, but starting out you may get these items confused.  First use a cleanser to clean any organic matter from your equipment such as One Step, or PBW (both brands are cleansers designed for brewing). These products contain what is essentially dry hydrogen peroxide and while some people even use them as sanitizers, they tend to leave a film so rinsing is recommended, and once you rinse something, you are assuming the water you used for rinsing is free of microorganisms. This is where sanitizer comes in. Products like StarSan and iodophor are no rinse sanitizers that will not harm your beer. However, you can’t sanitize something if it isn’t first cleaned, so clean  with a cleanser then sanitize with a sanitizer, and you will greatly minimize the potential for a ruined beer. Some may call this over kill, but it is a small price to pay to avoid dumping 5 gallons of precious beer down the drain.

Yeast Starters

Putting the correct amount of yeast in your beer can be one of the easiest ways to eliminate off-flavors. However, it is probably one of the most common oversights by the home brewer. Most people like the variety available in liquid yeast, and feel like it is a better product than the dry counter part, but the fact is, the large Wyeast pack and the standard Whitelabs vial, contain about half the necessary yeast for clean start to fermentation for a 5%, 5 gallon batch of ale. Using dry yeast has twice as many yeast cells for nearly half the price, but dry is limited to just a few strains. Doing a yeast starter is a great way to use liquid yeast correctly, but many beginners are intimidated by them. Salt City Brew Supply has created a helpful infographic to help understand yeast a little bit more, with simple instructions on how to do a yeast starter. You just need 24hrs, some yeast, dry malt extract, water and a container. Hopefully demystifying the Starter will be an easy way to increase the quality of your home brew.

Extract brewing vs. Extract/Grain brewing

There are a couple of simple ways to start brewing. Extract only and Extract/Grain, but before we get into the differences between the two, lets explain what extract is:

 

Beer is made from fermented grain, but more specifically, the sugars from grain (typically barley). When you add warm water to malted grain, the starch in the grain turns to sugar, and if you separate the liquid from the grain, you are left with very sugary water - add yeast and you get beer. This is obviously an oversimplification, but this is the process for “all grain” brewing which is important to understand when learning what extract is. So, back to the sugary water you made from soaking the grain. If you remove much of the water, you get Liquid Malt Extract (LME), and if you continue to remove the water and totally dehydrate it, you get Dry Malt Extract (DME). These are quality products that are made by the same malting companies that malt the actual grain, they just further refine the sugar to LME and DME.

While extract, both LME and DME, can sometimes get a bad rap from some of the brewing community, the truth of the matter is, if you add water back into the equation, you have the exact same thing during your boil that the All Grain brewers have during theirs. The big difference is of course... options. The malting companies that make the extract use their own blend of grain for what they think will make a good base for your extract beers. These blends usually come in Extra Light, Light, Amber, Dark, and Wheat. Munich and Rye are also available from Briess. Now you can add water to your extract, boil it with some hops and make beer, but these half a dozen options, even if you mix and match them, still will not give you the same control over what is in your beer that All Grain brewers get. This doesn’t mean you have an inferior product per se, but you are limited. Not much more than a decade ago, extract commonly came pre-hopped, which limited your options even further, but today with the increased availability of grain and hops, this method has all but died out.

Enter Extract/Grain. With the availability of fresh grains, called steeping grains, to modify color and taste, along with quality (un-hopped) extract to simplify the process, grain/extract has become the standard for brewers with limited space, someone just getting starting out, or veteran brewers that want a quality home brew without spending the extra time on All Grain. Extract/Grain recipes just require a simple extra step over extract brewing, which is to steep some fresh grain (much like a tea) for 30 minutes before you add your extract. With this extra step you can gain added control of your brewing process and start to dial in exactly the beer you want. Many of the pre-packaged ingredient kits from Salt City Brew Supply are Extract/Grain, and almost all recipe books and magazines will have both All Grain and Extract/Grain recipes.

So, if you want a super easy beer without the added effort of some steeping grains, extract only beer may be a good choice for you, or possibly an extract only beer kit (Coopers, or Mr. Beer). However, if you want more control over the process, color, and flavor of your beer and don't mind a couple extra steps and a little more time put into the beer making process extract/grain may be the right choice for you. There is no wrong answer, and there is certainly no reason not to try different things until you find what is right for you.

Getting Started - Beer Brewing Equipment:

So you have decided to start home brewing beer. You have tried a friend’s home brew, got some stuff as a gift, or you have just been a big fan of craft brew and want to give brewing a shot for yourself. How do you get started? Well, you need some equipment.

Home beer brewing is typically geared toward 5 gallon batches, which makes about 2 cases (24 12oz bottles) of beer. While there are other products found in big box retail stores that provide good alternatives and are an easy way to get started, such as Mr Beer 2.5 gallon extract kits, or Brooklyn Brew’s all grain 1 gallon kits, it is not that much more expensive to get a basic 5 gallon home brew kit. The advantage is not only do you get more to drink, but that you have the basic equipment to fully immerse yourself in the hobby if you decide to. You will continue to use the 5 gallon equipment even if you start to upgrade your system down the road. Here are the recommended pieces of equipment you will NEED to get started, all of which can be found at Salt City Brew Supply.

A primary fermenting vessel (with airlock) - This just needs to be a food grade container with a volume of 6 gallons or better that you can seal. The airlock will let gas out and keep oxygen from coming in. Most commonly used are glass or plastic carboys, or plastic buckets. There are pros and cons to both options, but both work great.

A kettle (big pot) - You can start by borrowing your mom’s stock pot, either Aluminum or Stainless steel, but she probably wont have a 7 gallon pot for a full 5 gallon boil. This is OK, 4 gallons or bigger will do for starters and will allow you to boil 2.5 gallons, you will just add water later in the process to get to the 5 gallons.

A siphon hose - You need to be able to move your beer around without pouring, so a length of tubing will due for siphoning. 5/16” hose is common, and can be used if you upgrade other items such as an Auto Syphon down the road.

Bottling bucket - If you would like to put the fizz in your bottles you need to “prime” it with just a little more sugar before bottling it. A bottling bucket will allow you to add the extra sugar to your beer that will provide the carbonation once bottled.

Bottles, Caps, and a Capper - Putting your beer in something when it is done is the last step before drinking, and while a pressurized keg system is very nice, it is quite a bit more expensive than bottles.

Cleanser to clean, Sanitizer to sanitize and Thermometer to meter your thermo.

There are many other pieces of equipment to make brewing beer easier, more efficient, and more consistent, but these are the things you will absolutely need. Salt City Brew Supply can help you start down the home brewing journey, and we can help you find what fits your situation best.