Home Brew Beer - Est. 2006

After my last post I decided to check that my made-up-on-the-spot recipe would produce something like the English Best Bitter that I hoped for. I read up about extraction efficiencies and the like from Jon Palmer’s excellent How to brew site and I also crunched my numbers through a piece of open-source software called Qbrew (site). This is similar to the very popular Promash (site) but is free so I went with it. Qbrew is available for Windows, Mac, and various flavours of Linux (I have it running on Kubuntu 6.06 for those that care).

Anyway back to the beer/recipe at hand. The outcome of all this tiresome research is that I have seriously over-estimated the amount of extract and/or grains I’ll need for the beer style I’m making. It turns out that I’ll need only the following:

• 1lb Amber/medium DME
• ~0.25 lbs Crystal (115L)

The hops are also reduced but I guess that’s more of a matter for personal preference than actual, technical beer making. I prefer less bitter beers so they will be reduced.

I’m going to order these tonight from one of either Easybrew or The Home Brew Shop. Basically, whichever comes out cheapest. I’ll buy the grain pre-crushed (I don’t have the facilities to do that); I think it’s the same price anyway. I’m also going to order a 1 gallon fermentor, a new syphon (an auto-syphon, I think), and possibly a digital thermometer to aid with the grain steeping.

I believe I have the home-brewer version of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome)!