2008 January | What's Brewin'

What is the best home brew beer recipe?

posted on January 30, 2008 in home brew

I have recently started making my own beer at home and I have yet to find a recipe that I really like. Do you have any suggestions for finding a good recipe, or website which sells them?

I typically like lagers (but they are tough to brew at home due to the temperature requeirements). An ale would be suitable.

yeah, personally i always make ales because like you said its more difficult to control the temperature and more stuff can go wrong with them. there are plenty of ale yeasts that are neutral enough that they taste like lagers, read some yeast profiles. its usually what i do.

beertools.com has a user submitted library of like +5000 recipes, pick a style you like and find a recipe that has good reviews from other users (there are a lot of good recipes but a lot of bad ones too since it is user submitted so i usually only pick reviewed recipes).

one thing in mind when you are using recipes though is that its not like cooking where adding x and y will usually get you the same cookies. when youre brewing things like the size of the boil, length of the boil, temperature it fermented at, AA content of the hops, how fine the grains were crushed, whether the recipe was supposed to be all grain but you are doing it as an extract brew, etc. all come into play and can cause a lot of variance in the beer from what the author intended. so if youre converting all grain recipes to extract recipes, the balance might be off because the recipe might be expecting a 90% yield from a mash, but you might only get a 20% yield from that grain when you steep it. i screwed up a few beers when i first started not realizing that the yield can be drastically different if you steep it instead of mash it.

this table has estimations of PPG obtained for some of the common grains… its not perfect but it if you are using all grain recipes, it may help you convert quantities a bit better. http://www.howtobrew.com/section2/chapter12-4-1.html

the size of your boil also affects the yield you get from hops and grains… smaller boil=less hop flavor/bitterness/sugars and flavor obtained from grain than a larger boil, so if you boil just like a gallon or two you may need to add extra steeping malts or hops to make up for that as well.

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Anyone know how to brew beer like Budweiser?

posted on January 19, 2008 in how to brew beer

My dad wants to know how to brew a beer such as budweiser. He knows how to brew beer, just doesnt know the receipe for bud.

I’m not sure I can call it a beer. If you lookup the technical definition of beer: malt, hops, water, yeast, you will notice that rice, corn and beechwood chips are not listed. Thus, budweiser is a beer-like beverage, but not beer.

The trick with budweiser is that where regular beers use 100% malted barley, budweiser uses over 50% rice. It’s cheaper, that’s their *only* reason.

Instead, your dad should try to brew something that the beer wants to be, something like a Light American Lager. Similar things would include Pilsners, find a Pilsner Urquell-like recipe.

Also, I can tell you that if you know how to calculate IBUs from the AAUs in the hops, your final brew should have 8.5IBUs. This is very very low, the beers I usually drink are in the 40-60 range (IBU is a Bitterness Unit, and it’s derived from the Alpha Acids in hops). Aim for around 5.0% ABV. I think this is just going to come down to reading a few recipes for Pilsners, seeing what they have in common and adjusting the hops down to 8.5 IBU and the alcohol to 5%.

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