I am a home brewer. Things seem to change during the Corona Virus pandemic in 2020 – there wasn’t an awful lot to do, but there was a lot of time to do it in! It gave me more time to read and think about what I wanted to do with my brewing. And the pub was shut!
Home brewing today is light years ahead of the plastic buckets of yester year. The key to it all is “choice”. Choice in equipment, ingredients and recipes. In fact, so much of today’s home brewing equipment is a scaled down version of what the professional brewers use that it has become possible to brew whatever you want. So it will come as no surprise that the quality and variety of home brewed beer has improved too.
However, there is still the usual shortage of “time”. This wasn’t an issue during the pandemic.
Recipes
There are plenty of community sites where recipes are shared. These will often be based on commercially available beers or could be something completely new. Some commercial brewers even make their recipes public (e.g. BrewDog). While other brewers put comprehensive details of the beers on their website (e.g. Magic Rock) so much so that you can have a good stab at brewing some similar.
Often trying to replicate a beer that you really like is a great place to start. And you’ll see from my list of pilot batches, commercially available beers have been the starting point for many of these brews. A bit of research on the Internet, will often yield enough clues to get you started on your own recipe.
Kit
To brew using malt extract, you need little more than a couple of large plastic buckets, a thermometer, and a big plastic spoon. With a bit of care, the beer will turn out OK, but you’ll always be limited to the kits and extracts that are available. But if you want to give this a whirl, I highly recommend the Mangrove Jack range of kits (have a look for the ones in a pouch that come with dried hops).
However, if you want total control and flexibility all grain brewing is the way to go. Unfortunately, this requires more kit as you have to steep grain to produce the wort. This is difficult even with the largest pan in the kitchen! I know. I have tried!
I am using a Grainfather G30 all in one unit for brewing. These units are well thought through and very easy to use. However, they are expensive, but if looked after, they will last a lifetime. I use the Grainfather website to create my recipes and then transmit these via Bluetooth to this unit. The recipes give me predicted starting and finishing gravity as well as predicting colour and bitterness. Again light years ahead of brewing in a large plastic bucket!
I have two Grainfather Conical Fermentation tanks. These allow me to drop any waste products out of the bottom of the tank reducing the amount of sediment in the beer.
In 2023, I upgraded my chiller unit to a Grainfather GC2. It replaced a second hand glycol chiller that I bought on eBay. The GC2 allows me to control the temperature during fermentation as well as dropping the temperature of the beer to around 5C before bottling/kegging.
I used to bottle all of my beer. I relied on secondary fermentation to carbonate the beer. But over time, I have moved to kegging my beer. There is definitely less bottle washing to do and I can carbonate beer overnight with the aid of bottled CO2. It is also a more reliable way of keeping hoppy beers in the best of condition. If you are careful when you are kegging beer, you can keep exposure to oxygen down to the absolute minimum.
Suppliers
There were shortages of some equipment and ingredients during lockdown, but these seem to be largely behind us. I occasionally encounter issues with specific items and this is often blamed on Brexit.
I mainly use two suppliers, both of them online. If one doesn’t have what I want in stock, the other usually does. I also keep a lookout for various bits of kit on eBay too.
The Malt Miller – Good selection of grain (particularly in 25KG sacks), good selection of Grainfather kit. Always super helpful on the phone, if you get stuck!
GetErBrewed – Hops in 1KG packaging, yeast in 500g packets and a good source of other ingredients. Based in Ireland, but next day delivery seems to work well.
Why “Welsh Steve” when the beer is brewed in Yorkshire?
Well, they call me Welsh Steve in my local pub! The name came with a large dose of sarcasm as I don’t sound Welsh (even though I was born and brought up in Wales!). But the name sort of stuck!