Big, heavy, awkward glass objects and hard surfaces do not play well together. Fortunately for clumsy homebrewers, Ross Browne and Gavin Quigley of Next Level Brewing have developed the Carboy Bumper.
The Black Sands concept, referred to loosely as “open source brewing,” invites people to visit the brewery, enjoy the atmosphere, drink the beer and then if they’re interested in homebrewing, go next door where customers will be given recipes to make a scaled down version of the same beer.
On one side, Kit Lab works like most online recipe forums. But there’s the added option to have precise ingredient amounts for recipes shipped to your door. And there are plans for both all-grain and extract versions so homebrewers of all levels can participate.
Keeping track of those last-minute homebrew recipe changes can be tricky. Often they are jotted down on a piece of scrap paper, at risk of being forgotten, misplaced or lost.
Through a device and cloud-based platform known as Electric Imp, BeerBug wirelessly transmits the status of your beer, cider or wine’s fermentation progress to a cloud, which you can then tap into and track on your smartphone or through the BeerBug’s website.
In 1513, 74 years before the settlers started brewing beer from corn in Virginia, Spain’s Ponce de León landed on the coast of modern-day Florida. St. Augustine may be steeped in centuries of history, but the nation’s oldest city is starting a new chapter as craft beer takes root there.
Last month, we talked about getting clean in the brewhouse, but we left out one important step: the mantra of the obsessive home organizer—everything has its place.
Many brewers put a lot into a beer that misses the mark because the temperatures changed during fermentation or it wasn’t given enough time to ferment and age. To prevent the heartbreak of releasing a beer before its time or too late, Christian Lavender created The Home Brewing Calendar.
The one place we can’t skimp is our ingredients. No matter how much we’d like to use that cheap bag of feed barley to make beer—there’s a reason it’s feed barley and not malt.
