18/06/2020
How do I make the perfect home brew?
It depends on what you mean by “perfect”. if you mean one that is a contender for winning a national competition — that level of quality — then this is (obviously) difficult. But to get there is the same road to improvement that any home brewer will take. It is just taken to a greater length.
Three things to work on:
Beer knowledge. Drink better beer. Try more beer styles and examples of those styles. Be a more attentive drinker. Do written evaluations of the beers you drink in the same way that a judge would rate a beer in a competition. Drink beer at the proper temperature so you can appreciate its full flavor. Try award-winning brews, but also non-so-good brews, so you can detect flaws. Know your ingredients. Be able to identify hops blindfolded.
Get reproducible results with your equipment. A beer recipe is not something you can just follow blindly. Your ingredients are natural things and will vary from batch to batch, and vendor to vendor. Your kettle size and shape may vary from the one used to develop the recipe. This impacts evaporation rates. Your water ma also have a different mineral profile that needs to be adjusted. Your goal should be able to consistently execute on a given recipe, and make the necessary mid-course adjustments so that you can hit your target values for volume, ABV, IBU and color, and achieve qualitative the intended final beer. It should not be a surprise how your beer comes out. You should be able to brew the same recipe five times in five months and get pretty much the same results. If you cannot do that, then there is too much variability in your process and your outcome will be due more to dumb luck than skill.
Recipe design. This is the main creative contribution. What do you want to do? Do you want to reproduce a stellar example of a classic European style? or do you want to make an “extreme” beer? If you know what you want the beer to taste like, and know the characteristics of different malts and hops and how they interact, then you can design your own recipe. There are programs that can help with the math, e.g., BeerSmith. But note that this step really has the first two as prerequisites. You need to understand beer first, to know what you want. And you need to be able to execute consistently on a recipe before you can expect to create a brew that is true to your own vision.
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