How to improve the homebrewing experience?

[blablah]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if we could get a brainstorming going about how to improve this already great community of homebrewers
And I don’t mean just this website, but the whole homebrewing experience.

For example:

• Are you a beginner that needs some specific help but can’t find information about your problem?
• Do you think the commercial brewing equipment is too expencive or not advance enough?
• Is it hard in your area to find good supplies?
• Is there need for new kind of social platform where homebrewers can exchange recipes and ideas?
• Do you have problems growing your own hops and need help?
• How can we get more people into this hobby so they can experience the joy of brewing?

So what are your problems, difficulties, questions or suggestions?
Nothing is crazy, there are no bad ideas or questions.

Cheers

 

[bobeer]

finding information about building water profiles that's dumbed down enough so I can understand it can be hard to find. As in, if your PH is X you can add X and X to get it to 5.2. There's some stuff out there but you have to dig and a lot of it is too chemistry based for me to fully understand. I'd like to know what basic water profiles fit to different styles of beer so you could tweak it from there to get to what you want.

beyond that I can't really think of anything that I can't find here or somewhere else online.

 

[Psylocide]

Point more people to HBT and tell them to read the stickies and ignore the goats.

 

[day_trippr]

Point more people to HBT and tell them to read[...]

That would be a good start...

Cheers!

 

[blablah]

finding information about building water profiles that's dumbed down enough so I can understand it can be hard to find. As in, if your PH is X you can add X and X to get it to 5.2. There's some stuff out there but you have to dig and a lot of it is too chemistry based for me to fully understand. I'd like to know what basic water profiles fit to different styles of beer so you could tweak it from there to get to what you want.

beyond that I can't really think of anything that I can't find here or somewhere else online.

I know exactly what you mean.
Maybe a can get some help from a friend who knows a lot about that stuff to help us write a general tutorial

 

[bobeer]

I know exactly what you mean.
Maybe a can get some help from a friend who knows a lot about that stuff to help us write a general tutorial

That would be sweet. Thanks!!

 

[TheHappyHopper]

I know exactly what you mean.
Maybe a can get some help from a friend who knows a lot about that stuff to help us write a general tutorial

That would be sweet. Thanks!!

You mean like this?
A Brewing Water Chemistry Primer
It's a sticky in the Brewing Science section of HBT. Yooper and ajdelange do a great job of giving easy baseline water profiles for anyone not great at Chemistry (like myself). There's currently 108 pages to the thread, but to keep it simple you really just need the info in the first post. I started using their recommendations and the problems that I was having with my brewing water have disappeared - once you get a hang of that, you can start tweaking your mineral additions as it suits your tastes.

 

[Remmy]

The one thing that really improves my homebrewing experience is drinking beers from start-to-finish on brew day.

 

[madscientist451]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if we could get a brainstorming going about how to improve this already great community of homebrewers
And I don’t mean just this website, but the whole homebrewing experience.

For example:

• Are you a beginner that needs some specific help but can’t find information about your problem?
• Do you think the commercial brewing equipment is too expencive or not advance enough?
• Is it hard in your area to find good supplies?
• Is there need for new kind of social platform where homebrewers can exchange recipes and ideas?
• Do you have problems growing your own hops and need help?
• How can we get more people into this hobby so they can experience the joy of brewing?

Cheers

Between you tube videos, forums like HBT, podcasts, books and now three brewing magazines, I think all the issues above are being covered pretty well.

 

[IslandLizard]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if we could get a brainstorming going about how to improve this already great community of homebrewers [...]

It's always amazing how someone who joined yesterday sees ways to improve our community.

 

[TheHappyHopper]

• How can we get more people into this hobby so they can experience the joy of brewing?

I take it that you might be in an area without easy access to a LHBS or brew clubs? If that's the case, then a good idea would be to think about starting your own local homebrew club - maybe looking in the Brewing Events & Local Gatherings section of the forum to see if there is already anything like that near you, or search Facebook.

In any case, as @madscientist451 mentions above, there is so much information available online, that even if you don't live near a good LHBS or homebrew clubs, if a new brewer is having trouble finding information then they just aren't even trying to look for it.

 

[bobeer]

You mean like this?
A Brewing Water Chemistry Primer
It's a sticky in the Brewing Science section of HBT. Yooper and ajdelange do a great job of giving easy baseline water profiles for anyone not great at Chemistry (like myself). There's currently 108 pages to the thread, but to keep it simple you really just need the info in the first post. I started using their recommendations and the problems that I was having with my brewing water have disappeared - once you get a hang of that, you can start tweaking your mineral additions as it suits your tastes.

Ha, yes, exactly like that. I don't hang out much in the brew science section but maybe I'll have to change that. Thanks!

 

[TheHappyHopper]

Ha, yes, exactly like that. I don't hang out much in
the brew science section but maybe I'll have to change that. Thanks!

Lol, no problem - I know when I first started paying attention to my water chemistry, I did all kinds of searches and reading posts and kept getting conflicting information, or information that was way over my head. When I finally found that post I had a :smack: moment when I realized it was a sticky that I had probably skipped past 100 times.

 

[k1ngl1ves]

Topless waitresses.





Yep. That would definitely improve my brew days by at least 1,000%.

 

[Gavin C]

For brewday, full body lycra suit to better facilitate ergonomic postures. Perhaps a small flap for one's sparge arm could be added. I think I may have seen that in Zymurgy. Perhaps not.

Also,

Bottomless waitresses.

 

[Crucial-BBQ]

The best thing to do imho would be to separate fact from fiction and to keep things solely in the perspective of home brewing. What I mean is that most, if not all, of our techniques, memes, myths, superstitions, etc. etc. come from the pro-brewer side of things and not all of it translates into the home brewing scale.

For example; if you got 100 bbl's of beer or more then yeah, you want to quickly cool it as fast as possible. But that is a large volume and water has some unique properties (like with its ability to retain heat rather well) that do not translate to the home brewers experience because of volume involved.

I know I'll get flamed for this but there is no real pressing reason to quickly cool 5 gallons of wort outside of simply saving time. Fear of contamination? Yeah, there is a race against time here but the window is larger than you think. The DMS boogey man? Most home brewers are not doing "delicate" enough beers where DMS can be a real issue but I am sure someone is going to tell me they have detected DMS in their Imperial Belgian Sour Stout. Cold break? That is going to happen on its own over time, no need to "shock" it into it other than save time.

You know why many get started with Mr. Beer kits? Well, outside of being available in many retail outlets the big draw is that there is nothing mysterious about those kits. They do a good job of keeping the Boogey Man away and present the instructions in a straight-forward manner with the focus on what is most important: making beer at home.

Another thing would be to keep trendy techniques in perspective, too, such as with late addition hops as the only additions. It may be an improvement but one thing is for sure; you'll use way more hops, spend more money, and either need to do a larger batch to accommodate for hop/wort absorption or understand you are going to loose a good amount of "beer" over what you may have already calculated.

 

[NathPowe]

Free beer.

 

[blablah]

The best thing to do imho would be to separate fact from fiction and to keep things solely in the perspective of home brewing. What I mean is that most, if not all, of our techniques, memes, myths, superstitions, etc. etc. come from the pro-brewer side of things and not all of it translates into the home brewing scale.

Awesome post man.
Last week I visited a local brewery (2500 liter brew installation) that produces a very popular (and very good) up and coming beer (won lots of prices)
and it seems that their technique for brewing is much simpler then what a lot of us homebrewers are doing.
The speed of the cooling like you said doesn't seem that important.
They used citywater without any kind of threatment.
Fermenting temperature was constant
etc

I guess we all focus too much on the details and the smallthings that won't really have a big effect on the outcome of the beer