Buckeye Brewcraft - Westerville

Today, I visited Buckeye Brewcraft. Located on North State Street in Westerville, the shop offers a good variety of home brewing equipment and ingredients.

Buckeye Brewcraft also features wine making and home soda making equipment and ingredients as well.

Although I didn't do an extensive comparison, prices seemed competitive with mail order home brewing suppliers, especially when you factor in shipping costs.

Inside the shop, you'll find an array of spices and flavorings for home brewing, such as sweet orange peel, cardamom, and cinnamon sticks. You'll find fruit essences (e.g., blueberry flavoring). You'll find a wide variety of grains, extracts, hops, and yeasts.

They also feature a good supply of brewing and bottling equipment. I saw bottle cappers, brew kettles, mash tuns, wine presses, empty bottles, the FastFerment fermenter, used corny kegs, bottling buckets, hoses, airlocks, caps, and much more.

They offer kits for a variety of beer styles, as well as bulk ingredients. Every grain or extract I've used in home brewing to date was available here... so it could easily serve as my go-to store for brewing ingredients.

There is a yeast chart on the wall depicting the various White Labs yeast strains and the beer styles they're good for. Many yeast and hops varieties were available in their refrigerated section, too.

All of this would probably be "enough" for a typical homebrew shop, but Buckeye Brewcraft goes the extra step of teaching home brewing classes as well. To find out when the classes are scheduled, or when other events are going on at the shop, visit their web site and click the Calendar link.

To encourage home brewers, Buckeye Brewcraft also features home brewing contests. At the time this post was written (Feb. 2015) they were accepting entries for their 2015 IPA contest, which will take place on March 21, 2015. I'm told there will be a Belgian Ale contest in June. I might just have to enter that one.

If you're a Columbus area resident interested in learning to brew your own beer, I would definitely recommend the shop. The staff is knowledgeable and friendly, the selection is good, and they teach as well as sell.

The shop is (at the time of writing) open 7 days a week. Monday through Saturday they're open 10am to 7pm. Sundays they're open from noon to 5pm.

Buckeye Brewcraft

33 N. State Street

Westerville, OH 43081

(614) 440-8854

Spices, brew kettle, bottling equipment

Flavorings, Candi Syrup, Sugars, Fruits

Grains and Malt Extracts

Grains

Refrigerator with yeast, hops, etc. - Yeast chart on wall - Grain bins to right

Seating and homebrew teaching area, bottles for sale

Fermenting, bottling, and large bags of grain

Grain crusher in front, wine and beer making equipment in back

FastFerment in window, corny kegs, soda equipment, and more

2021 Batch 16/17 - Horseman's Pumpkin Ale Kit from Great Fermentations

Although there are a few pumpkin spice ales on the market that I enjoy (Hoppin' Frog's Double Pumpkin, Samuel Adams Fat Jack, and Heavy Seas Great'r Pumpkin come to mind first), I've yet to brew a pumpkin spice ale that I have been happy with. Either I didn't feel like the base beer was quite right, or the spice mix was too "something" (insert random pie spice there) forward, it was too hop-forward, or it was wrong in some other way. This year, I decided to try the kit from Great Fermentations in Indiana to see if I liked that any better than previous brews. Ingredients 9 pounds 2-row Brewer's Malt 1 pound Munich Malt 8 ounces Crystal 40L Malt 15 ounces Canned Pumpkin (not included in kit) 1/4 tsp. Brewtan B (my addition to kit) 1 ounce Glacier Hops 1/2 tsp. Brewtan B (my addition to kit) 1 tsp. Irish Moss (15 min.) 0.5 tsp. Ground Cinnamon (not included in kit) 0.5 tsp. Vanilla extract (not included in kit) 0.5 tsp. Pumpkin Pie Spice (not included i...

2022 Batch 01 - St. Gambrinus Spiced Holiday Ale (Kit)

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2022 Batch 02 - Pecan Brandy Mead

I watched an episode of Moonshiners: Master Distiller late in 2020 where one of the contestants made a Pecan Brandy that he (and the judges) described as being very tasty, like drinking a pecan pie. I thought that sounded good, and although distilling it into brandy would not be a legal option for me, turning it into a mead would be quite possible and might be good. The recipe as described on the show was pretty simple... honey, water, yeast, and pecans. Ingredients 12 pounds of Wildflower Honey 2 pounds of Pecans, crushed and ground 4 gallons of water, treated with some gypsum 1 tsp. yeast nutrient 1 package of Premier Des Cotes champagne yeast Batch Size: 5.0 gallons (actual and estimated) Original Gravity: 1.090 (actual and estimated) Final Gravity: 0.984 (estimated) Brewing Instructions Bring water to a boil and sterilize wort chiller. Add half the pecans in a muslin bag. Add the other half, in a different muslin bag, to the fermenter. Gradually add ...

Begin Brewing!

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