Skip to main content

Brewing Resources

Here are some of my favorite brewing resources on the Internet, in case they're of value to you:

NOTE:  Unless explicitly indicated below, I do not receive compensation for your use of any of the links below or your purchase of anything from any linked vendors. These are just my recommendations and references I find useful.  These items may or may not suit your needs or brewing approach, so I recommend doing your own research and forming your own opinions before spending money on them or using them.

Homebrew shops I recommend:

Products I am particularly fond of:
  • iMake's The Grainfather - I've found this to be a reliable system capable of producing award-winning beers in the right hands.
  • SS Brew Tech - I'm fond of their conical fermenters and own a few
  • Anvil 4-gallon Fermenters - I have three of these and am very happy with them
  • Exchilerator Maxx Wort Chiller - a great counterflow wort chiller that's easy to setup, easy to use, and works extremely well
  • Tilt Hydrometer and Tilt Pi - revolutionized fermentation monitoring for me, provides near-real-time information on wort gravity and temperature, with logging to Brewfather and Google Sheets
  • Brewfather App - Something like a more modern, multi-platform, web-based version of BeerSmith or Beer Tools Pro.  It can handle your brewing supply inventory, equipment profiles, recipes, provide fermentation tracking, and more.
  • BrewJacket Immersion Pro Fermentation Temperature Control - when I need precise control over fermentation temperature, I use one of these
  • Williams Brewing Rack and Pinion Capper - no longer available anywhere I can find, this bench mounted capper is hands-down my favorite capper.  It can cap a 12-ounce bottle, then a 22-ounce bottle, then a 16-ounce bottle without having to do any more than spin a wheel. It's made of metal throughout so there's less likelihood of failure. I've even been able to cap twist-off bottles with it.

Here are some links I find useful from time to time:
I'll add more as I discover useful things.




Comments

Post a Comment

Note that comments to this blog are moderated in order to minimize spam comments and things that might be offensive to readers.

Popular posts from this blog

Yellow Label Angel Yeast vs. Typical Brewing Yeast

I currently have my second batch of rice wine fermenting with the "magical" yellow-label Angel Yeast from China, and wanted to share some of the more unusual aspects of using it.  If you've never seen or used this yeast, I suspect you're not alone.  It ships in a 500 gram package that looks like this: What makes it "yellow label" is that yellow box you see in the upper left corner of the package.  This implies that it's yeast for distilling (though you do not need to have a still or distill the output to use it).  As I understand it, inside the package is a mix of yeast and other materials which will convert starch into sugar and directly ferment it, without the need for a traditional mash step.  This can radically shorten your brewing time.  For my most-recent batch of rice wine, I heated 3 gallons of water to 155F, poured it over 13+ pounds of uncooked rice straight out of the bag, let that soak for an hour, rehydrated some of this yeast in warm water,
Post a Comment
Read more

Making Alton Brown's Immersion Cooker Fennel Cardamon Cordial

Alton Brown's "Good Eats" series is my favorite cooking show.  I love the way he explains the "why" and "how" of a recipe in detail, which helps you understand (if things don't go right) where you may have gone wrong.  In his episode on immersion cooking (also known as sous vide), he shows you how to make a cordial in an hour using an immersion cooker. It took me a while to locate all the ingredients here in Columbus.  I ended up getting the fennel and vodka at Giant Eagle. The cardamom seeds, pods, and anise stars came from Amazon.  The Fennel fronds and bulb came from Trader Joe's at Easton. Ingredients 32 ounces of 80-proof vodka 2 cups of fennel fronds 10 green cardamom pods 3 ounces granulated sugar 1 tablespoon fennel seeds 1 teaspoon black cardamom seeds 1 whole star anise Begin by loading your sous vide vessel with hot water and set your immersion cooker to 140F. While the cooker is getting up to that temperature, meas
2 comments
Read more

2021 Batch 1 - Rice Wine made with Yellow Label Angel Yeast

I've become a big fan of the Still It channel on YouTube.  About a month ago, Jesse posted a video about how he made rice wine using nothing more than water, rice, and a purported "magic" yeast from China called Yellow Label Angel Yeast. Perhaps even more amazing was the fact that he was able to make the rice wine without gelatinizing or mashing the rice.  He shows three batches in the video.  One was made by cooking the rice before adding the yeast mixture. Another was made by adding uncooked rice to boiling water.  The last was made by adding uncooked rice to room temperature water.  All three fermented out to roughly the same amount of alcohol in about two weeks. He was amazed by this, as was I. I resolved to buy some of this magical yeast from Aliexpress.com and try it out. In the Still It video, the rice is ground up in the grain mill into smaller chunks to make it easier for the enzymes in the yellow label yeast to convert and ferment.  I'm changing this up s
Post a Comment
Read more