On brewing beer

I’ve been homebrewing for a few months. Now that I’ve made most of the beginner mistakes, I want to document what I’ve learnt.

Some initial thoughts…

Cleaning

Pretty much every book on homebrewing starts by describing the importance and tediousness of cleaning. Even so, cleaning turned out to be much more painful than I imagined. Especially the stainless steel fermenter I’m using (BrewBuilt X3), while awesome and highly customizable, has 17 tri clamps and 2 ball lock ports that need to be disassembled and reassembled every time it’s cleaned. It takes about 2 hours to clean it.

I have some CIP equipment coming in for the fermenter and the kegs and I really hope that shortens the time.

Difficulty

I’ve been baking sourdough bread for about a decade now and I see a lot of similarities. Lot of variables to play with (much more with beer), lot of biological processes that are sometimes outside of our control, the difficulty to reproduce the same recipe because something small changed, timing being very important, etc.

But just like sourdough, there seems to be a relatively low initial threshold that once exceeded, it becomes hard to screw things up beyond repair. Although I certainly managed that a few times too.

Gear

I did the usual geek thing and immediately went deep on the gear. It’s frowned upon and I understand why, but it’s also an opportunity to learn a lot in the initial phase where one does not yet have a ton of experience and reps. And it’s fun to learn what’s possible down the road and to start slowly aiming for that without the wrong gear accidentally shutting any doors.

For example, I brewed two batches in a plastic Coopers kit fermenter and knew I’d outgrow it soon - that bucket doesn’t even have a blow off tube. Going straight to the BrewBuilt X3 was probably overkill, and I could’ve gotten a simpler stainless fermenter first. But this jump means I can now do anything down the line - chilling, spunding, maybe even pasteurizing. Plus it has wheels so I can move it between kitchen and terrace for cleaning, and having a beautiful stainless steel piece like this in the living room is a good conversation starter.

Lessons learnt

• At this small scale (20l), things tend to get wonky at times, e.g. transferring from fermenter to a keg will sometimes get stuck without a clear reason; I need to learn to accept this happens and prepare strategies for troubleshooting it when under time pressure
• Crash chilling with Singaporean ambient temperature is only possible to about 6-7 C, and even that takes a while, so I need to figure out how to crash chill in a keg instead; the downside is foam doesn’t break down and the floating dip tube does not sink deep enough through it
• Low alcohol - we enjoy the refreshing taste of beer and don’t necessarily want to get wasted, so I’m trying to brew low alcohol beers; I’ll write more about this over time, but for now 2% seems to be a good target to aim for - no need for pasteurization and it’s still relatively easy to make the final product taste good

More brewing mistakes and lessons to come…