Thanks for visiting the Home Brew Manual, a straightforward illustrated guide to home brewing.
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It’s rare that a given home brew recipe matches your brewing efficiency, hop variety or target batch size. Use these calculations to resize any recipe on brew day.
After previous charts describing bitterness, gravity and colour, I’ve decided to continue my exploration of the BJCP style guide. This time I’m looking at beer alcohol content.
The first in a new series focusing on beer ingredients, in this article I give an introduction to the four main components of home brew: malt, hops, yeast and water.
This is my first porter recipe. It includes several malts and great smelling wort.
Here are twenty six essential elements of home brewing, fully illustrated from A to Z.
Brewing instructors constantly drum home the importance of sanitising. But is it really necessary?
One of the things that annoys me about home brewing is the endless variation and confusion when it comes to units of measure. To make things slightly clearer, I’ve decided to find out what connects degrees Plato to specific gravity.
Beer kits are probably the most popular entry into home brewing, but are they the best way of getting started? There are other brewing techniques within range of beginners that may offer better results.
I started the Home Brew Manual to explore and tweak the processes of brewing. Over time I’ve come to view these as cyclical rather than linear, as I illustrate on this page.
Seven weeks after brew day, I’ve finally opened the strong mild beer brewed during the International Homebrew Project. And it turned out very well.
Many brewers swear that secondary fermentation improves their beer. However, this is much debated with many claiming it’s unnecessary. Here I look at the arguments for and against.
Many people start home brewing with a beer kit. If you’ve decided to join them, these illustrated instructions will get you started.
My recipe for a refreshing IPA that’s full of flavour and body, without being overpoweringly strong and bitter.
Dry hopping is one of the many ways you can add punch to the flavour of your beer. It gives you hop aroma and flavour without bitterness. Here I look at some of the ideas and techniques behind it, all illustrated with a recent brew.
When planning beer recipes it’s useful to be able to quickly see the effect of any changes, but the many variables make it an unwieldy manual calculation. As an alternative I’ve recently been testing Brewtarget, a free piece of brewing software and this is what I found.
I’ve recently calibrated my fermentation bucket so I can see how much wort and beer I’m actually getting from each batch. This is a quick guide showing how I did it.
There are several ways to start brewing beer at home, each with different levels of complexity. This page describes the four main methods with one clear diagram.
Learn about beer’s varied past and discover surprising things about its present. Many brews aren’t as traditional as you may think.
As part of the International Home Brew Project (IHP), organised by Alistair at Fuggled, I recently brewed a strong, and probably quite bitter, Scottish mild. This account highlights some of the challenges presented by this high gravity beer.
When reviewing beer recipes I find myself endlessly converting pounds and ounces to kilos, and Fahrenheit to Celsius. In order to speed up this process, I decided to create brewing conversion tables with all the necessary information in one place.
If you're starting from scratch I suggest you go to the beginner's guide to home brew, or look through the home brew FAQ section to find answers to common questions.
On the other hand, if you've already brewed and are looking for ways to expand your repertoire the Manual also has ideas for home brew recipes.
If you're thinking of trying all grain brewing but don't know where to start, why not think about brew in a bag. It will let you brew anything you want without needing any extra equipment.
Or if you prefer browsing, just explore the Home Brew Manual archives and start or continue your journey towards home brew mastery.
The Home Brew Manual is run by an enthusiastic student of home brewing. I'm constantly updating the site as I find out more about this great subject. If you would like to be kept up to date on future additions click here to subscribe.
Cheers!
