This week I do a deep dive on how the hobby has changed since my first batch in the 90s to today.
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Show Transcript (There will be errors AI created)
Colter Wilson: .Home brewing like any other hobby is affected by things like technology and just changes in the craft. People have taken this hobby and brought it to entirely new levels. And so this week I’m going to do a deep dive and we’re going to talk about the evolution of modern Homebrew this week on hovering DIY.
And welcome back to homebrewing DIY the podcast that takes on the do it yourself, aspect of homebrewing, gadgets, contraptions, and parts. The show covers it all on this week’s show. We’re going to do a deep dive episode where we’re going to talk about the evolution into what modern home brewing looks like today.
So we’ll take a look at back when I brewed my first batch in the nineties. And probably what homebrewing looked like a little bit before that and see how the evolution to 2021 has really just changed the hobby over time. So kind of exciting to jump into this week’s episode, but first. I’d like to thank all of our patrons over at Patrion.
It’s because of you that the show can come to you week after week, head on over to patrion.com/sobering. DIY. I have a lot of patrons to think this week, so let’s dive into it first. I’d like to thank Eric for becoming a new patron. I’d also like to think Brandon, for your support, Nicholas Rowley. Thank you once again for your support and then all the way back on the 5th of March.
Chris, George, thank you so much for your support. These ongoing supporters are what keeps this show coming to you week after week? Uh, just a couple of notes on Patrion. I did drop the price from $3 to $1 a month. So. Pretty much the cost of a cup of gas station coffee. You could go ad free, not have to be listening to any pesky ads during all of the episodes.
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Thank you so much for your support for your one-time donation, over a coffee. And last I’d like to think Gordon, for his donation of the support of a homebrewing DIY support from all of our listeners is something that helps the show come to you. And just so you know, Like I said, I have a day job. All of the money we use for homes is a hundred percent reinvested into the show.
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Um, same with Ryan pack Meyer. We’re getting them podcasts set up so that they can, you know, be on the show more sound great and, and not kind of hodgepodge some things together from, you know, uh, for example, they’re not, they’re not trying to do a podcast on their AirPods. It it’s easier on your ears and also easier for me to edit, but those are the types of things that your support goes into in helping grow the show.
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Those reviews are always, always going to help others find this show. I guess now’s a good time for us to dive into this week’s topic where we’re going to talk and do a deep dive into the evolution. Of homebrewing.
Now I’d like to talk a bit about the whole brewing as a hobby. This is. Episode that I’ve wanted to do for a while. And really what kind of gave me the ideas. Obviously it’s been a long pandemic and I’ve spent way more time surfing the internet than I probably should have just because. I think in general, we’ve all been stuck at home.
We’re we’re getting close to the end and I’m super excited about it. Right. My wife specifically, she’s getting vaccinated on Friday and I’m pretty close to actually getting my vaccination. And so we’re kind of at least. For the adults in our lives, getting pretty close to getting people to where life’s going to start to get back to normal.
I would say once we get in rolling into fully into summer, you’re going to start to see things coming back, the way that they used to be. And it’s, it’s definitely been a long year. That being said, I am actually looking forward to taking, obviously I’ll still put out this podcast, but I am looking forward to kind of taking a break from.
Being on line all the time and for all my events and to seeing people in person and to having Homebrew club meetings again with everybody in person. And I’m really looking forward to just having my friends over with a full Keizer and just hanging out and drinking some beers. I. Got gotta admit, I can’t wait until that day comes.
It’s it’s going to be a pretty, pretty amazing day. But for today’s deep dive, what I want to talk about is. Just the evolution of home brewing as a hobby. It’s a, it’s a very different hobby from when I brewed my first batch all the way back in 1998. Now I want to be very clear. 1998 was the first time I ever brewed.
And at that time home brewing was a very, very different hobby and, and things are just not really, if you think about just the approach to beer in general, it’s really evolved into something new and. I th I’m going to leave it up to you to say to yourself whether it’s better or not. But for me, I personally think it’s better today than it was, you know, 23 years ago.
And then even further back, if you get to the whole, you talked a whole Mo old homebrewers, who’ve been homebrewing since the eighties and the seventies and the sixties. They’re going to tell you, Hey, Homer, it’s completely different game from back in those days, just for the sheer availability of ingredients.
But yeah. Well, I I’m going to start from the evolution of home brewing from when I started home brewing, which was in the late nineties all the way until today, which is, you know, spring early spring of 2021. So let’s start first with what, what was the Homebrew scene like back in the nineties, in the late nineties.
And, uh, let’s my, when I was starting off home brewing in the late nineties. It was, I started with extract and my first batch was extract and it was a Cooper’s can a pre-war hopped cougars can, you’ve probably heard if you’ve listened to every episode of this podcast, you’ve probably heard me talk about this.
I w it was given to me as a gift. It was, it was called IPA bitter. So it was a, it was an English style IPA, and it came in a can. That was pre-war. Pre hopped wart that was basically extract. And all you had to do is add water to it, boil it. You didn’t have to add hops or anything, so you could boil it for about 10 or 15 minutes just to sterilize it.
And then you had to move it into a carboy and yet, and you then fermented it. Right? And then once you fermented it, Back in those days in the instructions, it talks about doing a secondary and you would take your beer and you would get, let it go through that first fermentation. And then you would rack the beer off into a, another carboy.
Or if you fermented in a five gallon bucket, you would move it into a glass carboy at that point. And you would let it sit for another week or two in what they called secondary fermentation. And in all reality with this. Stage was done for in the nineties was to just try to get your beer to clarify it a little bit more.
You’re sitting on a yeast cake, you’ve got a lot of fermentation kind of floating in there and people would move it over to the secondary. Let it sit. Yeah. In your basement and let it sit there and kind of settle out and you would have a much, much smaller yeast cake that you would then rack your beer again into your bottling bucket.
And you would move into the bottling phase. Now. Absolutely. In the late nineties, people were totally kegging the same way we kegged today. Uh, five gallon cans using. Using old soda cans, all of that was totally happening in the late nineties. So that’s a very, very similar situation as to what people are using for today.
But when it came to the actual brewing process, there were a lot of things different. So in fermentation, A big thing in, in that time of my whole early homebrewing days was that secondary fermentation. And that was a state page that a lot of people used now let’s reel it back into today. Almost no one I talked to does secondary fermentations and in all reality, it’s almost in some circles frowned upon to do a secondary fermentation because it’s another place for oxygen exposure and possible contamination, risks.
And. So we we’ve now gone from, Hey, we want to get it off the yeast and not let it sit on the yeast. That was also a big. Dogmatic thing of homebrewers I think in the late nineties was people saying that you don’t want Homebrew to sit on yeast for too long and in all reality, nobody even thinks that way anymore.
It, at least in my circles of talking about letting beer sit on yeast for too long of time, even to the fact of, there are some people in my homebrewing circles that when they lager beer, they lager. Beer on yeast as part of their logging process for getting a more authentic German flavor. So that, that would be one example.
So that that’s really kind of one of those dogmatic things of homebrewing in the late nineties. When I started that people always talked about like, Hey, you want to get it off the yeast? You want to get it to settle down. This is how you’re going to get really clear beer and. It’s just something that a lot of homebrewers don’t do today.
I, I would say the biggest evolution from the fermentation side when it comes to. Process is the fact that most people aren’t doing secondary fermentations anymore. And that’s just really something you don’t see a lot of in homebrewing today. So first thing we’ll check off the list is the secondary fermentation that has evolved into something else.
I would say the number one thing it’s involved into in modern home is probably a cold crash. And I’ll admit for me, cold crashing was a game changer. And I found it on forums. I brewed a few batches of beer at this time in my eye. So the, the story of my brewing is I brewed a few batches of beer in the late nineties.
And then I had a pretty long hiatus through the early two thousands come to the late aughts and, and around 2010, I started homebrewing again. Right. And so at that process, w w what had changed is a lot had changed in. And specifically to the secondary fermentation process, people had started to do a lot less of.
Secondary fermentations people started to cold crash. So cold crashing is the process of you finish your fermentation. And if you have a fridge that you can throw your beer into it, that’s already fully fermented out. You’re going to get it to settle a lot faster, get all of the proteins and the floating yeast to settle down to a cake at the bottom.
If you can keep it in cold storage. And, and it, that cold storage is going to help that yeast settle out and also all of the proteins and give you a nice, thick, dense yeast cake. And I gotta be honest, a cold crash. When you, when you think of the difference between yeast cakes have a cold crash to beer versus a beer that you rack into secondary, or you just.
Give enough time to settle out a cold crash yeast cake is just thicker, more dense. It doesn’t really move a lot. And when you’re racking it off, you’re just less likely to get stuff in there because it’s just. Cold and more dense. Uh, I guess that’s the best way to explain it. And so for me, I felt raw from the first time ever cold crashing.
This is the way it was going to go. Now, there are some aspects of cold crashing that are very, very. Like some kind of things you got to watch out for, right. Obviously if you’re cold crashing your beer, you want to, we want to talk about cold side oxidation risk and, and suck back. And there’s all kinds of hacks out there.
We’ve talked about it multiple times on the show, like the balloon hack, where you, you fill up a balloon and suck it back. You suck the CO2 back in through a balloon. Or what I like to do is I like to actually. Have there there’s there’s setups where you have like a keg going into a keg and it sucks the CO2 from another keg.
There’s just so many different ways on the, uh, to, to make it so that you don’t have those oxygen issues with a cold crash. But in all reality, cold crashing to me is truly the way to go when you’re talking about trying to. Clarify your beer quickly and to do so in a way that I think is just going to give you a better experience than running a secondary.
I feel like I actually get better beer from cold crashing than I do from doing a secondary fermentation. This is something that is evolved from the early dogmatic homebrewing days to now it’s 2021 and things have just definitely changed. The other big evolution I want to talk about is definitely that the oxidation piece that I just mentioned, it’s one of those things that back in the nineties, everybody talked about.
Obviously people did talk about oxygen, but it wasn’t talked about with such extreme. It wasn’t so extreme as it is today. And. It was more of like, don’t splash your bucket around when you’re bottling or try not to get too much oxygen into it while, while you’re moving it from, from your, your, your. For a minute or into a keg, right?
These were people weren’t, it was very uncommon to have somebody have a closed system when racking from a fermentor into a keg, for example, uh, you know, 20 years ago and now cold side oxidation. I would say is probably one of the number one things that I hear about when it comes from new home brewers or brewing advice given to new home brewers or people just in general, trying to say, what can I do to improve my beer?
Everybody talks about oxygen. Hey, limit the amount of oxygen and try to limit it as much as possible. Heck you were, if you’ve listened to this cast, just a couple episodes. We were talking to Brandon caps about hazy IPA’s and he was talking about. The minuscule amount of oxygen that he tries to keep out of his hazy IPA’s as to where, if he even had 200 parts per million, it would ruin his beer and it would be a whole tragedy and they would dump the batch.
Right. And these are all things that 20 years ago, even at the microbrewery level, you didn’t really hear so much about this kind of oxygen exposure. Now professional brewers have known about oxygen and it. Having an effect on, on shelf stability and the effects on beer for years and years and years. But at the Homebrew level, people just didn’t pay as much mind to it because you, you didn’t really have the, some of the technologies that we have today.
And people had also just not really come up with those types of processes. So I’m going to say the, the efforts that people make to keep oxygen out of beer were just something that people did a lot less of. I also think that one of the, the, the big pieces is the advent of IPA’s as a, as a, in general, as a beer style and being such an American style of beer that IPA’s have also kind of driven the oxygen piece because people have S have.
And you find out early, even in the big bitter bombs of the West coast IPA is that oxygen has an effect on those, even those bitter beers, because if you get oxygen on the cold side, you would start to lose bitterness quickly. And with the hazy IPA’s that are. All late addition, hops and large dry hops, you start to really see oxygen have effects on those beers.
I have definitely seen many purple, uh, hazy IPA’s specifically when I’ve had friends that have come and bottled me one, if I drink it that day, it’s usually pretty, it’s usually fine, but if I, if I try to keep it for a couple of weeks and it’s, it’s been a bottled hazy IPA just off of somebody’s tap. I, I find that they turn purple pretty quickly and that’s a direct effect from oxygen and really a great way to kind of show somebody that oxygen does have an effect of beer and specifically on shelf stability.
And, and I think that that is something that. I think about when I deal with beer today is cold side oxygen. And I also think that, you know, as we know, oxygen definitely has an effect on flavor. It’s considered an off flavor that cardboard or the, that wet cardboard flavor that people talk about that that’s usually direct directly attributed to oxygen.
Also, you get a lot of people. That when you go into competition that are super sensitive to oxygen and they can call you out on it. So to me, cold side oxygen is definitely something that I make an effort to try and call me a bit dogmatic. But I also think that there’s, there’s definitely some proven science there that says the oxygen does have an effect on beer.
And, and especially if you look at it over time, So that’s that, that’s my opinion. And, and, uh, the opinion of a lot of homebrewers today. And I think that it’s a good thing that it’s a focus today, not so much a focus, you know, 20, 22 years ago. Obviously they did talk about oxygen, but it wasn’t. To the level that it is today.
I also think that one thing that’s really evolved from when I started home brewing from, from my early days today, is there’s just a big difference in how people all grain brew. Right? So for example, when I first started home brewing, when people were building out their systems, this was actually. Right around when batch sparging had, had become kind of a thing and was starting to kind of kind of par purchase head.
But even then before that people were trying to recreate commercial breweries in their home when they were going all grain. So, yeah. Most all all-grain setups. When I first started were generally three vessel setups with a hot liquor tank, a mash tun. And then, uh, and then, uh, and then they would sparge over the mash tun into the, into the boil kettle.
I remember the first all-grain batch that I did with my roommates. And back in 1998, we had this like sprinkler sparge arm that would. That would spin around as you brought from the hot liquor tank into your mash tun. And then that was how we would mash and then sparge into in, and then you would like do your first runnings right into your kettle and, and, and there’s still tons of brewers that brew three vessel.
That’s, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. And there’s benefits, I think, in all different setups. Right. I think that. Like, if you want really, really clear beer having a three vessel system, I think is going to help you at least on the hot side for clarity though. I do say there’s a, what’s the word there?
There’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a little dogmatic there, right? But the idea is that there’s there, there, there are certain people that believe in it and still brew that way. And that’s the way they’re going to brew. And. Kudos. There’s nothing wrong with it. But when we talk about common ways that people brew, there’s that evolution in the arts where people really got into batch sparging.
And that’s where, you know, you used like a cooler mash tun. And you would mash into it. You would do your running’s off, through like a bazooka tube or the brake, the stainless steel braided tube that came out, or even now people mash in a bag and do batch barges that way. And then you would still. Sparge into it, fill the water up to basically Richard grain straight into the mash.
And it would be heated at let’s say one 70 and then yeah, you would fill up your, your, your, your sparge and then stir the hell out of it and then run it off again. Right. That that’s the batch barging method. And it’s a great method. It works really well. My neighbor across the street, when he first moved in and we were like, Oh, you’re home brew.
And we all started like, you know, Becoming the cool dudes that we are today talking about Homebrew with each other, you know, he was a batch spurge guy, right. And then in the late aughts, And, and really, you know, at least for the United States and in the early aughts for Australia is where brewing a bag really started to become a thing.
People started to realize that, Hey, this batch barge thing, in all reality, couldn’t you just kind of put a, it kind of moved from that batch sparge to people, just kind of doing these full volume, you know, one kettle brew in a bag systems and. Bruna bag at this point, I think is the most common all-grain method out there.
And definitely the most common that you’re going to see when it comes to new home brewers, just because the access to it is so much lower. Like you don’t have to, it doesn’t cost a thousand dollars and expensive equipment to get into all grain. It’s it’s basically, Oh, Hey, I’ve already got a boil kettle and you know, based on this, I could go to brew in a bag very, very easily.
Bruna bag works great for one gallon batches, it works great for three gallon batches. Uh, I’ll give you an example, the old brewing TV episodes back in the day, when I was getting back into it, I watched a ton of brewing TV from Northern brewer, and they even talked about brewing a bag as it was the new thing.
And it’s kind of cool, but you know, it’s only gonna work for a three gallon batch and, and, and if you were going to anything bigger, still go back to bash barging, or doing a three vessel system. And. And now it’s 2021 and the five gallon brew and a bag batch is super common. Uh, it’s super common to do a brew in a bad batch of my neighbors, do 10 gallon Bruin and backpackers and they’re.
And if you go to the brew bag, there’s entire brute nano breweries that are doing brew in a bag and that’s their entire method. And so that has. Pretty much been proven wrong that brew and a bad can be generally done at any size, as long as you can lift the bag out and it can handle the weight you can brew in the back.
And so it, it, we are now to a place where I think that Bruin ABAG has become really the number one way to get somebody into all-grain brewing and. People even tweak their systems from there into whatever their, their brew and a bag system looks like. And so I, I w I want to say that Bruna bag is definitely, definitely made homebrewing a lot more accessible, specifically, all green home brewing, a lot more accessible to newer homebrewers and that’s it.
That’s a good thing that it’s good for the hobby. And it’s just good in general, when I started. Brew in a bag. There were still people out there that said Bruna bag is an all-grain brewing. Like, and that would be a term that nobody would even use today. So just to kind of put that in perspective. So that’s an evolution, at least in the brewing methods to where we are today.
And then now we’re seeing another evolution. You know, Bruna bag is still a thing. Absolutely. But we’re now moving to these all in one brewing systems and it started off with things like the Pico brew and Pico brew. Great product sucks that the company’s not around. I, they gave it a good, good go. And they were doing a all-in-one it’s basically, it was like, think of it as like Keurig for homebrewing.
Right. They had these Pico packs. You could buy them. In a Pico pack, you literally just put water in it and you’re, you’re, you’re shoved to your Pico pack in, and it went through the whole brewing process and then you added the yeast to it. And it all like fermented in it. It was like a whole thing. Uh, the Pico brew was kind of a cool thing.
I watched it like appear. I watched all of the homebrewing gurus out there that do podcasts and everybody who’s in the home brewing world. All, you know, get sponsored by pinko brew and push the Pico brew. Oh man, I love my Pico brew and then all of a sudden it’s just disappeared. Right. And I think that the.
I personally think that the Pico brew had something right. Where I do think that home brewers want that all in one brewing system. But I think that the thing that kind of killed it was the Pico pack. I also think that people still want the flexibility of what they want to do for their recipes and don’t get me wrong.
The Pico packs were cool and that you could kind of get your own recipes in them. I believe I’ve never actually used one, but, but the idea is that. When I think about a homebrewer half of the fun is making a recipe. Half of the fun is the artistic side of home brewing it’s it’s like we’re science and cooking and art all mix.
And so I just, I feel like it was a little too trying to, it was trying to simplify it a little bit more than what a homebrewer is trying to do. But then when we look at the all-in-one brewing systems that have taken off it’s things like the grandfather. Right. And in comparison to grandfather, in comparison to a Pico brew was very inexpensive, right?
We think of the all-grain systems now, such as the mash and Boyle or the Brazilla and the, the Chinese knockoff ones that are like 150 bucks. There you can get an all-in-one brewing system for stupid cheap right now, but at the time it was, you know, 1500 to $2,000 for a Pico brew with Pico packs, or it was 800 bucks for a brew father.
Abreu father was going to come in all day and proof other took. The idea of brewing a bag in a way, um, and brought it into, you know, a full-on brew brewing system, though. It isn’t fully brewing. You still had to boil some water on the side and they asked that you, that you sparge the water as part of the process.
But the idea is that if you use. A brew brew father or a mash and boil or a Brazil, or the way they’re intended to be used. It’s a kind of hybrid between like batch barging and, and, and, and brew and a bag. It’s kind of a cool little setup. Uh, then now they’ve added pumps to them. They’ve added still tops to them.
So you can distill from them. They have all become an entire ecosystem in themselves, and these things are cool. Right. They they’re, they make brewing more accessible to more brewers and they make electric brewing more accessible to more homebrewers and I think that that’s a good thing. So when we look at the, when we look at the entire process of homebrewing from the nineties to today, just the brewing process, it’s very, very different.
I also think that, you know, the styles of beer, obviously we know that that’s changed in, in the late nineties when I started brewing parallels where all the rage, you know, if you, if you, if you were. Drinking things like a Sierra Nevada pale ale. That was the cool beer. That was the cool hoppy beer to have.
Uh, people did do IPA’s, but IPA’s were still kind of a thing. And they were still kind of driven off of British beers though. At the time they were starting, the West coast style was starting to come and become a thing. Just in its early infancy, but you know, IPA’s were nothing like they weren’t there.
They weren’t even close to the giant bitter bombs of a hundred used as they were in the like late aughts and early teens of, uh, the two thousands. Right. It hadn’t really come into its own style yet. It was still that derivative from the British style of an IPA. Uh, beer beers, then we’re also malt driven.
I would say in the late nineties, the cool beer to have was an Amber ale. I want you to, if you’re listening to this podcast right now, think to yourself, when was the last time you sat down and ordered an Burrell? There, there there’s still some great ones out there. I think Bill’s makes an amazing Amarelle, but, but the idea is that it’s just not.
A beer that a lot of people drink. Uh, Brown ELLs were also big beers then. Uh, Porter’s obviously we’re, we’re great beers. In those times, it was all these like multi driven beers and, and those were the beers that were, that were people wanted. They had some. Some hot backbone to them, but, but they were still showcasing the malt and malt forward beers were a thing.
Right? Then the evolution of beer styles moves in it, at least in the United States then moves into the bitter. IPA’s right. And we get into those West coast style clear. IPA’s with lots of crystal malts and, and really hoppy pale ELLs. And it’s bitter, lots of bittering hops and, and bittering hops throughout the entire boil with some dry hopping.
But it was all about getting as bitter as you can. We want to crank up the that, that became a whole thing. And then we. We went into iterations of different IPA’s right. The black IPA and the red IPA. And if you go look up 2015 BJC P style guidelines, you’ll see all of the relics of all of the different IPA’s at the time, you know, going through all of that process.
And then. Come the mid-teens is really when the hazy IPA starts to become a thing, right. Breweries in the East coast. We’re already making them in the early teens think like heady topper, they were being made long before. And I think that that’s probably the beer that hazy IPA’s are originally kind of driven from, but even then, It’s now become its own style and these different hop combinations.
And it’s very, very different than a West coast IPA. Yes. They both have the word IPA in them, but they’re so, so different there, you know, it’s all about late addition, if not any addition, hops in the boil and, and really large high dry hops. And it’s all about things like getting like. Like using London, yeast driven flavors, like London ale, yeast, and using, uh, wheat and oats and all of that.
It’s just completely different than what you were getting. If you were making an IPA back in 2010, they’re just very, very different things and, and all of these styles have evolved. And it’s funny when you think about the sought after beers, now it is. Hazy IPA’s barrel aged stouts, and really just barrel aged beers in general sour beers had a little stint in there and they, and there’s still some very, very well loved and, and, and.
Sought after sour breweries, but it’s yeah. Sour beer has become a very, very different thing. And so it’s, it’s fun to see the iterations of, of beer and all of these new styles and how they’ve changed along with brewing and how, how brewing in general has evolved as well as brewing. So it’s, it’s kinda cool to see those evolutions.
The last thing I want to talk about is when it, when it comes to. Yeas and, and the things that people are looking for in beers and, and there’s an entire section of home brewing that has really changed there as well. It used to be. When I first started homebrewing it, it was obviously dry yeast was, was, uh, the, the, the fermented Aceso five was probably, and probably still to this day is, is the number one used yeast and making home-brewed beer in the world.
I would say that that’s probably a pretty safe assumption and it’s a clean yeast that gets out of the way. It’s meant to be a yeast that doesn’t really add any flavors to your beer. Right. And, and that, that could be a great thing. I’m making a parallel. I want the East out of the way, I’m making a, I’m making a, a, a blonde ale.
I want the yeast out of the way. That’s, it’s a great beer. Uh, a great yeast for those types of beers, but in all reality, D amount of yeast available to us now in comparison to 20 years ago. And just ingredients in general are just very different. It used to be that you would go into a Homebrew shop and you might’ve.
If you went into a really good one, they might have a decent selection of different types of malts. And now when you walk into a home brew shop and I’ll give you an example, my local brew shop has probably a hundred different types of malt that I could choose from. And that’s very, very common in Homebrew shots now.
And we’re talking. All kinds of specialty malts down to different countries that they can come from down to. Uh, I have options of different types of rye from the whole color spectrum down to it being flaked dry too, too. Two chocolate. Right. And, and there’s just so many different types of, of wheat and different types of, of barley.
We just have so many options of really amazing ingredients that we just didn’t have access to. And I think that. That is the part that’s really made homebrewing an amazing hobby to have there. There’s just so many beers that you can make. There’s just so many things you can do with all of these ingredients and, and just make something special.
And, and for me, that, that, that’s, that’s the coolest part. That’s the coolest part about homebrewing that that’s what makes this hobbies so amazing is that you’re now in a place where. You have the entire world at your finger tips, you could, if you’re into making fermented beverages, you can make beer, you can make wine, you can make Mead, you can make Saki and.
Whatever it is you want to make, right. Uh, Maka Lee, which is a Korean rice wine, right? It’s like a cloudy Korean rice wine. I I’ve seen so many people making these different types of beverages out there. And there’s just the, the sky’s the limit when it comes to making fermented alcoholic beverages that you want to experiment with it, it’s just, I almost feel like, you know, right now, And, and for the last, I would say decade has really just been a golden age of home brewing, at least in the United States and things have just evolved into a wonderful place.
Uh, I also think that the things that we focus on. Are obviously a little are, are a lot different than the things we focused on 20 years ago. But in the end, I think it’s a good thing. And it’s a, it’s a snapshot in this time. And when we look 20 years from now, the things homebrewers are going to focus on are going to be.
Different and, and that’s okay. And, you know, maybe they’ll have different ways that they look at oxygen and maybe they’ll have different ways that they look at secondary fermentations or whatever it is. They’re there. They’re just going to be different things. But the cool part is, is that I think that when it comes to the whole brewing hobby is that, and this is just my total way of looking at all this.
Because there’s, there’s no wrong way to do anything. There’s just, Hey. You’re going to do it your way. And if you make good beer, that’s all that matters in the end. So, you know, listening to this, I am talking about the evolution and, and I’m talking in generalities, but in all reality, if you still do a three fermentation vessel with secondary, every single batch and you, you, you brew in the traditional way people did in the nineties or the eighties.
Good on you. If you make great beer. Wonderful. I’d love to have a beer with you, but I’m also not poo poo. The guy who does a brew in a bag with a cold crash, um, in an oxygen free cold site environment with everything, super temp controlled with computers and all kinds of stuff, and tries to take shortcuts all the way down to getting a beer done in seven days, grain to glass.
Boom, and if, as long as it’s a good beer, That’s all that matters. And so in the end, no matter what evolution beers going to take, it’s going to end up becoming a wonderful beverage that we’re all going to share with her friends. So, yeah. I’d love to hear from anyone else out there of how homebrewing has changed over time for you.
I know that when we talk about the people who listen to this podcast, it’s all over the spectrum from, from early beginners, all the way to seasoned vets that have been brewing longer than I’ve ever brewed. And, and I appreciate all that have listened to me. So, you know, if you’re still with me, I’d love some feedback, uh, and I’d love to read it in our next episode about, you know, how is your home brewing evolved over time?
And what, what, what does homebrewing look like to you that is very different from, from your beginning roots to the way it is today? I think that’s a wonderful conversation to have because. It also helps us look back on the hobby and see where we started and where we’ve become, and it might help us see where we’re going.
And that, that’s a great thing to think about when we think about the homebrewing hobby. So, uh, love they get that feedback and, uh, yeah. And speaking of feedback, we’ll take a quick break. And when we come back, we’ll hop into it. Thanks.
All right. We’re back with feedback and I’m going to just dive into our first one in our first one’s from Terry Jeffress and Terry writes. Hello from salt Lake city. I have a show suggestion adjustments for high altitude brewing. I know the hops utilization and KET carbonation require adjustments because of higher altitude.
But what does altitude actually effect? I I’ve set my altitude in brew father for Hopsy utilization and it seemed to get pretty good results. But carbonation seems to be alluding me. I have slightly elevated. My serving pressure to maintain a better carbonation, but it just seems to get a little bit under carved regards.
Terry PS, my brewing history starts relatively similar to yours. I bought my first kids from the beer nut to extract kits Porter and the Amber ale and jumped into an all-grain batch, uh, on number three and kegging on batch number six. So, uh, Terry, thank you so much for the feedback and. Yeah, I think that I should do a show on high-altitude brewing, to be honest.
I don’t do many adjustments for altitude and I’m actually a thousand feet higher in elevation than you are in salt Lake salt Lake sit around 4,300 feet. And I’m at about 5,300 feet. The number one thing I know that altitude effects when it comes to hop utilization is the fact that you just boil at a lower temperature.
Uh, the standard boiling rate for sea levels of around 210 degrees. My water boils here at around two Oh one. 200. So it’s, it’s about a 10 degree difference in the boil where water starts to boil and you never get above that temperature. I’ve never been above two Oh two in any of my, in, on any of my thermometers up here in Colorado.
So it’s definitely got an effect on your hospital utilization. I do know that you got to up the hops just a little bit to kind of factor in the fact that you’re boiling at a lower temperature, but it’s pretty slight. I’ve never really seen much of an effect as far as, uh, With carbonation goes. I do know that there’s an effect on altitude and carbonation.
That might be a good question for somebody like Chino, who’s a contributor or Ryan pack Meyer to answer. And I’ll definitely make sure that this is a subject that we tackle when we talk about high altitude brewing, because Hey, I live in a high altitude area and. I also I’m in Colorado. We definitely have towns that are above 10,000 feet here or close to 10,000 feet that have great breweries, like outer ranges up in Frisco, which is around 10,000 feet.
I think it’s like 90. 800 feet or something like that. And so it, that they definitely have to do something to adjust for high altitude and, and I’d love to hear more about that. So I think that’s a great suggestion and, and great feedback. So thank you so much, Terry. And then I’ve got another piece of feedback and I actually got this from Chino.
Uh, who’s a contributor here at hoper and DIY. He, he loves to write me letters about my episodes cause he does listen to the podcast and, and it’s, it’s, it’s awesome to get his notes on a couple of things. And this is a really good one. So I wanted to make sure I read it. He sent me an email where he’s like, Hey, I was listening to episode 75 with Kevin Brooks barrel aged stout.
And it sounds like the beer was a treat, but there’s a couple of observations on a technical note for listeners. Kevin mentioned that he had an issue. Bottle conditioning, one of his barrel aged stouts. There are two things going on when bottling conditioning barrel barely stouts first, you or Ryan touched on the need to re East, which can be the case for a really long aged beer.
Um, It may, it may not in some ways be necessary, but reinvesting is an insurance policy and may reduce carbonation and it could reduce the carbonation time. But the second issue is a big one, priming sugar calculators, assume that your beer is already partly carbonated from fermentation. So. About 0.8 volumes of freshly fermented beer that hasn’t exceeded the around 70 degrees Fahrenheit that ha that hasn’t exceeded around 70 degrees Fahrenheit after bubbling a slowed down, but barrel aged beers can go flat.
And priming sugar calculators. Doesn’t ask for that info for compensation. That is actually a good point out because yes, they’re there, they do assume that there’s a little bit of carbonation, cause they assume that you’re just going to finish it and move it. They don’t assume that you’ve been aging it in a barrel.
So there’s definitely a factor in there. Um, and we are planning on. Eventually putting a tool on the website where we are going to talk about things like bottle conditioning, age beers, and having a priming sugar calculator where we’re actually in the process of building out a ton of different calculators for the website.
So that homebrewing DIY in general can be a resource for you. If you would like to look at different calculators that, that you know are right then and there, uh, I’ll give you, I. I have certain calculators that I use on spreadsheets and I’d love to get them on the website just so that we can get them used.
Um, so keep an eye out for those next. He said the best examples of beer in the world. Are the best home brews, even shining commercial examples in a style rarely score more than a 45 on a 50 point BJC P scale scored by master judges and sometimes lower. But the same judges might hand out, uh, several high scores in a big Homebrew competition.
So another reason to love the hobby and I, I agree. And one of the things that we talk about in our. Homebrew beer chef challenges is that, you know, we do put them up against commercial examples. And every time I talk to somebody, I say, Hey, we’re going to put it up against this commercial example. Every home brewer that sends it to me is like, Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to beat that beer.
But the thing is, is. I haven’t total agreement with Chino here in the fact that I think that home-brewed beers can be an issue in a lot of instances are better than a lot of commercial beers. Don’t get me wrong. There are some amazing commercial beers out there that are highly sought after, but if you’re a really good home brewer and you’ve taken a lot of time and attention and care and a very small batch of beer, that’s a lot easier to manage than a large.
Batch of beer. I think that in some ways you can actually produce beers that are as good, if not better than a lot of the commercial examples. And he does point out that, you know, commercial examples rarely get above a 45 and there are people out there that have had a 50 handed out to them in competition for a home-brewed beer.
So think about that. Yeah. When you, when you, when you’re, uh, thinking about, Hey, does my beer hold up to commercial? I’ve definitely made some beers that I love a lot more than the commercial examples and that’s in my own personal brewery. And I hope that that’s the case for you because that’s something I truly, truly believe in when it comes to beers.
So, uh, Yeah. So, uh, that’s what I have this week for feedback. And I want to thank everyone who sends in feedback. It’s super appreciated. You can always send feedback to podcast at homebrewing, diy.beer. That’s a podcast at brewing DIY deer, top beer. That’s that email goes to directly to me. And then.
Another way you can submit feedback is to head to homebrewing, diy.beer, our website. If you go to the contact page, just fill out the form. And then it’s going to send an email to podcast, home homebrewing, Tia to beer. So either way I get it, uh, another way you can send me feedback is just hit me up on my social media.
If you head over to homebrewing DIY on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, I’m also on Reddit. You’ll see my posts on the home brewing forum. I do post the podcast there and, and you can always message me feedback there, and I’m always glad to read it other channels than just to email. So just let you know, uh, if I get feedback that I think is, uh, that is valid and good feedback, I I’d love to make sure that we get it read on the show.
And so thank you very much for those who do. Uh, let’s, let’s wrap this puppy up.
I’d like to thank everyone who stuck with me this far to listen to the outro. It makes me real happy that, uh, you stuck her out and. I had a great time talking about the evolution of the homebrewing hobby, at least in my eyes. And, uh, it was a fun conversation that I’m having with all of you. Well, that’s it for this week.
And we’ll talk to you next week. Uh, homebrewing, DIY.
Um,
