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Acetaldehyde is one of the most common off-flavors encountered in beer, often described as having a green apple or freshly cut pumpkin aroma and taste. In this article we will delve into the causes, prevention, and remedies for acetaldehyde, as well as how to identify it in your own brews.
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In order to ensure complete control over your recipe, efficiency and brewing system, you really need to be crushing your own malted grains. After several years of brewing on our 35L BrewZilla 3.1.1 using pre-milled grains from our local home brew shop, we decided to invest in a grain mill and begin crushing our own grains for each recipe and brew day. This lead us to the question as to what the ideal crush size is to use on a BrewZilla system?
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Our second iteration of the Juice Boost Hazy IPA (previously NEIPA) with a slightly tweaked grain bill and hop schedule compared to the original. It's a decent hazy in our opinion, but there's still some things we'll look at tweaking for version 3...
Read on to see all the details about our latest brew day on our 35L BrewZilla 3.1.1 where we brought our Redemption West Coast IPA recipe to life.
We've assembled our grain mill, so the next step is to go ahead and adjust the rollers to the required gap size. Adjusting the gap size is important as it effects how the grain is crushed. A smaller gap will lead to a finer crush, which can help with conversion of starches to sugar, but can cause issues with recirculation or sparging, since the water is not able to flow through the grain bed as easily. Conversely, a larger gap will give a coarser crush, which can aid in water flow through the grain bed, but can lead to decreased conversion of starches to sugar (ie. efficiency). Finding the sweet spot for your brewing system is key, and like most things, setting the gap size is pretty easy once you know how to do it. The provided instructions with the grain mill certainly lack the kind of detail you need to do it properly. Read on for some detailed steps on how we did it.
Our second attempt at a Mexican Lager and we're very pleased with how this one turned out. A new recipe and new yeast variety helps to keep things interesting, and makes it all the more satisfying when it turns out well.
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The next step in our homebrewing journey is to take the plunge into milling our own grains. We opted for the Malt King from Keg King - a geared 3 roller grain mill that comes with a nice steel mounting board and saves us having to muck around creating our mounting board from timber. We recently went through the assembly so figured we'd document our experience.
We often like to have a beer alternative on tap and we recently tried KegLand's Blunderberg Ginger Beer kit. It's essentially a glorified cordial, requiring some flavour "shot" concentrates to be mixed with water, sugar and another additive to prevent it from fermenting.
