Of course nothing compares to your favorite LHSS (Local Homebrew Supply Shop) – it’s great to support the local economy; most such shops have knowledgeable and helpful staff members; many offer homebrewing classes or clubs where you can meet fellow brewers (and best of all try their beer) and share knowledge; and of course, there’s the benefit of instant gratification, no shipping required.

Unfortunately, not every homebrewer has access to such a shop. And even those who do, will still like to order from a homebrewing web store from time-to-time. Maybe it’s to get a certain kit or grain that they can’t find locally, or maybe you will find a deal too good to pass up. While there are dozens of places online to order homebrewing kits, ingredients and tools, a few such sites in particular seem to rise above the rest.

The first is NorthernBrewer.com. In addition to a very active, knowledgeable forum of brewers, Northern Brewer offers some of the best beer, wine & mead kits on the market. They have recipe kits to meet every level of brewer, from the most basic American Wheat Beer extract kit, to the most complicated, aging-appropriate all-grain Belgian Quad recipe. Northern Brewer also stocks all the equipment you would ever need, be it for cleaning & sanitization, fermentation, bottling or kegging, and lose ingredients (also available in bulk) for any recipe you can imagine, including flavorings like fruit, honey and spices.

The second online shop recommendation is AustinHomebrew.com. If you are looking for a beyond impressive selection of kits – extract, partial-mash or all-grain – recipes and styles, the selection at Austin Homebrew is unmatched. Where else will you find something like their latest spring seasonal kit, Honey Hibiscus Wit? And best of all, Austin keeps the shipping & handling charge of your order to a modest $7.99, regardless of what or how much you order. While it doesn’t quite beat a LHSS, that’s still pretty darn good (and if you have a few fellow brewing friends, place an order of a few different kits together to cut down on the shipping cost per person even further).

The third and final recommendation is meant more for the seasoned homebrewer who is ready to start kegging their beers, building a home bar or taking their homebrew on the road to local festivals and competitions. And that would be KegWorks.com. KegWorks shouldn’t be your go-to for homebrewing ingredients and or kits, but their selection of kegging and home bar equipment is unmatched, their prices are competitive and their customer service is awesome. As your hobby expands, don’t overlook KegWorks.com.

If you aren’t lucky enough to be able to regularly get to a local homebrew supply shop to feed your addiction, with a little digging, you will certainly be able to find some great bargains and interesting recipes and kits no more than a mouse click away.

The notion of smoked beer, or rauchbier as the Germans call it, has been around since brewing beer began. In fact, until the invention of the drum-style kiln in 1818, the malt used in brewing was cured with fires made of wood, coal, coke, straw or peat. And while brewers tried hard to direct the smoke away from the green malt during the cure, it undoubtedly was absorbed to some degree.

While smoked malt may seem most at home in a dark style of beer, like porter or stout (and it works wonders in such beers), it’s also a popular additive to lighter German styles, like märzen, helles, bock and weissbier, and even melds well with many popular Belgian-style brews. If you are looking for some commercially-available samples of the style, among American craft brands you might want to try the Stone Smoked Porter, Rogue Smoke Ale and, if you can get your hands on a bottle, the elusive Alaskan Smoked Porter (the most decorated beer in the history of the Great American Beer Festival).

One of the most prominent malt suppliers in Germany, Weyermann Specialty Malts of Bamberg, provides their authentic rauchmalz to most homebrewing-related retail outlets. However, many homebrewers themselves have begun to experiment with smoking their own malt. Many take a base malt which has already been cured – like pilsner, pale ale, Vienna, and Munich malts – and toast it themselves in the oven for a little depth and smokiness.

If you do err on the side of commercially produced malts (or even if you choose to smoke your own), bear in mind that, since rauchmalz is a base malt, it needs to be mashed. So if you are an extract brewer, a mini or side mash will be necessary if you plan to remain true-to-style.

If you’re looking for a stronger, more robust smoked character than rauchmalz can provide – one which will stand up enough in a darker style like a robust Porter – peated malt is another option; one which is usually available at your local homebrew supply shop. However, unlike German rauchmalz, t he smoky, phenol, character of peated malt is extremely robust and much rougher. Thus, it should be used with great restraint and is best only in ales where a smoky background character is preferred. With peated malt, a good rule of thumb is to start with only 2% of your grain bill and only increase from there as you get comfortable with the flavor and style. However, with levels that low, mashing peated malt is not necessary and it can be steeped with the rest of your specialty grains.

Whether you smoke your own malt at home, or buy commercially-available rauchmalz or peated malts, playing around with smoky flavors and aromas in many different styles of homebrew is a fun adventure every homebrewer should play with. Cheers!

Luke Livingston is opening a new brewery in Lewiston, Maine, Baxter Brewing Company, which expects to ship its first cases of beer in September of this year. However, Baxter is not just another craft brewery. In fact, it will be the first craft brewery north of Connecticut to can its entire line of beer. What follows is a discussion with Livingston on how Baxter came to be and what makes it (and cans) different.

BrewingKB.com: How’d you get into the industry?

Livingston: I actually sort of stumbled into the industry quite differently than most brewery founders. While I have been homebrewing since I turned 21, I started to really get into craft beer through a beer blog I ran for a number of years, and through professional advertising sales for a local niche weekly newspaper, so I learned both the industry as a whole and the local Maine beer market that way. And I think coming at my start-up from a marketing and sales standpoint, rather than just some homebrewer-turned-professional, will be a breath of fresh air for the industry and sets us up for success in the long run. I’ve hired a veteran Masterbrewer to handle the brewing operations, which allows me to focus on the business side of the business.

BrewingKB.com: There are already a lot of breweries in Maine, how are you going to be different?

Livingston: Well, the current beer landscape in Maine is dominated by either the Alan Pugsley/Ringwood yeast-influenced English-style ales of companies like Shipyard, Sea Dog, Geary’s, Gritty’s, etc. – all of which are very low profile, un-adventuresome beers which all taste remarkably similar – or the incredible but pretty far out there Belgian-style beers from Allagash. There is very little in the middle – those up & coming, highly-hopped, West Coast-style, American ales. In addition to putting all of our beer in cans (something not done in this region), we’ll be brewing beers and styles currently not found here. I’ve seen the way Mainers palates have changed and expanded recently and I think they are ready and anxious for something new, something flavorful and something other than Ringwood. That’s where we come in.

BrewingKB.com: Why Cans?

Livingston: The benefits of cans are threefold: first, they are much better for the environment than glass bottles. Cans require less energy to create and less energy to ship than glass bottles, they are made from more than 70% recycled material and Americans are statistically twice as likely to recycle aluminum than they are glass. Secondly, cans are better for beer because they are completely light and oxygen free, keeping the beer in them fresher longer. And third, cans have much superior portability to glass. You can take a can everywhere you can’t take glass bottles (because they’re either too dangerous or too cumbersome), like the beach, the boat, the golf course; camping, hiking, fishing, snowboarding, etc.

BrewingKB.com: Does beer that comes from a can taste any different than beer that comes from a bottle if both are poured into a pint glass?

Livingston: If both types of beer are poured into a glass, I have a very hard time thinking that any normal palate would be able to taste a difference. The cans we will be purchasing will have a water-soluble solution coating the walls of the can so aluminum and beer never touch. Meaning there won’t be any of that “tinny” taste drinkers of early canned beer seem to ascertain goes with beer in a can. If anything, our beer will taste fresher than a comparable beer from a bottle.

BrewingKB.com: Are you starting with just one flavor or will there be several? What about seasonals?

Livingston: We will be releasing two beers initially – Stowaway IPA and Pamola Extra Pale Ale. Stowaway IPA, which is the beer we are considering our flagship release, will be a very highly-hopped, West Coast-style American IPA truly unlike any other beer produced in the state of Maine. Pamola XPA will be a very easy-drinking, session beer. While it will still be a very full-flavored ale, its light, golden taste will be the perfect ending to a long summer hike.

BrewingKB.com: Is anybody making a big deal about your age? After all, you’ve only been able to legally drink for about 5 years.

Livingston: Well, it’s closer to 5 years J but no, people seem to be more impressed with it than anything else. And I am joined by a veteran cast – my brewer, Michael LaCharite, has been homebrewing for more than 25 years and professionally brewing for more than 15 years – of employees and advisors. Besides, Ken Grossman, the founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. (the 2^nd largest craft brewery in the country) was only 24 when he went into business. And Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head was 25 when he opened his brewery. So there’s a long history of young entrepreneurs in this industry.

There are few things in this world as ancient, as revered, as cherished and as highly consumed as beer. One of those things, however, is chocolate. Its history, health benefits, allure and powers as an aphrodisiac are all well documented. Thus it only makes sense that the flavors of the two (beer & chocolate that is) would work together in such harmony. Sam Adams Chocolate Bock, Foothills Sexual Chocolate, Dogfish Head Theobroma, and Rouge Chocolate Stout are all perfect examples of this.

While brewing with chocolate is certainly an art form and the resulting flavors are not something to be taken lightly – remember if adding chocolate to homebrew: back off of the dark malts at the same rate at which you add new chocolate to the recipe so as not to overwhelm the palate – the results can be beautiful.

Just about any chocolate will work in a homebrew recipe. Cocoa powder, bar chocolate, cocoa nibs and even Hersey’s Chocolate Syrup are all more-or-less trouble-free and can work very well at different times during the brewing process. In fact, the resulting chocolate flavors and aromas of adding a 12 ounce can of Hersey’s syrup (which itself is fat-free and thus very advantageous to brewing) to the secondary fermentation of a brown ale, porter or stout will astound you. And it doesn’t get much easier than that.

If you want to be a little more “genuine” in your brewing than chocolate syrup, although both cocoa powder and chocolate bars will work, the best recommendation is the cocoa nib. Nibs are the most raw, and thus most intense of the four; they are essentially crushed cocoa beans that are either raw or a little toasted. Raw nibs work best in a brown ale or lighter porter, while roasted nibs will have enough power to stand out in a Baltic Porter or stout. If you’re unsure about the strength of the nibs you’ve got, taste them. It will usually be your best bet in determining the character they will impart in your brew (as a rule of thumb, three ounces is usually a good starting point for a five gallon batch). Nibs can be added to the mash, the boil or suspended in the secondary like you would dry hops or spices. While syrup is probably easiest, coco nibs are generally the brewer’s chocolate of choice, as they are relatively unaltered from their natural state, thus contributing the most authentic taste.

Baltic Cocoa Porter Recipe

• 7 pounds light DME (9# pilsner malt for all-grain)
• 2 pounds Munich or amber malt extract (3# light Munich malt for all-grain)
• ½ pound caramunich III
• ½ pound cararoma malt
• ½ pound black patent malt
• 2 ounces of milled cocoa nibs
• 7 AAU Perle or Liberty hops
• ½ ounce Liberty, Halletau or Saaz hops for flavor/aroma, about 10 minutes in the kettle
• Ferment with American ale yeast for robust porter, or California Common yeast for Baltic-style porter. During aging, suspend 3 ounces of uncrushed roasted cocoa nibs in the beer.

Experimentation is the name of the game for homebrewers – it’s why many brewers continue to develop their hobby and why they choose to brew the beer they drink, rather than (or in addition to) buying it commercially. Homebrewers experiment with different styles, different techniques and different flavors. They go from extract brewing, to the use of specialty grains, to mini or partial mashes and eventually to all-grain brewing techniques.

However, one thing which is overlooked by many – certainly not all – homebrewers is trying your hand at brewing something other than beer. The options are truly bountiful and the results are nearly as much fun and as tasty as homebrewed beer. Many homebrew supply shops provide the ingredients and equipment necessary to experiment with brewing your own wine, hard cider, mead (honey wine) or sake (rice wine), and many of the Web’s most popular homebrew forums and blogs have resources to help you learn the necessary techniques.

Brewing both cider and mead is a relatively simple jump from homebrewing beer because neither requires any additional equipment. WYeast Laboratories, the most popular liquid yeast choice in the homebrewing community, provides their well-known liquid yeast “Smack Packs” in both cider (or champagne yeast; a very common choice for ciders) and mead varieties. Really the only caveat to be weary of if you choose to venture into mead or cider making is that both, mead especially, take a VERY long time to ferment – three months or more for the beginner mead kits from NorthernBrewer.com – so you will want to be sure and have an extra carboy or two lying around to ferment in so you don’t have to forego brewing anything else while your mead experiment takes shape.

Making the Sake leap is a simple one as well, just not quite as simple. While the brewing equipment required for Sake kits is the same, and WYeast makes a liquid Sake yeast too, sake also requires the addition of white rice (long or short grain will do), citric acid and koji spores; ingredients that most homebrewers wouldn’t have in their home arsenal.

Home winemaking, though similar to all other above home fermented drinks, does require additional equipment and additional labor. Winemaking requires additional racking steps for clarity, so a number of free carboys are required (as well as racking equipment). Winemaking generally requires the addition of oak, either by adding oak chips to a carboy or by aging your wine in an oak barrel; a very costly investment. And lastly, probably the biggest difference for most homebrewers (unless you currently cork & cage your homebrew) is the necessity of corking your 750 ml bottles of wine. This requires the purchase of a corking machine, something most home beer brewers don’t have lying around.

However, clearly the options are abundant if you are looking to expand your brewing horizons beyond additional beer styles or techniques. Part of what makes the world of fermented beverages such a great hobby truly is the nearly limitless possibilities of experimentation. Go nuts!

There is little doubt that cans are fast becoming a mainstay on the American craft beer landscape. Cans began to appear in the craft market in 2002, when Oskar Blues Brewing Co. (now the 44th largest craft brewery in the country) of Lyons, Colorado purchased a manual, two-headed canning system from Cask Brewing Systems of North America (in Calgary, Alberta, CA).

Today, there are more than fifty craft breweries in the United States who are already canning some or all of their beers. With more, like Baxter Brewing Co – a start-up craft brewery in central Maine – or West Coast powerhouse, Pyramid Brewing – who announced recently that they will begin canning their summer seasonal release, Haywire American-Style Hefeweizen, this year – popping up daily.

Advocates of the canned craft beer revolution, as it’s often called, claim that craft beer in cans has three main advantages over its bottled cohorts. First, cans are much better for the environment than glass bottles. Cans require less energy to create and less energy to ship than glass bottles, they are made from more than 70% recycled material and Americans are statistically twice as likely to recycle aluminum than they are glass. Secondly, cans are better for beer because they are completely light and oxygen free, keeping the beer in them fresher longer. And third, cans have much superior portability to glass. You can take a can everywhere you can’t take glass bottles (because they’re either too dangerous or too cumbersome), like the beach, the boat, the golf course; camping, hiking, fishing, snowboarding, etc.

While craft cans are not yet as easily recognized or found as their bottled counterparts, there is little denying their renaissance is here to stay and is yet another example of craft breweries pushing the boundaries of the generally accepted and the mainstream. Have you begun drinking craft cans yet?

Brewing beers with fruit additions is both fun and delicious, especially as the weather warms and we drag on into summer. But like with any brewing additive, there are many variations and schools of thought on the easiest and best ways to flavor a fruit beer.

Once you’ve chosen a fruit flavor to impart in your beer – choosing the flavor is a different argument for a different day – there are generally three different methods and times you can choose to flavor your beer: during the boil, during the conditioning, or at bottling time. I have used all three with varying results.
Adding fruit during the boil creates the strongest fruit flavors – especially if you use real, fresh or frozen berries – but also requires the most fruit. One hint I found very useful (although much messier) is rather than putting the berries in a muslin bag, add lose berries to the boil so that when you pour from the kettle into your fermenter through a funnel, you essentially create a filter of berries through which the wort has to pass, sucking out even more fruit juice and flavor.

The second option is adding fruit (usually either whole fruit or a puree like those from Oregon Fruit Products) to your secondary and aging/conditioning the beer on a bed of fruit for a few weeks. This requires less fruit volume than adding during the boil and results in a great aroma, but less fruit flavor is absorbed into the beer this way. Of course this is not necessarily a bad thing; it all depends on the presence you would like the fruit to play in your beer. Often it will be a matter of trial and error until you find your preferred method of fruiting.
Lastly, the option which is probably the easiest and most cost effective would be to add a few ounces (to taste) of fruit extract to your bucket just prior to bottling. The main downside to this method, however, is that the resulting flavors can often be very syrupy—like a Seadog Blueberry for a commercial comparison – and not taste authentic enough for most seasoned homebrewers.

Whichever method you choose (and again, I recommend playing with all three), flavoring your beer with fruit is a fun and welcome summer brewing experiment. To take this a step further, try brewing a recipe or a style which would not normally call for fruit, like a Coconut Coffee Stout; or a fruit not normally found in beer, like a Kiwi Wit, and see what happens. Good luck and happy brewing!

Simply put, Beer Wars the movie (2009) is one every fan of beer needs to see. The film, which can be downloaded directly from BeerWarsMovie.com, or streamed live (or rented) from NetFlix, was written and narrated by industry insider Anat Baron. In Beer Wars, Baron tells the story of craft brewing hero Sam Calagione, the owner of Dogfish Head, and his struggles with expansion; and of Rhonda Kallman, as she tries to get her brand of malt beverage, Moonshot – a beer brewed with caffeine – off the ground as a one-woman show.

Even though Dogfish has seen unprecedented growth and success, for Calagoine, the cost and toll of expanding the brewery’s capacity weighs heavily on not only the company’s assets, but the Calagoine family’s as well. As Sam and wife Mariah struggle with putting their home up to guarantee the loans necessary to purchase larger fermentation tanks for the brewery.

The filmmaker also follows Kallman around Boston, as she tries to convince new accounts to pick up her Moonshot drink. Kallman left a position on top of the beer world as Jim Koch’s (Sam Adams) right-hand-lady to self-fund Moonshot and bootstrap the company from the ground up. Despite a slow start and tough numbers – and a quickly-diminishing bank account – she chooses to push on despite all odds and ends the film considering selling the brand (or partnering with) one of the behemoth brewing companies like MillerCoors or Anheuser-Busch.

The film is not without criticisms or faults. Filmmaker Anat Baron set out to create a film which realistically represents the beer industry while claiming she herself is an industry insider. However, she only ever worked for gimmicky malt beverage company Mike’s Hard Lemonade and is actually allergic to alcohol, so she has no real intimate knowledge of beer.

Secondly, as noted, Rhonda Kallman’s product “Moonshot” is also a malt beverage (not a beer) brewed with caffeine. Many argue that while Kallman has the right to market the drink like anyone else, it has no place in a film which is meant to fight for the rights and awareness of the country’s small, struggling, artisanal craft breweries.

Despite these arguments, Beer Wars sheds a very important light on the bully-like ways that the country’s “Big Three” breweries – Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors – still control the nation’s beer landscape (one out of every two beers sold in the U.S. is an Anheuser-Busch product), creating what many consider a monopoly of the industry. Despite the laws of a three-tiered distribution system put in place to stop such monopolies after the passage of the twenty-first amendment.

Whether you are a seasoned craft beer connoisseur or a newcomer to the hobby, Beer Wars is an important film to see; chalk-full of powerful information, industry insight and feel-good stories which makes any fan of Better Beer happy to raise a glass and toast the suds we love.

I have noticed that one of the most frequently asked questions by new and old brewers is, is my beer done fermenting? Well, there are a few ways to answer that; varying from pitching more yeast to be sure, comparing the expected attenuation from the yeast manufacturer with the actual attenuation, or moving the beer to a warmer spot. I have never been a huge fan of any of these options because of loss of flavor from overpitching or the creation of esters from warming the whole batch.

The fast or forced fermentation test is a way to circumvent that process to analytically determine what you final gravity should be. The way that I like to go about this is to create a starter that is slightly larger than is needed, and to save about 8oz or so of unfermented wort. I then take a hydrometer reading (or brix), aerate, and then use the extra yeast to overpitch this small batch, and allow it to ferment in a slightly warmer area. You can also aerate this small batch throughout its fermentation because there is no worry about oxidation. After a few days the fermentation will be done and you can take a final gravity reading. This final gravity reading is what you would expect out of your larger batch based the yeast strain, particular batch, and optimal conditions for your yeast.
As a side note, you can also use a variation of this after fermentation has seemingly ended, but you are unsure if it is fully attenuated. All you need to do is take an aseptic sample from you wort, large enough for a hydrometer reading, and place it into a santized beer bottle with an airlock. I then place that sample (which was likely aerated from the transfer) in a warmer area and then check its reading about two days later. By doing this, you can tell whether your brew is finished fermenting.

P.S. This method is also useful in finding the expected attenuation of harvested yeast strains.

Most of what you read or hear says to clean out your keg lines every 2 weeks. I know most restaurants are required to do this, (whether they do or not I can’t say), but that is the recommendation.

Now I feel that at the homebrew / homebar level that is probably overkill, and a way that the manufacturers of cleaning products can scare you into using more product (strictly opinion here). That being said, waiting a year to clean out your keg lines may be on the opposite end of the extreme timetable, if this is you, get them cleaned!

Much like anything else (for me that is) when it comes down to cleaning periodically, procrastination is very easy to set in, and the mentality of “I’ll get it done next opportunity” seems quite relavent.

Now this method is not a replacement for a necessary deep clean that a system may need every now and again with caustics or hard cleaners, but is a very easy way to keep your stuff up to snuff.

 First your liquid lines will require being attached to the quick disconnects by using a barbed swivel nut at the end of each line  http://www.midwestsupplies.com/products/ProdByID.aspx?ProdID=4533 this will allow you to exchange quick disconnects. The second thing you will need is a carboantor cap    http://www.midwestsupplies.com/products/ProdByID.aspx?ProdID=4537 

This is the assembly process:

1. Disconnect liquid line from keg, then open faucet to remove any pressure from the line.

2. Spin off the liquid quick disconnect (black if ball lock) and spin on a ball lock gas quick disconnect (grey).

3. Fill a 2 liter soda bottle with cleaner of your choice- BLC, PBW, bleach solution, etc

4. Fill another 2 liter bottle with hot water.

5. Screw the carbonator cap to the top of the bottle with the cleaner

6. Attach the quick disconnect to the carbonator cap.

7. With the faucet forward and open, squeeze the bottle to force the cleaner through the line and out of the faucet into a waiting catch basin.

8. Unscrew the cap from the cleaning bottle and reattach to the rinse bottle.

9. Sqeeze the rinse water through the line and out of the faucet into a catch basin.

10. Reattach the liquid QD to the line, reconnect the keg, dump off the first pint or so.

Again, I am not recommending that a thorough routine clean should not be performed, however for those of us who procrastinate but are looking for some peace of mind, this is a cheap, quick way to blast your lines out periodically.