Cleaning and sanitizing all you home brew equipment is the one thing you can do to guarantee your beer doesn’t spoil. If you fail to adequately clean and sanitize your equipment, you have a good chance of ruining your beer—which has been known to make grown men and women cry. Thankfully, cleaning and sanitizing is pretty damn easy. It just takes some attention to detail and a little common-sense. If you can wash and scrub dishes, you’ll have no problems keeping your equipment clean. It simply involves soaking, rinsing, or spraying your equipment before it touches the beer. So, let’s get to it!
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Beer Craftr brings the joy of home brewing to anyone who wants to brew their own beer but doesn't know where to start.
Yeast Washing: How to reuse brewing yeast to save money
By Joseph Lavoie | Last Updated:
Yes, you read that right. There’s such a thing as “yeast washing.” It goes by many names, including “yeast harvesting,” “yeast re-harvesting,” and “yeast rinsing.” Regardless of what you want to call it, one-gallon brewers can use this technique to brew with a wider variety of yeast strains, while saving money on liquid yeasts. I’ll walk you through how you can level-up your brewing skills with this technique. But first, let’s talk about why we’d want reuse that kind-of-gross-looking sludge at the bottom of our fermented wort.
1-Gallon Brown Ale Recipe
By Joseph Lavoie | Last Updated:
Brown ale is such a broad range that one recipe can’t really do the style justice. It remains, in my view, one of the most underrated styles out there. The term itself isn’t particularly exciting. “Brown Ale”. As the Oxford Companion to Beer points out, that’s not much more useful than the term “red wine.” This is especially true when you consider that before the 1700s, most beers would have been brown—hence why pale ales would eventually become a huge hit.
1-Gallon Dry Stout Recipe
By Joseph Lavoie | Last Updated:
Stout is a fascinating beer with no less than four distinct styles of its own: classic (dry), foreign, sweet, and imperial. As this is the first stout recipe I’ve developed for BeerCraftr, I kept it classic. The dry stout really is the standard and we should all strive to have a good one in our repertoire—one we could almost make in our sleep. I hope this does that. I’ve kept it simple with only one hop variety so you can experiment with the dosage of your choosing. Although, to stay within the style, I’d only experiment with the amount of aroma hops (near the end of the boil), and do so in small degrees. Treat this recipe as a blank canvass to work from.