Sometimes you just want an easy-drinking pint with a solid (yet restrained) hit of malt character, with a dash of caramel and toasted notes. If you need a break from hoppy beers, try this one out, and enjoy its beautiful colour.
1-Gallon Mild Ale Recipe
This style seems to be coming back from the dead (or seeing a birth of sorts in North America). Deliberately low in alcohol, mild ale is the perfect (if not original!) session ale. I’ve kept this one low in ABV, in line with modern takes of this once stronger ale.
Understanding Malt: The Soul of Your Beer
It’s so obvious to say, but without malt, you can’t have beer. In a world obsessed with hops and funky yeast strains, it’s easy to forget how crucial this ingredient is. Malt is to beer what honey is to mead; what apple is to cider. Without malt, you can’t make beer. Get to know this most important of ingredients with my detailed but easy-to-follow explainer.
1-Gallon Pumpkin Ale Recipe
Thanksgiving comes early in Canada (second weekend of October), which means I get a head start on my American friends for this popular beer style. This recipe took me three years to perfect, but I’m finally happy with it. I hope you’ll enjoy it too. I can’t think of a better way to mark the start of Fall than a pint of this tasty beer.
1-Gallon American IPA Recipe
This is the beer style that got me hooked on craft beer. I remember it clear as day. I was in Madison, Wisconsin working on a political campaign. My colleagues thought this “Canuck” should try some “proper” American beer. It was love as first taste.
1-Gallon Ginger Saison Recipe
I got the idea for this recipe from Sam Calagione’s home-brew recipe book. The original is a partial mash extract recipe. I adopted it to my own liking, and for all-grain, one-gallon brewing. Ginger is one of my favourite beer ingredients, and it shines in this recipe. It’s good for your digestion, so this beer must be good for you, right?
Small-Batch Brewing Equipment : A Complete List For Beginners
To make amazing beer, you’re going to need to boil and ferment your ingredients with some basic equipment. If you’re just starting out, and aren’t sure if you’re ready to commit to this hobby, I have good news for you: you don’t need an extensive collection of gear to get started.
1-Gallon Christmas Ale Recipe
You’re going to want to make this a Christmas tradition. Ginger, cloves, cinnamon, the spicy notes of Belgian yeast—what’s not to love about this recipe? Treat this as a starting point. Make it your own family recipe. You could toss in some orange peel or some nutmeg to mix things up a bit. Egg nog is soooooo 1765.
1-Gallon Imperial IPA Recipe
This recipe has so many hops, I have no room to write a description! It’s the perfect beer to serve your hop-head drinking pals. Seriously, look at the IBU count on this bad boy and see if they can handle it.
1-Gallon Scotch Ale Recipe
It probably comes as no surprise that the Scots have their own distinct flavour and beer style. Scotland, the land of scotch whiskey, grows a lot of barley. It’s a crop that has been readily available to brewers in the land of lovat tweed, so it comes as no surprise that Scotland has a unique brewing culture. While barley may have been an easy crop to grow in Scotland, hops were a bit more challenging. Hence the sweet malt-forward flavour profile of this classic style.
The Complete Guide: How to clean and sanitize homebrew equipment
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!
Yeast Washing: How to reuse brewing yeast to save money
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
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
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.
1-Gallon Abbey Ale Recipe
These days, I’m mesmerized by the complexities of Belgian beer. The good ones have flavour characteristics more commonly associated with wine—complex and especially smooth (perhaps too smooth!). There’s also something seemingly contradictory about the idea of monks brewing beer, but in the 7th century, Cistercian rules called on monks to live a life of self-reliance and to be hospitable. At the time, beer was safer than water, and thus hospitable. Those were some lucky pilgrims!
