All posts by Tom Ayres

It’s Winter! What You Should Be Brewing Right Now

Home Brewing 2 Comments

It’s winter, well at least in the Midwest. For those living in colder climates, our palates scream for hearty, full bodied beers this time of year.  There are a range of beer styles to choose from to satisfy your desire for heavier beer.  My “go-to” beer for winter is a Foreign Extra Stout. I feel it’s a nice blend of  hearty, yet still easy drinking enough to enjoy a couple of pints.The Foreign Extra Stout has an interesting and long style history. The style dates…

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Worried About Oxidation in Your Homebrew? “Cold Crash Guardian” to the Rescue!

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Many professional brewers will tell you that the #1 shortcoming of homebrewed beers is oxidation.  Oxygen ingress, even in small amounts can spoil your beer, adversely affecting its flavor, clarity and shelf-life. When homebrewing, harmful oxygen is most often introduced after fermentation is completed. Opportunities to introduce unwanted oxygen occur when taking hydrometer readings, transferring to secondary vessels, dry hopping, when cold crashing and during packaging. Inventive  homebrewers have developed a variety process changes, methods and tools to limit oxygen in their beers. During my…

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It’s Fall! What You Should Be Brewing Right Now

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As the fall season begins, I start to get a hankering for more hearty beers. I don’t know about you, but I can’t just make a leap into drinking heavier beers straight away. I need some beers that will ease my palate into the heavier brews of winter. There are lots of beer-style choices to consider brewing during this transitional season. My “go-to” beer for fall is a German Altbier. To me, it’s the perfect blend of hearty and easy drinking.For those unfamiliar with this…

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CopyCat! Tips for Cloning Your Favorite Craft Beers

Home Brewing 2 Comments

For many homebrewers, the desire to clone our favorite beers was a primary motivation for starting our journey in beer making. I know it was for me. I didn’t just want to brew an IPA, I wanted to brew a Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. Clone brewing kits of the day were fine, but I found they were only distant approximations of the beer I really wanted to brew. Early in my brewing journey, I started scouring publications, online forums and brewer’s websites to look for…

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Fake Brews: Do You Believe in These Brewing Myths?

Debate & Commentary 2 Comments

As I look back on my earlier decade of brewing beer, it dawned on me that my brewing practices and beliefs have changed quite a bit from when I first began. My evolution as a brewer (well, I hope it’s been an evolution) has been fueled by equal parts research and hands-on experience. It’s my hope that sharing my brewing learnings may help others to sift out some prevalent myths from their brewing. Doing so has many benefits, including simplifying and shortening your brewing by…

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Relief Pitching: How to Save Your Brew Day

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Source: TribLive.com Advice to hombrewers when the batch specific gravity needs adjustmentAs a homebrewer, we’ve all been there. That moment during your brew day when you realize something went wrong and you’re off track. For me, confirmation of that fact usually occurs when I take my first gravity read following the mash at the pre-boil stage of my brew day. I usually know its coming; I missed my target mash temp, my pH was a little off, I got distracted and missed a small step…

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Recipe Design for Brewers…Simplified (Part 4: Water)

Brewers, Debate & Commentary, Home Brewing Leave a comment

This series by Tom Ayres, explores recipe design. Brewing creativity and the factors that makes each beer style worthy of celebration. All segments in this series can be read here. Now that we have a structure, spice and a catalyst for our beer, we need to finish developing our recipe. In this episode we’ll explore designing water profiles for your beer. A quick review of our design plan… As we discussed previously, we’re going to tackle beer recipe design in parts. You can embrace the…

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Recipe Design for Brewers…Simplified (Part 3: Yeast)

Brewers, Debate & Commentary, Home Brewing Leave a comment

This series by Tom Ayres, explores recipe design. Brewing creativity and the factors that makes each beer style worthy of celebration. All segments in this series can be read here. Now that we have a structure and spice for our beer, we need to continue developing our recipe further. In this episode we’ll explore designing yeast additions. A quick review of our design plan… As we discussed previously, we’re going to tackle beer recipe design in parts. You can embrace the whole series or take…

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Recipe Design for Brewers…Simplified (Part 2: Hops)

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This series by Tom Ayres, explores recipe design. Brewing creativity and the factors that makes each beer style worthy of celebration. All segments in this series can be read here. Now that we have a structure for our beer, we need to develop our recipe further to include the equally important ingredients of hops, yeast and water. In this article we’ll explore designing hop additions. A quick review of our design plan… As we discussed last time, we’re going to tackle beer recipe design in…

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Recipe Design for Brewers…Simplified

Brewers, Debate & Commentary 4 Comments

This series by Tom Ayres, explores recipe design. Brewing creativity and the factors that makes each beer style worthy of celebration. All segments in this series can be read here. When it comes to designing your own beer recipes, there’s a lot of great information out there. From books on the subject to website articles, there’s a lot of great detailed information and approaches to designing beer recipes from scratch. That said, it’s pretty complicated stuff. After reviewing some of my favorite sources on this…

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