With some thought and planning, big dessert stouts are well within reach of extract brewers. Here's a recipe featuring vanilla, pecan, cacao, and plenty of toasted coconut.
In this edition of No Rests for the Wicked—a series on extracting the most character from extract brewing—Jester Goldman turns his attention to the dark, decadent, and dessert-like.
In this Learning Lab, we tempt fate by inviting oxidation exposure and punishing our wort with hot-side aeration. Will it ruin our beer, or is the threat exaggerated?
In this Learning Lab, we intentionally make things harder for our yeast cells—to better understand what can go wrong, and how to recognize what happened.
Get back to basics and focus on the starch-conversion mash step, to better understand which mashing regime best fits the beer you want to brew.
Go beyond the standard three-addition hopping schedule to test other techniques for injecting hop character into your beer.
Hops for bitterness, flavor, and aroma... and, often, three corresponding additions to the boil. Using one-gallon test batches hopped differently, let's test our assumptions.
Let's affirm the importance of building malt complexity. By mixing up your base malts, bringing in rye or oats, or experimenting with specialty malts, you can bring depth and nuance to your beers, creating a knock-out recipe.
Decent beer is definitely good but learning about water chemistry can give you additional control over what you brew and take your beer from good to great.
Base malts are the foundation of beer. It’s worthwhile to have a sense of the trade-offs your extract supplier made. As a bonus, this mini-batch experiment is a good introduction to mashing.