Making Beer


Make Your Best Vienna Lager

The best examples of Vienna Lager are like drinking a liquid version of dry toast. Here, Josh Weikert shows you how to brew one that delivers toasty malt flavors with a dry and clean background.

Calibrating Your Hydrometer

Calibrating your hydrometer is an easy step that will ensure higher-quality beer and more reproducible results with your recipes.

A Czech, a German, and an American Walk into a Bar: Pilsners in Context

Thanks to a few drain-poured barrels of bad ale, Pilsners were born and became the most popular beer style in the world, showcasing the flavor potential of hops long before the first IPAs came on the scene, but giving brewers no place to hide faults.

Belgian Beer: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

Joe Stange offers 5 tips for (correctly) making Belgian-style beer.

Safety First: Don’t Get (Bottle) Bombed

When a bottle of homebrew explodes, you’ll need to determine the cause of the explosion and decide whether the batch can be saved. Longtime homebrewer Jester Goldman has a step-by-step guide, as well as safe disposal tips.

In Defense of Extract Kits

Extract kits can be a bit maligned in the homebrew community, but before you disregard them completely, take a look at why we think they can be pretty great.

Make Your First Batch an IPA

Seriously consider brewing an IPA for one of your first batches of homebrew.

Make Your Best Southern English Brown

The southern English brown ale is a sweet beer and big on flavor, with a sessionable ABV. Josh Weikert discusses his favorite techniques for brewing the best southern English brown ever.

Double Your Brewing Pleasure

Doubling up to a 10-gallon (38 l) brew system doesn’t take twice the effort, but it does require a few tweaks to your fermentation and packaging processes. Longtime homebrewer Jester Goldman has some advice for getting the mix just right.

Wild Lager: An Experiment in Collaborative Co-Fermentation

A recent collaboration brew between Wolves & People farmhouse brewery and lager brewers Heater Allen offered the opportunity to try partnering homegrown wild yeast with a lager strain to produce a mixed-fermentation lager.