Brewer's Friend Home Brewing Software

Homebrew Summer Shandy

For a refreshing twist on home brew, try something called a shandy – beer mixed with lemonade, ginger ale, etc.

It has been a blistering summer where we live. I was over at a friend’s house recently. She pulled out a Leinenkugel Summer Shandy out of the fridge and poured me one. It was pretty good – not great – but good. Later that weekend, our next door neighbor handed me a homemade shandy with Boulevard Wheat and lemonade.  Much better! Still a bit sweet, but much better.

I had a keg of wheat beer in the keezer and I had promised to bring some homebrew to a party. Inspired by these weekend quaffs, I set out to craft some homebrew shandy using a wheat beer as a base. (In this case, it was a hefe-like wheat beer.) Here’s a link to the recipe, but I used 2 row instead of pilsner…that’s why I say it was hefe-like…

Often shandys are made with wheat beer. Radlers are made with lager. Not a hard and fast rule, but typically the case. Different countries have different traditions of mixing other liquids/juice with beer. Here’s a link to an interesting article about these traditions and other beer cocktails.

Ok, back to the story…

I’d recommend you start with some lemonade you like. We have a Trader Joe’s around the corner, so we drink a fair amount of their lemonade you get in the frozen section. The price is right and it’s tart and tasty. Don’t skimp too much here…it will be a significant contribution to the flavor.

There are two basic “dials” you’ll be adjusting to get your shandy where you want it:

1. The flavor of the lemonade (how concentrated you mix it)

2. The proportion of beer to lemonade

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the first “dial.”  This is largely a matter of taste – we typically make ours a bit more concentrated than the instructions on the Trader Joe’s frozen lemonade can. If you try my steps below and you’re still not thrilled, remember that you can modify the lemon flavor with a more/less concentrated lemonade.

I recommend that you work in small quantities to get your desired flavor profile identified. Here’s what I used to dial in my shandy:

After mixing up my lemonade, I began by testing with 1 ounce of beer and then X ounce (or fraction) of lemonade. By using small quantities, I could make up samples quickly, not fill myself up, and most importantly not waste homebrew!

I’d recommend starting at a 1:1 ratio (half beer, half lemonade). Many people like it around that proportion. For this batch of shandy, we preferred a 2:1 ratio (beer to lemonade). We liked it more “beery” than “lemonadey” in flavor. My guess is that when I make it again, I’d likely use this same process. Depending on the batch of homebrew and the batch lemonade the proportions would change.

Here’s a shot of my homebrew shandy:

On to packing for the party – I put the shandy in 64 ounce soda pop PET bottles. Twenty-one (21) ounces was about ⅓ of that measure, so I put that amount of lemonade in the bottle, then filled the beer in on top of it. That mixed the two together nicely. It made it easy to transport, cool, and serve at the party. People who don’t typically like beer liked the shandy. They went through about 3 gallons during the evening. Next time you want to try something different, try your homebrew in a shandy or radler. Cheers!

Posted in Beer Styles, Fun | No Comments »

Benefits of Cloud Brewing Software and Our Pricing Model

In case you are curious about why we went with an annual subscription fee, and why we think it works better, this post should clear up some details.

You may be on the fence like this fellow brewer who wrote in (edited and anonymized):

Its hard to justify $10 a year when I can just buy an application for $28 or use a free website. Your site definitely has more features than others (I would miss the batch scaling capability), but I most likely will go with the $28 option unless I’m missing something. 

Here’s our honest answer:

Quite right, pricing is a challenging issue. We had to come up with something reasonable for the pricing and your feedback is appreciated.  That said, at $28 for a lifetime, we’d go out of business in a hurry!  Hosting, maintenance, support all add up.  Home Brew Talk asks $25 per year, and $125 for a lifetime last time I checked, so as for an online community we are well aligned there.

Maybe we could come up with a free forever edition that was somehow plastered with ads or nerfed in some other way?  It may come to that, but for now we have solid traction, sales at a very healthy conversion rate, and a decent growth rate.

The cloud based aspect is probably the biggest benefit.  If you use a smart phone or tablet, you can get on the site with that device and it works reasonably well (not quite a native experience but we are working towards that).  BF works on Mac, PC, Linux, just about anything with a modern browser and an internet connection.

Consider that Windows8 is going to hose a lot of application developers. In a year or two other software makers could be in a position where they have to re-write a lot of code, and force their users to upgrade.  Though it looks like $28 once, it is actually $28 every few years (this is true of all software, our model is just putting that up front).   Since BF is browser based, you have nothing to worry about in terms of technology shifting under your feet, and you get the upgrades automatically. In fact, we have ZERO incentive to hold back features so you buy again.  Instead, we have every incentive to make you delighted every time you visit!

As for free sites, you get what you pay for in terms of service, backups, and attention to detail.  We take pride in responding to user requests and we improve the site all the time based on user feedback. Check out the forum to see our progress there. We are also professionals, so that is something else to consider.   At the end of the day, we’d love to have you as a customer.  At $17.99 for 2 years, that ends up being a fraction of the price of a single batch, and solves the problem of organizing the details in one, easy to use spot.

Posted in Announcements | 7 Comments »

15 Minute Boil Tested

Earlier this year, a fellow named Brian reached out to us for a collaboration project. He’s a very cool guy, an award winning brewer, and happens to be the owner of The Brew Mentor, a home brew store in Mentor, Ohio. Brian had an idea that makes brewing easier for extract brewers who are pressed for time. The idea of a 15 minute boil is not new, but Brian has some twists on it and designed several recipes that fit best with the process.  We brewed around the same time, sampled our beers over the phone, and compared notes.

The idea is simple: get the best beer possible with only a 15 minute boil. This saves 45 minutes on brew day, and can cut the entire process to under an hour and a half. With a good chiller and refrigerated top off water, Brian got a 2.5 gallon batch done in 67 minutes:

9:17-  start, water from tap @ 78°
9:21-  water temp @ 155°
9:36-  steeping water down to 144° secondary wort almost boiling
9:38-  pull grains, combine worts
9:40-  add immersion chiller
9:45-  boil starts 10:01-  boil finished
10:07-  wort cooled to 95°
10:18-  finished in fermentor with yeast pitched

We did two different recipes. The first, dubbed Easy Blonde is a light sweet blonde ale that uses Amarillo – prefect for summer. The second is Pale Face, a smooth caramely beer with an amazing Simcoe aroma and flavor. We can confidently say that both brews turned out great! In fact, Pale Face won silver in a home brew competition! Don’t expect to impress your hop head friends with these beers. They are not bitter by any means, but in my opinion qualify as crowd pleasers.

This class of recipe is prefect for on the go people to brew up one evening a couple weeks before a tail-gater.  Football season is here!!!

What we learned:

1. A 15 minute boil can make decent quality beer within a number of categories. Don’t even think about doing an Imperial IPA with a 15 minute boil. Styles that are in reach with a 15 minute boil: Cream Ale, Scottish Light, Porter, Standard Bitter, English Mild, Fruit Beer.
2. Don’t expect much bitterness at all, but do expect the late addition effect to be strong.
3. The Rager equation seems a lot more accurate than Tinseth for a 15 minute boil.
4. 15 minute boil extract based brews are good enough to be competitive in home brew competitions!  Wow, we were not really expecting that.

What we remembered:

1. Ice baths suck. Get a chiller. You’ll love it.
2. Extract brewing is fast (and with a 15 minute boil blazing fast), and can make decent beer in a short amount of time.

I’ve never been so pressed for time when brewing. Ever time I turned around it was time to do something else. I’ve gotten accustomed to that nice slowdown period between the first hop addition at 60 minutes and the next (usually at 30 minutes or later).

To make up for the painful reduction in IBU levels, Brian is also working on an all grain, 90 minute boil American IPA called Bitch Slap.  At 125 IBUs and 9% ABV, that should compensate nicely for all the light beer we made lately!

For more tradeoffs in home brewing, remember when it comes to better, faster, and cheaper beer: Pick two and you’ll be fine!

Posted in Brewing | No Comments »

Inventory Management Feature Launched

Hey fellow brewers!

We just launched an inventory manager! It tracks fermentables, hops, yeast, other ingredients and equipment. Look for it under the My Brewing navigation menu at the top, or the My Inventory button inside your brewing dashboard.  In future releases the system will provide the option of deducting items from your inventory when you ‘Brew’ a recipe.

Early release users: you have less than a week to purchase a premium subscription and still get extra time added to your account.

The hop harvest is coming up in a matter of days! If you are contemplating a fresh hop brew, this is your only chance until next year.  Your local home brew store should have fresh hops lined up for purchase if they are not already sold out.

Posted in Announcements | No Comments »

Better Faster Cheaper Beer

Brewer’s are always on the lookout for a killer recipe, a brew day improvement, or a way to take their brewing to the next level. When we taste a good quality micro brew, we say to ourselves: “I could brew that… but first I’d make a few changes…”.

Home brewers are self sufficient, determined, creative individuals who say NO to macro beer and the oxidized defects it teaches our pallets! It is in the very nature of home brewers to improve their craft, push the limits, and at times go over the edge.

There is better, there is cheaper, and there is faster.

Pick two and you’ll be fine.

Faster – less time on brew day and less time in the fermentor. Ales win (2 weeks vs 6-8 for lagers)! Kegging speeds up the bottling process but has high up front costs! Extract brewing, though faster on brew day is more expensive because of the added cost of the extract.

Cheaper – can’t get much cheaper than buying 2-row in bulk and using your own hops. However if you want cheap home brew, you are looking at light bodied, low IBU beers. One of our fellow brewers is exploring the possibility of using feed corn to get his price per pint even lower.

Better – think what most new micro breweries are doing with their beers. It is all about rich flavor and complex bitterness. There is even a new beer category in the making: see our article on Black Ales.  The pursuit of better beer is a money spending time consuming operation.

A note on lagers:
For clarification, as a class of beers lagers are not better than ales. However, there is no substitute for a good lager beer. It is too bad lagers take 4-6 months to make. This is proven to me personally by recent experiments: Mocktoberfest and Kölsch.

Oktoberfest yeast (WLP820 / Bavarian Lager 2206) and German Ale yeast (WLP830 / 2124 Bohemian Lager) impart an intangible flavor profile that not only defines their respective categories but makes them shine.

Posted in Economics of Brewing | 1 Comment »

Big Hops Climbing the Shed

The hops are really climbing up the shed! Chinook and Fuggle are growing the best in the middle. Only two year old vines, I’m pleased and can’t wait to brew!

Next year a trellis is going up to keep the hops off the siding. It will look nicer, and be better for the siding on the shed. One thing I did not anticipate is how close the hops are getting to the porch light. Earlier this summer one of the leaves was touching the light bulb when the motion detector switched it on. It didn’t catch of fire thankfully, but it was withered and was dead the next morning. There is enough foliage now I think this hop plant is a real fire risk. So… in the mean time that light is shut off.

Here is how it looks from inside the shed:

Check out what was on one of the leaves:

Bastards! These bugs seem to be gone, and I saw lots of lady bugs chomping away. Spider mites are the next big issue to worry about. I’ve been playing around with a hops spray program. I’ve tried various spray strategies, but the notes are not solid enough for a write up yet. We’ll see how the organic, non-toxic stuff does first.

Looking forward to harvesting and doing some home brewing in a few weeks!

Posted in Fun, Hops Growing | 6 Comments »

Brew Timer Upgrade

The brew timer upgrade we talked about in our July 11^th post just went live. This is awesome because a separate clock timer is no longer needed on brew day.  We can’t wait to brew again!

• The timers are saved auto-magically by the system.
• The new design allows navigation inside the brew session page, even while the timers are running.
• If your laptop falls asleep or you accidentally close your browser, when you come back to the page the timers will be right where they should be.

The new timer bar appears at the bottom of the brew session page:

The ‘Open More’ button reveals a readout of the current step and the next step. The bar will hide itself when you switch the brew status to ‘primary fermentation’.

Known issue with the timer (fixed 8/1/12):

• On some older versions of Android’s web browser, the bar will not stay in the correct position in portrait mode. We are currently working on a fix for this. We didn’t want to hold up the release because of it.
  Update 8/1/12 – This is fixed! We also made some improvements to how dialogs perform on Android.

Given this is a newly released feature, and a rather involved one, there could be small issues.  Please let us know if you spot anything and we’ll jump on it.

Other items released, which came from feature requests in the forum:

• Boil gravity is now displayed by the Recipe Editor under the ‘More…’ dialog.
  See the topic in the forum.
• Recipe Editor displays all the matching styles based on the batch stats.
  See the topic in the forum.

Features Up Next:

• Support for metric units being added to stand alone calculators.
• Hydrometer temperature correction calculator will support temperatures up to 159F, and will allow for different hydrometer calibrations. This will go into the brew log and the stand alone calculator. (Update 8/3 – this is now live!)
• In design phase: group brewing, yeast pitching calculator.

Early release users – if you haven’t purchased yet, for each month you participated in the early release you will be granted an extra month of subscription time when you purchase. This offer expires August 31st, just a month away.

Posted in Announcements | 6 Comments »

Better Bottle Blowoff Tube

When I had been brewing about six months, I transitioned from glass to Better Bottles. These are PET plastic fermenters. I was hauling carboys up and down stairs from basement to kitchen frequently. Even with a Brew Hauler strap system, the breakage potential and resulting safety issue was hard for me to stomach. When I read a letter in Zymurgy from a brewer that nearly lost his hand due to a broken glass carboy, that sealed the deal and I made the switch. I’m not criticizing glass carboys for other brewers – I’m just saying they weren’t a fit for me and my brewing.

I quickly settled on Better Bottles, mainly because I loved seeing the fermentation and not having to open the container (like plastic buckets require). Even years later I still love seeing fermentation!

I brew a lot of Belgian Wits – this style is always on tap at our house. White Labs WLP400 is a climber! The first time I fermented a Wit in a 6 gallon Better Bottle I had a big blowout and resulting cleanup. I began combing the forums for how people made blowoff arrangements for their Better Bottles. There weren’t that many posts on Better Bottles to begin with, so it was slim pickings on advice. However, I did find a few posts that talked about  a #10 drilled stopper with plastic tubing running into sanitizer or your liquid of choice. I tried that setup, and for Wits and Hefes it still wasn’t enough – more blowouts and cleanups. I was back to square one.

After more research, I discovered that the manufacturer of Better Bottles makes a blowoff assembly specifically for the Better Bottle. The asssembly’s hole was a larger diameter than the tubing I had been using, so I ordered two and decided to give them a try.

Here is a photo of the blowoff assembly Better Bottle makes:

This is really nice, heavy plastic. There’s a teflon-coated o-ring that makes a secure seal, and you’ll notice that the opening is threaded.

This next picture highlights the reason for the threading – the blowoff assembly is made to work with a ¾ inch PVC fittings. See below:

The PVC pipe is a much larger diameter than the tubing I used to use. It is also really easy to clean and to sanitize because it disassembles. Here’s a shot of my setup fully assembled (this photo was taken after I’d done cleanup, hence the empty fermenter, etc.):

What I like about using the milk jug is that I can put some water in it to settle just under the PVC pipe, plus it has a wide bottom that makes it hard to accidentally knock over. During the summer I occasionally have issues with fruit/vinegar flies hanging around my fermenters. By the milk jug having a narrow neck and by adding water to a level just under the PVC pipe, I can prevent flies from getting into the fermenter. I get the benefits of an unrestricted ‘open type’ fermentation – no back pressure from liquid in an airlock or other container, and I also mitigate the risk of contamination.

One important note: if you have ‘Vintage Shop’ brand PET bottles (they look similar to Better Bottles without the bands – they’re smooth) the blowoff assembly does not fit solidly in the neck. It covers the opening completely, but the neck does not have a rib that will hold the o-ring.

Here’s how I use the blowoff assembly with the Vintage Shop brand…painter’s tape holds it:

I have had great success with this arrangement and don’t have to worry anymore about cleaning up a blowout. If you use Better Bottles and use yeasts that are heavy climbers or aggressive top croppers, this blowoff rig could be a useful addition to your setup.

Post By Brewer kcpup

Posted in Equipment | 4 Comments »

Early Release Ended – Subscriptions Available

The Early Release period is complete. The Brewer’s Friend subscription based service is now live.

Brewer’s Friend saves you time, helps your brewing go more smoothly, and leads to better home brewed beer.

The price is $9.99 per year for Premium Members, or $17.99 for two years. We offer an unlimited duration trial so new users can get to know us over their next few batches. The blog, forum, calculators and brew sheets continue to be free. However, going past more than five recipes or five brew sessions will require a Premium Membership. As part of the conversion, everyone who signed up previously now has a Trial Membership.

More Details Here:

• Features and Pricing Page
• FAQs

To Our Early Release Members:

To say thank you to members who signed up during the early release, for each month you participated in the early release you will be granted an extra month of subscription time when you purchase. Early release users also have the option of buying an exclusive, limited quantity, Lifetime Membership.

This offer is only valid until August, 31st, 2012.

If you decide not to purchase, you may continue to edit all your existing recipes and brew sessions, even if you had more than five.

The Brewer’s Friend team would like to thank you for the feedback, praise, and the beer recipes you shared!

How to purchase:

Login, or signup first, then look for the upgrade button in the upper right hand corner.

Major feature upgrade planned for the next release:

• The brew timer will keep ticking even if you your computer goes to sleep or you happen to change pages during your brew. (This is driving some of us at Brewer’s Friend a little nuts and we really want to fix this soon.)

By the way, profile pictures are looking great on the recipes and the search page. Here are a few collages we made, fun times!

Stay tuned for more blog posts!

Posted in Announcements | 2 Comments »

Brewing Wildflower Wheat – A Honey Chamomile Wheat Beer from Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione

We were running dangerously low on Witbier, our standard summer quaffer. Hoping for an interesting alternative to try, I was “shopping” for inspiration in the wheat beer recipes on Home Brew Talk (or Homebrew Talk, HBT, depending how you spell it). I ran across one posted by Passed Pawn – a Honey Chamomile Wheat. He adapted the “Wildflower Wheat” recipe from Sam Calagione’s book Extreme Brewing. Sam is the founder of Dogfish Head (DFH) Brewery in Delaware. He is known as a creative brewer. I haven’t read the book, but after smelling the wort on brewday I’ll be purchasing it soon!

First, here’s the recipe from the book, per Passed Pawn. The book lists an extract recipe:

• 6.6# wheat extract
• 1# honey
• 1 oz Vangaurd hops (60 minute)
• 2 oz chamomile flowers
• White Labs WLP320 or Wyeast 1010
• OG: 1.057
• FG 1.008
• IBUs: 15

Here is Passed Pawn’s adaption, which includes conversion to All Grain – you’ll notice differences in yeast, hops, honey addition, and IBU’s:

Yeast: Fermentis S-04 Dry Yeast
Yeast Starter: No
Batch Size (Gallons): 10
Original Gravity: 1.061
Final Gravity: 1.017
IBU: 24, Cascade
Boiling Time (Minutes): 60
Color: 4
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): 21 @ 65° F
10 gallon batch
————
Amount Item Type % or IBU
10.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 47.62 %
8.00 lb Wheat Malt, Ger (2.0 SRM) Grain 38.10 %
2.50 oz Cascade [5.40 %] (60 min) Hops 23.7 IBU
2.00 tsp Flour (wheat) (Boil 5.0 min) Misc
4.00 oz Chamomile (Boil 60.0 min) Misc
3.00 lb Honey (1.0 SRM) Sugar 14.29 %
2 Pkgs Safale English Ale (Fermentis #S-04) Yeast-Ale
Mash Schedule: Single Infusion Mash, 154°F. Leaving some body in this seemed to increase the perception of honey.
Honey was cheap clover honey from Walmart.
————

I’m much more of a hophead than most of our friends, so I used caution on the IBU’s. I didn’t have Vanguard on hand, but a recommended alternative is Hersbrucker, which I did have. I stuck close to the original IBU number (around 15) and honey addition proportion.

The only major deviation would be the yeast. My only on-hand wheat beer yeasts were too flavorful – Wit and Hefe yeasts. My English yeast (1968/002, the Fuller’s strain) was busy working on my Special Bitter. I had some Pacman rinsed from a recent APA batch and decided to use it for the yeast.

Here’s a link to my recipe, right here on Brewer’s Friend!
https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/10990/wildflower-wheat-honey-chamomile-wheat

Let me confess that I am a sucker for chamomile in brewing. It adds a lovely nose to Witbiers. The prominence of this herb was the major attraction to this recipe. And the quantity is EXTREME – 2 ounces! When I use chamomile in Wits, it’s at flameout and typically 2 grams. Take a look at this pic – a mountain of chamomile:

I’m in a transition phase of moving to milling grain at home. This brewday was the first test drive of the mill. The pic below shows the handle, but I didn’t use that…my ½ inch corded drill made short work of the white wheat malt (my 2 row was already milled).

I do a modified BIAB with a sparge and mash in a 10 gallon Igloo tun. I used to mash on the stovetop in a stockpot. I’d wrap the pot in blankets during the mash to keep the temp up. I was losing too much heat in the winter, so when I saw this mash tun for sale on Craigslist, I didn’t hesitate. The tun’s first life was as a jobsite handwashing station. Luckily it only ever had water in it. Man is it ugly on the outside! The man I bought it from added a nice stainless steel braid insert and the valve as well. Works great!

I put my bag into the tun to make cleanup easier. While it is something else that needs to be cleaned and preheating takes extra time, I love the temperature stability and find the tradeoff in time and cleanup worth it. Here’s a pic of the bag on the mash tun:

The mash was uneventful. With the help of Brewer’s Friend ‘brew’ feature I hit my temperatures and collected the wort quantity I needed. I’ve been experimenting with one or two water additions for my batch sparge. This time I did two additions…I got 76% efficiency. Fortunately the mash calculations in Brewer’s Friend make this pretty painless to coordinate and measure. On to the boil – man is that a lot of chamomile!

I was wondering why the chamomile addition at the beginning of the boil and not the end like many Wit recipes call for. I’m guessing Sam of Dogfish Head may explain it in the book. As I smelled the chamomile throughout the downstairs during the boil I reasoned that the 60 minute addition is like making a whole bunch of tea and leaving the tea leaves or herbs in the water for a long time. It’s an alternate way to get that flowery, fruity fragrance in the beer. I’m looking forward to the end product to see if I should apply this addition timing to Witbiers. I wouldn’t use the huge quantity, but the process of adding at the beginning of the boil might be useful for other beers.

As you can probably see, I boil on our stovetop. We have one of those high power burners and it is a gas range. It works adequately. I don’t want to move my brewing out of the kitchen. It is much easier for me to get stuff done during the “in between” times on a brew day when I’m inside in the kitchen.

I love the way wheat beers smell when they’re boiling. This was no exception – it smelled wonderful! The honey is added at flameout – it too smelled great…Passed Pawn said much of the honey character remains in the finished product. I sure hope so!

So, now I just need to wait and see how this ferments out. I can hardly wait!

Post by Brewer kcpup

Posted in Recipes | 4 Comments »