Brewer's Friend Home Brewing Software

BIAB Custom Bags You Can Order

Looking for a custom made brew bag for doing BIAB? Check out this article. If you don’t know what BIAB is yet, check out our previous article for complete details on BIAB.

But where can I buy a BIAB bag?

Finding a suitable bag has been a long standing problem. The multitude of kettle shapes and sizes makes it difficult for manufacturers to mass produce these bags. From a DIY perspective, finding the right fabric and then getting someone to sew it up takes a lot of time and effort. These issues and the general lack of availability for a ready made BIAB bag is why I never personally tried BIAB.

The good news is, the team at Brew Bag will make you a custom bag. The price is only $35!

The folks at Brew Bag are really nice to work with. They go to the trouble of understanding your situation and they make sure you get what you need.

The bag is built to last and has nice handles. The first time you get the bag it needs to be washed in Woolite or a light bleach solution on the delicate setting.

I must say, BIAB is a great way to brew! There is less equipment to deal with. The brewing process is simpler because all the mash water is added up front. It is fun to setup a rope and pulley to hoist the bag when it drains. I highly recommend BIAB for home brewers looking to go all grain for the first time. With BIAB the mash tun and HLT are not needed. All that is required is a sufficiently large kettle (5 gallon batches need roughly a 10 gallon kettle). A false bottom is also needed.

An easy BIAB false bottom:

The bag should never touch the heating element or the bottom of the kettle. No matter what the heat source, some sort of false bottom is required with BIAB. Jeff at Brew Bag suggested I go with a DIY pizza pan with legs.

This false bottom is built from a $8.39 aluminum pizza pan, and 4 stainless steel screws.  It is a bit flimsy but it works. Central Restaurant has pans of this style in just about every size.

Here are some images from the brew day:

Summer Citra Kölsch (an experiment)

(By the way, the brew feature at Brewer’s Friend flawlessly calculated the mash water volume needed and allowed me to calculate the strike temperature with ease. BIAB is fully supported by the Brewer’s Friend recipe editor and brewing software.)

To lift the bag out of the kettle and let it drain a pulley can help. Turns out there isn’t quite enough clearance where the kettle is (but I can move it up to the mash tun position next time). For this batch, lifting the wet bag into a clean bucket and letting it drain there for 10 minutes worked well enough.

BIAB Considerations:

BIAB mashes thin. My brew was around 3.5 quarts per pound. This can lower efficiency.

Make sure to do a mash out step. Raise the temperature to 170F and rinse the grains thoroughly.

Mash for 75-90 minutes instead of just 60 to get better efficiency.

Compensate for the false bottom when measuring for the size of the bag.

There is more trub from the BIAB method. It is all settled at the bottom of the carboy.

If you go with a pulley system, make sure the rope can handle the weight of the grains plus the water they absorb. For a batch that has 10 pounds of grain, the bag itself when wet is probably closer to 20 pounds.

Due to capacity issues, high gravity beers may not be possible given your equipment. One way around that is to add extract to boost gravity for those occasional high gravity beers.

Brewer’s Friend was provided with a complimentary bag from Brew Bags.

Posted in Equipment | 5 Comments »

Quick feature update

• No Chill – extended hop boil time calculation now supported. Click the ‘More…’ button in the recipe editor. Look for the No Chill – Extended Hop Boil Time field.
• A value of between 5 and 15 minutes should more accurately represent the IBUs for the batch. We leave it up to you decide.
• With a no chill batch, the hops continue to impart bitterness after the boil is done because the temperature drops so gradually.
• Boil time of zero now allowed. This comes into play for meads and ciders.
• Responsive Design: Site looks better at any resolution and performs better on smart phones and tablets!
• Misc: Tuned rounding logic inside mash calculator, corrected sorting of brew log entries, system more smoothly handles brewing an all grain batch in BIAB mode or vice versa, site performance optimized.

PROST!

Posted in Announcements | No Comments »

Summer Brewing Update

The first day of summer is right around the corner.  It is time for summer beers to be brewed and enjoyed. Usually this means choosing delicate aromatic hops, fruity yeasts, and shooting for a drier finish. Liquid refreshment here we come!

We played around with five different batches, each overlapping the other in some respect. Two of the batches use Kölsch yeast and two use American Hefe yeast. Two of the batches have noble hops (Hallertau and Tettnanger), while two use Citra and Crystal hops. The grain bills are pretty similar, consisting of Pilsner as the base malt, and a little Vienna and Munich. It will be interesting to see how the Kölsch yeast and the Citra hops combine vs the traditional noble hops.  Citra hops give an amazing mango like quality that should make for a refreshing crowd pleaser.

In my own humble opinion, the Spring Kölsch will be hard to beat. Being the traditional combination of all German ingredients, this might be expected. The Kölsch yeast provides notes of honey, vanilla, even a little smokiness, in just the right proportions. One downside of the Kölsch is it takes longer than other yeasts to clean itself up. Until about 45 days after the brew, there was a rubbery plastic taste. I thought it was from the Better Bottle, or a yeast health issue.  Turns out it was just green beer.

There is also a batch made with 100% Amarillo hops to show off the grapefruit aroma and flavor profile it provides. This batch was done in collaboration with Brian from the Brew Mentor in Ohio. When the results are in on that batch we’ll be doing a blog post to explain the new twist on brewing Brian came up with.

Summer Beer Recipes:

• Autobahn Hopped American Hefe
• Summer Citra Kölsch – An Experiment
• Aaron’s First Brew
• TBM Easy Blonde 15 (Larry’s)
• Spring Kölsch

One summer evening we will do a blind tasting to evaluate the results. We always add in a cheap macro brew just to make it entertaining. I wonder what we will mix in this time, maybe a little PBR? Our tasting sheet is simple enough that even novice beer drinkers can have fun too.

Blow off Tube Needed:

Here’s what happens when you don’t leave enough head space in your primary fermentor:

The yeast shoots everywhere!  Bit of a sticky mess, but all it takes is replacing the air lock.  A blow off tube is the best solution.

Other News:

• Site updates have been ongoing.
• The mash calculator and water chemistry calculators are now built into the brew session.
• Grain lists have been updated on all calculators.
• The site renders correctly at any width and works smoothly on smart phones and tablets.
• We just did a Brew In A Bag (BIAB) style batch. That was awesome, learned a lot. Complete details on that next time.
• A yeast pitching calculator is on the way!

Posted in Brewing | 3 Comments »

New features launched

New features were rolled out recently:

• Brewer’s Profile Pages – under your profile section you may upload a picture and setup a public profile. See my profile as an example. We encourage everyone to upload an inspiring beer-tastic profile picture! The picture appears on your profile (if you choose to make it public) and your public recipes. 
  

• Update 6/4 – Water Chemistry Profiles – under your profile section, you can input your local water profile. Water profiles can be shared and are published here!
• The recipe editor as has a new feature for pre-made target water profiles.  If you see one that is missing that you regularly use, please contact us.
• An upcoming release will tie the source water and target water concepts together.  The brew feature will compute the brewing salt additions (or dilutions) necessary to go from the recipe’s target water profile to your profile.
• IBUs – calculations now appear per hop addition on the recipe builder.
• Mash Calculator – added to the brew feature. Tracks how much water you need to mash, does infusion temperature calculations. Incorporates your brewing profile and the recipe so all the numbers are automatically calculated.  Let us know what you think! Update 6/4 – partial mash and BIAB are now supported too!
  

• Fixes – a number of bugs in the recipe editor related to back button, sorting, etc.
• Added yeasts and updated ppg values for grains.

By the way, did you know you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook ?

Posted in Announcements | 4 Comments »

New Calculators for Priming and Kegging Launched

Just launched the following calculators:

Priming Sugar and Keg PSI Calculators:

• Priming Calculator – Calculates how much priming sugar is needed. Works with table sugar, corn sugar, and DME.
• Keg Carbonation Calculator – Calculates regulator PSI setting based on desired volumes of CO2 and temperature.

Posted in Announcements | 3 Comments »

First Brew Adventure

Post by Brewer Aaron:

Brewing my first batch of beer today —a hefewiezen with citra hops— only solidified the wisdom that failure is good, especially the right kind. In this case, my first brewing experience was fraught with failures, but ones that we were set up to recover from gracefully and learn from. So here they are, the things I learned from brewing my first batch of beer.

1. Your recipe will be changed during the brewing process. At least for your first batches, you won’t be able to follow your recipe to the letter, but don’t worry, as long as you follow it closely, it shouldn’t screw up your beer too much. Especially try to know which items need to be striclty followed, and which have some wiggle room.

2. If you’re cooking on a stove, make sure your favorite burner is clean and ready to go. The burner I started my steep on started smoking, so I had to move it to a back burner. This made it hard to reach both the kettle, and the dials on the stove, a complication that would come back to bite us later. Also, if your stove doesn’t have a fan (yay 1970’s building codes!), you’ll soon learn where your smoke alarms are.

3. Start with less water rather than more. This may only apply to an extract brew with steeping grains, but if you’re using a smaller kettle, as I was, it’s nice to have a little more room for grains and hops. I learned this the hard way, when my brew boiled over. Which brings us to the next item…

4. Have some contingency plan for a boil over. In my case, I got the kettle off quick enough, with a very minor burn on my hand, and no brew on the floor. But you should either have a way to safely move the overflowing kettle off your heat source, or have a heat source that you don’t care about covering with burnt brew. In my case my brew fell on the element, making a big caramelized mess.

5. Buy some extra hop/grain bags. They’re cheap, you’ll use them. Larry suggested I do 4 hop additions, which would have been nice, but I only had two. Not a huge deal, but it would’ve been nice to have the flexibility.

6. The time elapsed in your boil matters less than the time left. I don’t really know when I dropped in my first hop addition, but I do know I waited 20 minutes later for my second, and 40 minutes later to end my boil. Here is my ice bath:

7. Be extra careful with your gravity meter (hydrometer). Yup, about 5 minutes after talking about how breakable they are with Larry, I broke it. That’s why it’s nice to:

8. Have an extra bucket.  Useful for keeping sanitizer solution on hand.

9. Shake up your wet (liquid) yeast before opening the package and pouring it in. If anything, it will make you feel a little less dumb when you’re left with a vial coated in the stuff that should be making your beer.

10. When topping off your fermenter to a certain amount, stop filling every so often, and let the foam settle. In my case, I didn’t, so now I’m brewing 6 gallons instead of 5.

11. Have some vodka around the house, in case you need to top off your airlock. Yup, mine wasn’t filled enough, so Larry suggested this trick.

12. You don’t need your bottles ready on the day of brewing. I knew this. I’ve helped other people brew, but for some reason that didn’t stop me from having them ready. At least they’re pretty in my dishwasher.

13. Your Airlock will be noisy. You’ll be surprised by how loud the bubbling is, but it’s a nice reminder of how awesome you are for brewing your own beer.

So now I’ve got 6 gallons of American Hefe brewed with Citra and Crystal hops in the fermenter. I’ll post back to let you all know how it turns out!

Posted in Brewing | 2 Comments »

Black Ale as a Beer Category

Black IPA, Cascadian Dark Ale, Black Ale, whatever you want to call it, the people want it!

Damn that looks delicious!  Rather… it WAS delicious as I drank it after taking the pictures.

Currently Black IPAs, CDAs, Black Ales, Dark IPAs, whatever you want to call them, are categorized under BJCP category 23 – Specialty Beer. Category 23 is the catch all for everything from Australian Sparking Ale, to Malt Liquor, to Black IPA / CDAs. Given continued commercial success and adoption by home brewers, is it time to finally grant this class of beer its own category? BJCP has not acted on this yet. There are a number of issues to sort out.

Issue #1: What to call the category?

For sanity sake, let’s add one new category and not five. Debating the difference between a Black IPA and a Cascadian Dark Ale (CDA) is possible, but it is splitting hairs. Being from Portland, putting ‘Cascadian’ in the name feels right, but that makes it regionally centric which in today’s politically correct world would be a mistake. That leaves Black IPA or Black Ale. Brewer’s Friend recommends naming the category ‘Black Ale’. The reason for dropping IPA from the category name is covered next.

Issue #2: This is not an IPA with ‘food coloring’ added to make it look black.

The point of a beer category is not just based on stats like OG/FG and IBUs. A category is based on flavor, aroma, mouth feel, appearance, and even history. A Black Ale is not hopped up porter or darkened IPA. Could we someday have a beer called Dark Kolsch, just because it has a hint of roasted flavor but uses noble hops, an SRM of 35, and is light in body? What about a Dark Cream Ale??

Issue #3: General profile:

A Black Ale uses Northwest hops (eg – Amarillo, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Columbus, Crystal, Simcoe). The citrus hop flavor combined with roasted notes make for unique flavor combinations characteristic to the style. Rich roasted, caramel, chocolate, and coffee flavors can be present.

Aroma: Mix of caramel, roasted malt, and possible hints of chocolate/coffee paired with dry hopped citrus, pine, grapefruit, fruity, floral, and herbal hop notes. Alcohol should not be overly present in aroma.

Appearance: Very dark. Dark brown to obsidian black, with creamy white or tan head.

Flavor: Could be hop forward or malt forward, but bitter and roasted flavors both should be present, and eclipsed by citrus/herbal/spice notes from excessive use of north west hops. This is not a malty beer nor should it be too sweet. The flavor should be crisp, and the finish somewhat dry, but not entirely dominated by the hop profile like in an IPA. Subtle oak notes can be present from barrel aging.

Mouth-feel: Medium body, not overly malty, but not dry or watery. Can (should?) leave lingering flavors on the tongue from dry hopping. Low to moderate carbonation.

Stats:

• OG: 1.060 – 1.075
• FG: 1.010 – 1.018
• ABV: 6% – 8%
• IBU: 60-120
• SRM: 35-40+

Issue #4: What category to put it in?

Does it belong under the IPA category as 14D or the American Ale category as 10D? There are two main themes driving the definition. One is a standard IPA with a dark color and a hint of roasted flavor. The second is a stout or porter with a huge amount of hops. A Black Ale is similar to a barely wine, but not as high in alcohol content and less malty. IPA’s are hoppy beers, but not the only hoppy beers, so Brewer’s Friend recommends putting Black Ale under the American Ales category, as 10D.

Posted in Beer Styles | 4 Comments »

Brew Shed Exhaust Fan – Need More Power!

Choose your brew shed exhaust fan and ducting design carefully. My shed is exactly what I was after with one exception: the exhaust system. On wet days the condensation from the boil off can become a bit of a problem. Note that there are zero problems on warm days, but doing a 90 minute boil on a rainy day leads to this situation:

I did a lot of research on fans in terms of price, noise level, and cubic feet per minute (CFM). The more CFM you want the more expensive they get and the more noise they put out. The ideal solution is a reasonably priced fan that can keep the room dry but not drive me nuts with racket. Going in I knew a kitchen hood fan like the ones that normally go over a stove would not be powerful enough.

Where to find a powerful exhaust fan? It turns out exhaust fans are a big deal for ‘growers’ too. Their supply stores have several models to choose from. It felt a little strange ordering from one of these places. Thankfully, the shed has a sky light so big brother can already see what is going on in there.

After trying to find a balance between noise level, cost and CFM, I went with this:
Can MAX Fan 6″ – 334 cfm w/ Speed Contrl
https://www.bghydro.com/BGH/itemdesc.asp?ic=AEFCFMF06&Tp=
https://www.growwurks.com/can-fan-max-fan-6-3-speed-complete-control-334-cfm.aspx

The max fan is $150 before shipping. The noise level is tolerable and I thought 334 CFM would be plenty. It works fine for a 60 minute boil in dry weather. However, it is too weak to keep up with a 90 minute boil if the relative humidity is over 75%. What I ended up having to do a couple times earlier this winter was wrap a towel around the unit since there was so much dripping coming out of it. That works pretty well and has gotten me by until I have time to make a more permanent solution.

Possible Solutions:

1. Get something with a higher CFM, and then build an insulated box around it to block out some of the noise.
2. Redesign the duct work. What I accidentally created is a reflux chamber – doh! When the hot gas goes up through the fan, some of it cools and condenses on the walls of the ducting and then drips back down (all the way). My fault for designing it that way, but it was the shortest distance. What I probably need to do is orient the fan sideways and rig a dip tube that goes outside.

Other considerations when it comes to condensation in the brewery:

Selecting a hood is another issue. The loft makes for a built in hood, but it is not the same thing as a professional stainless steel hood. Those things are insanely expensive, coming in upwards of $1,000 for a cheap one. I had a left over dust collection vent from my wood shop so I mounted that. I don’t think the problem is the hood, I think the main problem is the reflux.

https://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=11312
https://amzn.com/B0000223WV

Looking forward to anything our readers can share on this issue!  Don’t build a re-flux chamber like I did!

Posted in Equipment | 1 Comment »

1.09 Launched – Random Beer Brewing Goodness

• Ability to sort hops and grains (see buttons in each box). Hops sorting is based on the order the hops would be used in the recipe.  Grain sorting is by weight.  Several users wrote in about this, and it started bothering us too!  Now you can add/edit hops all you want, and hit the ‘Sort Hops’ button to get a nice and tidy listing.
• Selecting a hop use of ‘Dry Hop’ will change the time box to ‘days’ instead of ‘min.’.  All existing Dry Hop entries have been set to 7 days (just this one time because of the change in this release).
• Added URL field to Recipe Editor below the notes field. The input field is only visible if you are logged in and have confirmed your email address.  This will help keep the content at Brewer’s Friend of a high quality and deter spammers.  When a URL is set, it will appear under the recipe’s name on the recipe view page.
• In Other Ingredients section allows grams and ounces to be specified for both US and Metric units.
• Added Extra Light DME, Extra Light LME, and clarified Canadian 2-row in grain list.
• Added 8 types of hops and updated the average AA value on several others. Thank you John H!
• Fixed bug with backspace key reported by Brian at https://thebrewmentor.com/.

• Added ‘Rebuild’ tab to Brew Session which allows you to recompute the brew steps and water requirements without deleting a recreating the brew. This is useful if you changed the recipe or profile settings after the brew was created.  This also resets all the brew steps that were checked off.
• Added ‘Recipe View’ tab to Brew Session. This makes it easy to see the ingredients in the recipe without having to navigate away from the Brew Session page.
• Temperature adjustment field allows more than 3 characters.

• Mobile support improved on recipe view and search pages.  Try it out and send us feedback.
• If you have not confirmed your email address, you will now see a red status about this in the upper right hand corner with a ‘resend’ button you can use to trigger the email again. Certain features, like adding a URL to a recipe are blocked until you confirm your email address.

Posted in Announcements | 13 Comments »

Myths About Electric Brewing Dispelled

Personally, it has been eight batches since the upgrade to electric. The electric brewery is just awesome. There have been zero leaks on my weld-less fittings and no problems with operation.

Going into the upgrade, there were a few myths I was concerned about. Let me tell you the facts:

You can only do dark beers with electric brewing because the element will scorch the wort.

This is completely untrue given the right equipment. My first batch was a 3.2% Hefewiezen came out perfect. Subsequent batches, including an American Lager (arguably the lightest beer in the world) also had no scorching. In essence, expect ZERO scorching using the HighGravityBrew elements. If you build your own controller, or use a different element, this could be a problem.

The electricity is expensive.

According to our calculations electricity reduces the energy cost by 70%!

Equation for electricity consumption in home brewing:
hours * (watts / 1000) * price/kWh = total cost
For an example, let’s say the the price is $0.12 / kWh, and a typical batch is brewed:

• 1 hour * (5500 / 1000) * $0.12 = $0.66 (hot liquor tank 5500 watt element)
• 1 hour * (4500 / 1000) * $0.12 = $0.54 (boil kettle 4500 watt element)

Total electricity cost for a standard batch of beer: $1.20

A 5 gallon tank of propane is around $20 to fill, and you get at best 4 batches out of it. That puts the cost around $4/batch with propane.

It requires an expensive computer controller.

Yes and no. You can ‘build your own’ controller out of parts for under $100. That would also require knowledge of electronics. The one from HighGravityBrew is a turn key solution. Most electric brew rigs also have fancy controllers to automate valves and pumps in addition to controlling the electric element. This goes way beyond the issue of switching from gas to electric for a heat source. Besides, at that point it becomes a labor of love. As long as you are having fun and your wife is okay with the project, go for it!

My submersion chiller won’t work.

This is true. I had to adopt my chiller to look like this so it would straddle the heating element. Cools faster and looks interesting. One online reviewer said it looked like the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

I was against upgrading to a plate or counter flow chiller. That style of chiller leaves a lot of hot wort sitting in your kettle while they are draining. This is not good. Plate chillers are also a bear to clean without using caustic solutions.

An electrician is needed:

Actually, this is true. Pay for a licensed electrician and get the permits to make sure your brewing area is safe. Don’t electrocute yourself or burn the house down! All you need is a dryer outlet on a GCFI’d breaker.

Posted in Brewing | 7 Comments »