Latest Post

I've been homebrewing beer for a little over seven years now. I've been reflecting on my time brewing lately. I've learned a lot since that inaugural brew day with my dad in my uncle's woodshop seven years ago. My first batch of beer was a Citra-hopped pale ale. The extract recipe was the perfect starter recipe for me. It was simple, light, and tasty. 

Partial-volume Extract Batches

I learned a lot through each batch of beer I brewed. My first batch of beer, pictured above, was brewed in my uncle's woodshop. I had been taking a course in college called Fermentation and Distillation. My final project was to brew a batch of beer. It's the kind of class every college kid hopes to take one day.

Anyways, I pieced together a brewing setup with some of my dad's old homebrewing stuff and did it in my uncle's woodshop. The brew kettle was a 3-gallon kettle and I used a propane burner for heat. This first beer was a Citra Pale ale made with liquid malt extract, a little caramel malt steeped in the kettle, Citra hops, and US-05 yeast. Because of the low volume of my brew kettle, I had to do a partial volume boil and then top up my fermenter with tap water before pitching yeast. This setup worked, but the beer didn't resemble a pale ale. It looked more like a brown ale. It tasted great, but the color of a beer can bias people's perceptions of it as I'm sure you know.

Full-volume Extract Batches 

To try and lighten up the color of my beer, I wanted to try boiling with the full volume of wort so the sugars would be less concentrated and would therefore carmelize less during the boiling process. Doing full-volume boils, however, required me to have a bigger kettle. As a broke college kid, I wasn't looking to buy a brand-new stainless steel brew kettle. Instead, I found a greasy old aluminum turkey fryer in my parent's basement. It was in rough shape, but I took it upon myself to clean it up and get it into brewing condition.

Brewing with this new turkey fryer brew kettle did...