lukasholenweg.com

Introduction You can find many recipes for elderflower wine or champagne online. They are pretty similar in the ingredients but differ in the execution. With most of these recipes you don’t really know what you will finally get. Of course, we all like a little excitement. But going into the cellar to fetch a possible anti person mine to serve the guests, really is too much for me. I won’t even talk about giving explosive gifts or sending them in the mail. I don’t know about you but having a recipe that creates a good tasting and shelf stable elderflower wine or champagne is of uttermost importance. This is why i created the second part of this article. It talks[…]

Keeping stock I created a simple excel file to manage brewing materials. With it you can keep stock of your hops, yeast and malt. When you want to brew a beer, it tells you the exact amount of ingredients you have left and if you have to order any. Historic view on the stock of your brewing ingredients. You can download the file here: http://lukasholenweg.com/HBKeeper_V0.1.xls How to use First add all the malt types you are using to column A of the Malt_Calc sheet. To simplify recipe creation, you can also add their EBC or Lovibond. Now go to the Malt_Stock sheet. All the malts you added before are now here. Add the date of today in a new row (CTRL+:)[…]

Advantages of 1 Gallon Brews One gallon brewing is great if you are planning to start with all grain or extract brewing and don’t want to spend a lot of money. Maybe you live in a small apartment and have to keep your brewing equipment compact. Either way, this system is something you should consider. Another advantage of 1 gallon brewing is that you can try a lot of different recipes in a short amount of time, its a great way to learn. You can focus on tuning your recipes and have a lot of new beers to try. You can get most of the equipment in this post very cheap. I try to reuse as much stuff as possible.[…]

Introduction You probably know that cleaning makes up a big part of the brew day. It is also one of the prime factor for making good beer. As the saying goes, a brewer is just a glorified janitor. But even though it is so important, it is very difficult to find information on what kind of products you can or should use for cleaning a homebrew setup. Most of the guides you can find online or in books are for professional brewers. They use strong chemicals which are dangerous and hard to find on a small scale. As a homebrewer you should only use them as a last resort. I spent many years looking for the perfect chemicals and cleaning[…]

My BIAB brewery setup is designed to make cleaning as easy and effortless as possible. More than 6 years experience and trials with simplifying brew systems went into it. Even when brewing with it today, i think about what could be improved. Everything has to be easy to clean, you should be able to see it and reach it with a brush. If you can’t see it you can’t control it. This is why you will not find a counter-flow chiller in my setup. There are other advantages by using this rule, you can clean your brewery with little and less strong chemicals. Possible problems will be identified a lot quicker and you will spend a shorter time cleaning. In[…]