Top 15 Homebrewing Hacks for brewers (2021 Edition)

on this episode of doing the most we're going to cover 15 home brewing hacks [Music] everything from meat roast baked creation fermentation inebriation doing the most now you could call them hacks you could call them tips and tricks but whatever they are we've also done two other videos on home brewing hacks if you would like to see 20 other home brewing hacks check out both of those previous videos there will be links down in the description there's no reason to fill this video with fluff so let's get down to it number one carbonation drops recently i saw a comment from a colleague of mine calling carbonation drops useless things and while i understand where this colleague is coming from given that it is typically appropriate to calculate the exact amount of priming sugar you want for the exact volume of carbonation you want in your bottles i think that carbonation drops are a nice cheat particularly for beginner brewers and if you follow the channel you've seen me using them recently because i don't like bottle conditioning and i think carbonation drops which are just pre-measured doses of dextrose that you can use to prime individual bottles i think they're a perfectly okay and acceptable solution if you want to cut a couple of corners in your home brewing if you want to level up use a priming sugar calculator choose the priming sugar that you're working with be it honey or dextrose or cane sugar and input your information there and calculate the proper priming sugar but if you're just looking to quick prime some bottles i think carbonation drops are an easy way of doing it number two keep chopsticks handy in your brew space this one's actually fairly simple and i keep a whole thing of chopsticks up here in my gear shelf but chopsticks can come in relatively handy we like to use them sometimes on the show to do honey tastings snap them in half swirl around in the honey taste it bamboo is an environmentally friendly material so you're not really doing any harm to the environment by using them and they're also multi-purpose so you drop something down in the neck of your car boy and you're trying to get it out chopsticks can be an easy way of retrieving it whether you need stir sticks grabbers tasting sticks whatever some cheap inexpensive and disposable bamboo chopsticks are a good option number three keep your notes strapped to your car boy this one's fairly simple and not really something you see in my homebrew space but i take gratuitous digital notes on pretty much everything that's going on in here as well as having a video record of everything that i'm brewing up but it might improve your workflow to have your notes easily accessible strapped to your carboy you want things in there like your gravity readings fermentation temperature when it started when it finished things like that for this one here i just used a recipe card a hole punch and a rubber band to strap that on there that way you never quite forget what's going on inside the jug number four zest for every problem okay not every problem but if you've got a brew that's maybe just a little too delicate maybe not enough nuance needs just a little bit of something in there to judge it up a little bit of zest citrus zest can go a long way for example i'm working right now on an acer glen recipe an acer glen is a mead made also with maple syrup and it just needed a little bit of something and i ended up oaking it but also i decided to put just a little bit of orange zest in there and secondary and while the orange flavor doesn't really jump out it added a whole other layer of complexity that is unexpected in the brew and really hefts up the maple syrup and honey flavors so do you have a payment that's just lacking a little something or maybe a bragget that just needs a little edge a little zing on it try a little citrus zest maybe some grapefruit lemon lime it might fundamentally transform your brew number five there's almost always a substitution say you get down to brass tacks and you're ready to start a brew and you're missing something and maybe the local homebrew store is closed but the grocery store is open generally for almost every ingredient there's some substitution they're substitutions for hops for yeast for nutrients for different fruit adjuncts for different spices and this is a great time for me to plug our discord server that's discord.doingthemost.org it's basically like an old school chat room and our discord server is full of brilliant home brewers that are ready and willing to help so missing an ingredient and looking for a substitution i would jump onto our discord server and ask because there's almost always a substitution number six starter kits for replacement gear yeah i know this one sounds kind of weird but starter kits like beginner introductory kits are a pretty good way of replacing gear that's lost or broken now granted say you wanted a hydrometer you're going to spend a little bit more to get a beginner meat or wine making kit that comes with a hydrometer but it's also going to come with a ton of other gear that's all bundled at a discount our local home brew store sells beginner wine making kits that come with a couple of buckets hydrometer hoses racking systems all of that stuff and it's a lot cheaper than buying all the pieces individually so if you're looking to expand your home brewery or winery or meadery then it's a good opportunity to just go ahead and make that investment starter kits it's like they're having a sale every day and to that point number seven keep an inventory of your supplies this is something i've definitely learned over the years and especially since we started this youtube channel i keep a running list of stuff that's low or has run out and then when i'm ready to order new home brewing supplies or make a trip to my local home brewing store i've got a ready-made shopping list of everything that i need to pick up run a little bit low on firmado almost emptied out your bottle of starzan add it to the list keeping an inventory will keep you in check so you're not missing ingredients or gear when you need them also from bc's bargain basement number eight always check the freezer section for deals on fruit whether you make mead or wine or fruited beers it's always a good idea to check the freezer section for fruit deals maybe it's fruit that's getting close to an expiration date or maybe it's fruit that's going out of a season quite often grocery stores will have sales deals on frozen fruit we've got a market just up the street that has blueberries for half off of what i would normally purchase them at a regular grocery store or wholesale market i'm talking like a dollar a pound for blueberries and their freezer section has been full of them for like a month i can guarantee you i will have another blueberry brew going soon the freezer section it's like a rotating clearance section always swing by number nine steal a taster every time now this one is a lot easier for us who brew three five or seven gallon batches but you can do it with a one gallon batch also get yourself some of those little 187 milliliter bottles or even some of those little airplane bottles and steal just a little bit of your brew every time you do something to it take a sample when it goes into secondary take a sample before you add an adjunct to it take a sample before you transfer into tertiary take a sample at bottling and that will give you several samples you can use to track the development of the flavor profile along the way and if you're only stealing just a little bit then you're not really impacting the amount of head space in the top now i don't recommend this for all brews but for a brew that you're going to be doing the most to it's really nice to see how that progress tracked over the course of the brew then if you decide you want to brew it again but you've also decided that you've gone too far you've done too much then you always have those little save states where you can rewind back to and say okay i want to get here but you know maybe we don't add the hibiscus in tertiary so if you're developing a recipe still a few tasters and then once it's finished you can line them all up taste through them vertically and see how your brew progressed one quick important note on that you do want to make sure that the brew is degassed before you steal those little taster bottles or at least your taster samples are degassed because you don't want to create little tiny bottle bombs nobody likes bottle bombs number 10 steeping bags for adjuncts what i'm talking about here is these little paper tea bags environmentally friendly super effective say you want to add some dry hops to a beer or a mead in primary using a steeping bag that you can secure by the lid of the bucket and then pull out later saves you a lot of mess you can use these for spices like cinnamon sticks cloves nutmeg you could use them for zest make life easier on yourself use a steeping bag when you can number eleven erythritol for back sweetening now i'm not gonna go in to all of it we've got a video about how erythritol is our favorite non-fermentable sweetener and that's the operative phrase there non-fermentable sweetener that video has all sorts of information about why you would want to use a non-fermentable sweetener and we also rank the non-fermentable sweeteners by taste our favorite is erythritol and it's great specifically if you want to sweeten a brew and also bottle condition it but for real just check out that video for more information number 12 get yourself a hanging scale i got this one on ebay years ago for just a few bucks they're super cheap and super simple and look look how happy this is look at that little smile why a hanging scale instead of you know a regular food scale because sometimes it's easier to weigh stuff on a hanging scale say you wanted to weigh a bunch of fruit say you're a high school math problem you want to weigh 62 oranges well you could put a reusable shopping bag on here weigh it tear it out so that way it zeroes out your scale and then fill that bag with your 62 oranges hang that from your hanging scale and you'll know how much those oranges weigh get yourself a hanging scale i promise you you will find yourself using it a lot more than you think you would number 13 buckets for primary this tip is targeted toward very very beginner brewers but buckets food grade plastic buckets with a grommet that you can stick an airlock in brewing in buckets is gonna save you a lot of stress you don't wanna fill up a one gallon jug with fruit and try and ferment it for one you're gonna blow out your airlock as the carbon dioxide pushes that fruit up and out the neck of your jug and for two you can get a two gallon bucket and have plenty of room for fruit and adjuncts that you would never have in a one gallon vessel and this one gallon vessel say you did fill it up with three pounds of fruit your yield on the other side is gonna be like a half gallon yield scaled up to the five gallon batches i do it's really nice to be able to just fill up a bucket with your brew let everything settle out and then transfer off to a glass carboy when you need to transfer to secondary the bucket has a handle i can move it around really easily if i need to take it up to the attic to get it hot or i need to bring it down here to get it cold i can do that without doing a tango with a five gallon glass carboy full of liquid buckets for primary i don't always do it but i definitely do it when i know it's going to make life a lot easier number 14 milk crates for car boys now this is one that i don't do but i need to do because car boys these days these big glass car boys are being made a lot more cheaply than they were back in the day which means they're a lot more fragile enter the milk crate you can put your glass carboy into a milk crate and use the handles on the milk crate to carry it this puts less stress on say that fragile neck of the car boy when you're carrying it around your house or moving it around your bruise base also god forbid your carboy suddenly shatters as i've had happen most of the glass is going to be contained within that milk crate rather than spreading itself all around your floor containing most of the sharp stabby part of the mess to a centralized location at some point i need to invest in a bunch of milk crates and finally number 15 melter or baker's honey for cheap mead melter and baker's honey is just cheaper than a lot of other honey and that's because it's kind of like the final dregs of the honey after the honey has gone through the production line often it has been heated and heated enough to change the character of the honey but you know what it's great in things that can use a caramel or toffee kind of flavor or a beauche if you're already going to be caramelizing your honey why get good honey when you can get melter or baker's honey it's still perfectly good honey and you're going to be caramelizing the heck out of it anyway so get it at a reduced cost i recently had a rotamel sent to me by a friend and subscriber on the channel and it used melter honey and just that light note of warm richness from that honey having been slightly heat treated actually really complemented the floral flavors of the rotimel in a really interesting way that wouldn't have existed if he had used a different kind of honey so for some applications melter honey bakers honey works great i hope this list was helpful again we have two other videos with home brewing hacks tips and tricks that you can check out which puts us at a total of 35 hacks tips and tricks for home brewers not bad what are your home brewing tips drop a comment and let us know if you liked this video i hope you'll hit that thumbs up and maybe subscribe to the channel if you haven't already hit that notification bell so you'll get more of our home brewing content in your youtube feed you can check us out on instagram and pinterest at doing the most okay our website's doingthemost.org and we have a discord server at discord.doingthemost.org we're also on twitch at doing the most okay until next time happy brewing you

Channel: Doin the Most

Views: 15,274

Rating: 4.9269404 out of 5

Keywords: beer, wine, cider, mead, howto, brew, homebrewing, home brew, hacks, tips, tricks, beginner, amateur, novice, tips and tricks, homebrew tips, homebrewing hacks, homebrewing tricks, advice for beginners, make beer at home, make mead at home, how to make mead, how to make wine, Carbonation drops, chopsticks, brew notes, citrus zest, Starter kit, frozen fruit, adjunct, Erythritol, Hanging scale, Milk crates, Melter honey, bakers honey, brewing gear, homebrewing tips, homebrewing advice

Id: PyKDGVQhnOk

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021