Beer School

Today’s topic: Detailed look at the mash step of brewing beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Every batch of all-grain beer starts right here, with the mash. This is where we take the dry, cracked grains, combine them with some warm water, and make the malty, sugar-filled liquid that will be the base for our homebrew.

Today’s topic: Detailed look at how to sparge the mash and separate the sugary beer wort. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School After the mash, the next major part in the beer-making process is separating out the sweet liquid we’ve made and sparging the mashed grains.

Today’s topic: Detailed look at boiling the wort and adding hops. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School By this point in the brew day, we have finished making the base of our beer — the sugary wort — and now it’s time to introduce some other flavors. This happens in the form of those tiny, very aromatic, rather pungent hop pellets.

Today’s topic: Detailed look at cooling the wort and adding the yeast. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School After mashing the grains, making our wort, and then adding the hops, there’s really only one thing left to do in the beer-making process: add the yeast.

Today’s topic: What’s happening during the primary fermentation The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School By this point — a day or two after your brew day — you should start seeing bubbles popping up through the water in your airlock.

Today’s topic: How to be a polite, considerate homebrewer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Let’s take a break from our big homebrewing discussions today and talk about something that doesn’t always come up: the etiquette of brewing beer at home.

Today’s topic: Finding the best spot in your house to stash your fermenting beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School You want to stash your fermenting beer somewhere out of the way so you’re not constantly tripping over it, but where it’s still accessible so you can get to it when you need to.

Today’s topic: Learn how to siphon beer from one container to another. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Of all the steps of brewing beer, I actually think it’s siphoning that really trips people up, at least to begin with. It seems so simple — we’re just transferring beer from one container to another using a rubber hose. Easy-peasy.

Today’s assignment: Transfer your beer from the primary to the secondary. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School In the last few days, you probably noticed the bubbles in the airlock getting slower and less frequent — a sure sign that the first stage of active fermentation is winding down.

Today’s topic: Understand what’s happening to your beer right now The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School With the first exciting week of active fermentation behind us, it might look like nothing is happening in your beer — but looks can be deceiving. The next few weeks are a quiet, but important, time for our freshly made homebrew.

Today’s topic: All the easy ways you can tweak a homebrew recipe The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School With your first batch of homebrew still waiting to be bottled and a now-empty fermentation bucket staring you down, perhaps you’re contemplating … doing another homebrew? I fully support this plan!

Today’s topic: How homebrews go from flat to fizzy The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Beer’s refreshing fizziness is at least half of what we love about it, and right now, I’m sorry to say it — your homebrew has none. Zero fizz. It’s flatter than a can of soda left out after a party. But we’re going to change all that.

Today’s topic: A walk-through of the whole bottling process from start to finish. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School If you’ve been following along with our Beer School timeline, you’ll still be a little more than a week away from bottling your first batch at this point.

Today’s topic: How to figure out what went wrong with your beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Even the most experienced, gifted, and diligent homebrewer still occasionally gets a bum bottle. It happens. And when it does, it’s useful to take a few minutes to try and figure out what went wrong — and how to avoid it next time.

Today’s topic: A few ideas for passing the time until your homebrew is ready. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School One more week until your beer will be ready to bottle, and another few weeks after that until it’s ready to drink — how can we make that time pass more swiftly? Well, one answer is obvious: Make another batch of beer!

Today’s topic: What’s going on inside the bottle right now, plus 5 amber ales to try while you wait The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School One more week to go until your beer is ready to drink! Are you feeling tempted to sample a bottle a little early? Totally understandable.

Today’s topic: Taste your finished homebrew The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Today is the day! Your homebrew is finally ready to be tasted.

Today’s topic: Bottle your beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School In the past three weeks, your homebrew has gone from raw grains to sugary wort to actual beer — all that’s left to do is bottle it up. Let’s get to it!