Posts by Tara Nurin

One water supplier can draw from many sources, from wells to rivers to springs, and every fount may vary in its chemical composition. Even a single source can fluctuate when it rains or snows. So imagine the variety between geographic locations. This article explores how water chemistry affects commercial brewing.

Hop creep refers to the overattenuation of dry-hopped beer. One might otherwise describe it as a sneaky, unwanted secondary fermentation that can lower gravity, provoke a diacetyl spike, and create excess alcohol and CO2. This article explores hop creep in depth: causes, effects and things you can do to prevent it.

Have you caught the haze craze? Until the last decade, hazy beers tended to show up primarily as mistakes or unfiltered styles like Belgian and German wheats. There are many ways to create protein haze in beer and more ways to avoid it. This article explores the role pH plays in crafting successfully murky beers.

Does pitch rate matter? Though not everyone agrees, prevailing wisdom strongly suggests that brewers who prioritize accurate flavors and/or consistency should absolutely pay attention to their yeast counts. The various factors required to calculate a target pitch rate for beer can make figuring out the formula quite complicated. In this article, we deconstruct the topic and find some easy ways to do it. 

Brewers commonly repitch yeast to ferment batch after batch to save money and coax out the complex flavors and higher flocculation rates that Saccharomyces yeast can develop over multiple generations, particularly from the second to the third. But in order to maximize yeast function and longevity, it’s important to be strategic and maintain consistency when…

By using a simple spunding valve, you can naturally carbonate your lagers and ales without worrying about building dangerously high pressure. In order to either speed up production, maintain a natural process, achieve a certain mouthfeel, follow their interpretation of Reinheitsgebot or simply spend less money buying carbon dioxide gas (CO2), some brewers opt to…

By refusing to wait until fermentation has finished to dry-hop their beers, brewers are extracting surprisingly different aromas, flavors and appearances In addition to “hazy” and “tropical,” “dry-hopped” may be the word-du-jour ricocheting around the IPA landscape. Most dry hopping — which must happen post-boil for the hops oils to retain their delicate volatile compounds…

Anyone who works with brewer’s yeast knows they need to give it a pretty cushy work environment to maintain its function. When yeast cells aren’t happy – say, because they’re unhealthy, run out of nutrients to digest or colleagues to do their share of the task – they stop doing their job. If you’ve experienced…