Posts by Tara Nurin
Protein Haze: How Understanding pH Will Help You Brew Intentionally Unclear Beer
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.
Read MoreHow Yeast Pitching Rates Affect Beer Fermentation
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.
Read MoreFerment Hot, Fast, and Clean Beer with Kveik Norweigan Farmhouse Yeast Strains
There’s a trending not-so-new category of super-yeasts in town and if you haven’t tasted or brewed with them yet, you likely will soon. Called kveik (kuh-vike) yeasts, they hail from Norway, and their fans say that almost anything your yeast can do, kveik yeast can probably do better.
Read MoreYeast Harvesting: Best (& Worst) Practices and How to Know When It’s Time to Pitch Fresh Yeast
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…
Read More5 Ways to Maximize Your Brewery’s Potential During Coronavirus
Now that most states are mandating social distancing measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, it can be extremely difficult to know how to adjust production schedules to match unpredictable demand over an impossible-to-predict timeline. Though business may be slow, many breweries are experimenting with new ideas and approaches, both to give their customers…
Read MoreNatural Beer Carbonation Through Spunding Can Save Your Brewery Time and Money
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…
Read MoreWhy Some Experimentally Minded Brewers Are Dry Hopping During Active Fermentation
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…
Read MoreStuck Fermentation: Causes, Prevention and How to Fix Them When They Happen
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…
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