When making beer at home, yeast turns fermentable sugar into alcohol and CO₂. Increase the fermentable sugar, and you increase the potential alcohol content. These higher-alcohol brews are often referred to as “high gravity”.

Why increase the alcohol content of a beer?
You may be interested in “upgrading” a beer recipe to a double or imperial version. Say you have a great stout recipe, but want to bump it up to an imperial stout. Add more fermentable sugar, and the potential alcohol goes up.
You may also want to increase the alcohol content of a beer to make it better for aging. Higher alcohol content helps prevent contamination and encourages flavors to develop over time. “Winter warmers” – higher gravity beer, often brewed with spices and other flavorings – make great holiday gifts. Brew a high-gravity spiced ale for New Year’s Eve, and let it age so you can pull it out for future New Year’s Eves and see how the “vintage” changes over time. (Hint: these 1-Liter amber bottles can give your beer an elegant look.)

By how much can you increase the content of a homebrew?
Most beer yeast will stall out at 12-15% alcohol by volume, some even way before that, depending on the strain. Some are more alcohol tolerant than others. Beyond a certain point, adding more fermentable sugar than the beer yeast can handle will only make the beer sweeter, not increase its alcohol.

Sources of fermentable sugar
There are several ways to add more fermentable sugars to your beer. This increases the original gravity of the beer, which is measured with a hydrometer.

• Malt – If brewing all-grain or partial mash, adding more malt will increase the gravity. Most of your gravity will come from an increase in base malt, but you may also increase the specialty malts to keep the flavors in balance.

• Malt extract – Adding malt extract to your recipe is an easy way to add more fermentables for both all-grain and extract brewers. Just mix it right in the kettle as usual.

• Sugar – Adjunct sugars offer yet another way to raise the gravity of a beer, but don’t limit yourself to plain old white table sugar. There are several types of sugar, from cane sugar and brown sugar to more exotic sugars like candi sugar and panela. Maple syrup and honey are also interesting sugar sources. Keep in mind that nearly 100% of the sugar will be fermented into alcohol. Generally speaking, the darker the sugar, the more color and flavor will be contributed to the beer.

Another option: add alcohol directly to the beer
If you want to make something along the lines of a bourbon barrel stout or a wine barrel saison, you can add liquor directly to the beer after fermentation. Flavored liqueurs can also be used to add fruit, chocolate, or coffee flavor to beer. This is a great option if you want to take a five-gallon batch and divide it into different experiments after fermentation.
Though there’s a time and a place for lower-alcohol, session beers, there are times when raising the alcohol content of a homebrew gives it an added level of sophistication. What are some of your favorite high-gravity beers?
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David Ackley is a writer, brewer, and craft beer marketing consultant. He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder of the Local Beer Blog.

One homebrewing topic that doesn’t get enough attention is over-consumption. Sure, we like to savor our beer, but having five gallons worth of it on hand makes it pretty tempting to imbibe more than we should. If for no other reason, avoiding a toxic hangover is reason enough to moderate how much beer we drink.
Without getting preachy, if you’re someone who wants to reduce your alcohol intake – and avoid the homebrew hangover that comes with it – you might consider some of these options:

1. Brew lower gravity beers – “Session” beers – those with 4.5-5% or less alcohol by volume – are all the rage these days. It seems that consumers are more interested in enjoying a refreshing beverage over the course of a few hours, as opposed to getting the most ABV bang for your buck. You might consider keeping at least one session beer in the rotation on a regular basis. Some good options include a mild, summer ale, or English bitter.

2. Drink from a keg – One of the advantages of a draft system is that you can pour as much or as little as you’d like. Want more than one beer but less than two? Easy! Draft systems are great for limiting your daily consumption (but it’s just as tempting to overdo it, so be careful!).

3. Mix a shandy – Planning a long drinking session? Stretch your beer out further by blending it with something non-alcoholic, like ginger beer or soda. It sounds weird, I know, but they can actually be really refreshing and be an enjoyable way to avoid the homebrew hangover. Check out Shandy is Dandy for some shandy mixing recommendations.

4. Avoid fusel alcohols – This point has more to do with the quality of the alcohol than the quantity. Fusel alcohols, or higher alcohols as they’re sometimes called, are often responsible for splitting headaches. By keeping your fermentation temperature under control, you can limit fusel alcohol production and at least some of the headache that comes with a hangover. Reducing fusel alcohols will have the adding benefit of reducing solvent-like off-flavors in your beer.

5. Drink with food and water – Keeping hydrated is key to avoiding a homebrew hangover. If drinking at a hot homebrew festival or similar event, aim for a 1:1 ratio of beer to water (for every beer you try, drink an equal amount of water). And be sure to get some food in your stomach – just the break from drinking can be enough to keep things under control.

6. Eat yogurt and dry yeast? You might have seen a recent news article about Jim Koch of Boston Beer Co. having a “secret remedy” that allows him to drink all day without getting drunk. I’m not sure about the validity of this method, but it’s worth a try, right?

What strategies do you use to keep from avoiding a homebrew hangover? Share in the comments below…
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David Ackley is a writer, brewer, and craft beer marketing consultant. He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder of the Local Beer Blog.

Home brewing doesn’t require you to take a whole lot of measurement or to know a whole lot about the science side of the hobby. After all, people have been making beer for thousands of years, and it wasn’t until relatively recently that anyone really understood the role yeast played in the brewing process. But in order to make good beer predictably and consistently, knowing how to control the numbers is critical.
Below, find a breakdown of the most common home brewing measurements and figures used when making beer. Learn how to work these numbers, and your homemade beer will be all the better!
 
Common Home Brewing Measurements:

• Volume – One of the most basic calculations you’ll need to keep track of is volume – the amount of space your beer takes up. Overshooting or undershooting your volume measurements can have a huge impact on beer color, flavor, alcohol content, mouthfeel, and more.

• Weight – Homebrew ingredients are typically measured out by weight. A digital scale is an important tool for your home brewery.

• Temperature – Measuring temperature comes into play in several parts of homebrewing. We often try to hit a specific temperature when steeping or mashing grains. Having good control over fermentation temperature can “make or break” your beer.

• Gravity – Specific gravity is a measurement of the density of a liquid. Pure water has a specific gravity of 1.000. In brewing, gravity tells us how much dissolved solids there are in wort and in finished beer. We usually measure gravity with a hydrometer. By taking the original or starting gravity and subtracting the finished gravity, we can figure out how much sugar was consumed during the fermentation process and calculate the alcohol content of the finished beer. You’ll often hear beers called “high-gravity” or “low-gravity” (As in, “Man, I had way too many high-gravity beers last night!”). This refers to the original gravity of the beer, and by extension, the alcohol content.

• ABV – “Alcohol by volume.” Using the gravity measurements from above, we can figure out the alcohol content of beer. Take the original gravity (let’s say 1.050) and subtract the final gravity (1.010). Take that number (0.040) and multiply by 131.25 to get the alcohol content (5.25%). There are ABV calculators that can help with the math, but I find it’s easy enough just to plug the numbers into my phone.

• IBUs – “International Bittering Units.” In Europe, these may be listed as EBUs – they’re the same thing. IBUs are a figure that relates how much bitterness is contributed to a beer by hops. You can do IBU calculations by hand, but for these I usually use an IBU calculator. But in general, know that the more hops you use, the higher the alpha acid content of the hops, and the longer they are boiled in the wort, the higher the IBUs.

• Alpha Acids – Alpha acids, which are found in hops, are what make beer bitter. They’re expressed as a percentage of the total weight of the hops. For example, Cascade hops are typically 4.5-6% AA. You’ll often see recipes that call for a specific number of AAUs or HBUs. These stand for alpha acid units or homebrew bittering units. These are an easy way to develop consistency when alpha acids may change from batch to batch. To calculate AAUs or HBUs, take the weight of the hops (say, 1.5 oz.) and multiply by the alpha acid content of the hops (5%). That adds up to 7.5 AAUs.

• SRM – SRM stands for standard reference method and is a measurement of beer color. The palest beers, like wits and pale lagers, are in the 2-5 SRM range. Anything over about 35-40 is a very dark beer. (In Europe they use the EBC scale – it’s roughly double SRM.)

• Lovibond – Lovibond is a measurement of malt color, the main contributor to beer color. Very pale pilsner or pale ale malt is usually below 5 degrees Lovibond. Some of the mid-range malts that give beer an amber or copper range from about 20 to 100˚L. The darkest malts – the chocolate malts and heavily roasted malts – tend to be in the 300-500 range. A good recipe builder will help you with the math of predicting beer color.

 
Other Home Brewing Measurements and Calculations
These are just some of the primary figures used in homebrewing. As you advance in the hobby, you’ll also start paying more and more attention to things like efficiency, pH, pitching rates, and attenuation. But if you have firm control over the numbers above, you’re well on your well to brewing some excellent beer!
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David Ackley is a writer, brewer, and craft beer marketing consultant. He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder of the Local Beer Blog.