If you’ve ever shopped around for a new fermenter, you’ve probably asked yourself this question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of fermentation buckets vs. carboys?
As a beginning homebrewer, it may be hard to find a definitive answer to the question. Ask other brewers, and you’ll probably get a range of opinions. It seems that everyone has their preference.
But there’s a reason that homebrew equipment kits include a bucket fermenter for primary fermentation and a carboy for secondary fermentation. It all comes down to a few pros and cons:

Buckets

• Wide mouth offers easy access – The design of a fermenting bucket makes it easy to pour into from the boil kettle – you don’t have to mess with a funnel. It’s also easy to open the lid to pull hydrometer samples or add dry hops or other flavorings.

• Lots of headspace – Buckets offer lots of room for krausen during primary fermentation.

• Plastic is lightweight and unlikely to break – Buckets are easier to move than glass. Plus, if you drop one, it won’t shatter and send you to the ER.

• Easy to clean – It’s easier to get inside a bucket to clean the insides. If you need to, you can really get in there and scrub.

Carboys

• Great for bulk aging – With carboys, it’s easy to minimize headspace. Reducing the amount of beer that comes in contact with air greatly reduces the chances of oxidation and infection.

• A window to your fermentation – Carboys are clear, so you can see what’s happening inside.

• They come in glass and plastic options – Some brewers feel like they get better flavor when fermenting in glass.

• Don’t provide much space for primary fermentation – To give the krausen room to grow, you may need to rig up a blowoff tube.

• Can be difficult to clean – Since the opening at the top is so small, it can be hard to get inside for a deep clean. We recommend using a carboy brush or an automatic carboy washer to really get inside.

Conclusion
Though both fermentation buckets and carboys work well for fermenting beer, buckets tend to be best for primary fermentation and carboys for secondary fermentation and aging. If you anticipate needing to get inside the fermenter during fermentation (to add dry hops or to stir a mead), a bucket may be your best bet. If you plan to age a beer for a long time after primary fermentation, consider using a carboy to minimize headspace. So as you can start to see there is some commonsense arguments for using a fermentation bucket vs using a carboy.
Which do you prefer: fermentation bucket or carboy?
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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.

When focusing on flavors in beer, hops and malt usually get the most attention, often followed by fruit, chocolate, vanilla, and wood. But creating delicate layers of taste and aroma can be as easy as brandishing your green thumb. Try brewing beer with herbs!
For me, I’ve found success with two herbs I’m able to grow in my backyard: rosemary and basil. Summers are hot here in North Carolina, but with a little daily attention, it’s been easy for me to grow more than enough of these herbs to use as late additions to the boil. Remember: the key to unlocking the highest quality flavors from these ingredients is to use them as fresh as possible, so brewing beer with herbs you’ve grown yourself just makes sense.
Here are a couple ways to utilize these easy-to-grow herbs for a new beer recipe.

Homebrewing with Rosemary
There are many varieties of rosemary to choose from, but the easiest for homebrewing purposes may be the “common” varietal, which does well in many climates and is sun-tolerant. If you’ve ever used rosemary for cooking, you’ll recognize it’s piney characteristic. That makes it a good complement to certain kinds of hops, especially ones with spicy or piney characteristics.
If you want to enhance piney flavors of your hop bill, consider using some rosemary with Chinook or Columbus hops. Alternatively, the piney aspect of rosemary can supplement citrus characteristics – think of how well rosemary works with lemon when preparing food dishes. In that case, rosemary can work well with Cascade, Citra, and Simcoe hops. About half an ounce of freshly cut rosemary will do the trick. You don’ t want to over-do-it. Balance is a big part of brewing beer with herbs.
I’ve only used rosemary with IPAs, but pale ales or even saisons might be a good recipe option. Here’s an IPA extract beer recipe to try with rosemary:

Recipe: Piney the Elder IPA
(5-gallon batch, extract with specialty grains)
Specs
OG: 1.065
FG: 1.016
ABV: 6.4%
IBUs: 55
SRM: 10
Ingredients
1 lb. Caramel 40 malt
9 lbs. Golden light liquid extract
1 oz. Columbus hops at :60
1 oz. Chinook hops at :15
1 oz. Columbus hops at :5
0.5 oz. freshly cut rosemary at knockout
1 oz. Chinook dry hop (optional)
Wyeast 1056: American Ale yeast
Directions
Steep the grains in 2.5 gallons of water at 150˚F for 30 minutes. Remove the grains, mix in liquid malt extract, and bring wort to a boil. Add hops and rosemary according to schedule. At end of boil, cool wort to 70˚F or below and transfer to a clean, sanitized fermenter. Add enough clean water to make 5 gallons of wort. Stir vigorously for 1-2 minutes and pitch yeast. Ferment at 70˚F.

Homebrewing with Basil
The basil you grow at home or find in the store offers a delicate sweetness and a twinge of spice, a flavor combination that often pairs well with wheat beers. I’ve found great success mixing the flavor of basil with honey.
Once again, when brewing beer with this herb think of using it in terms of cooking in the kitchen. Its sweetness mixes well with Italian dishes, cuts some of the heat of Indian food, and enhances the pleasant, savory feeling of meat. Similarly, using basil in home brewing should enhance the beer rather than dominate it.
The trick with basil is to focus on using it at the knockout/flameout stage of the boil or as a dry-“herbing” option. If it’s boiled too long, it will bring unwanted bitterness to your beer.
I’ve had success with this beer recipe adapted from the July/August 2011 issue of Brew Your Own magazine, which balances some of the basil flavor with medium-range alpha acid of Cascade hops.

Recipe: Honey Basil Ale (Bison Organic Beer Honey Basil clone)
(5-gallon batch, partial mash recipe)
Specs
OG: 1.052
FG: 1.010
ABV: 5.5%
IBUs: 19
SRM: 6
Ingredients
3.3 lbs. light, unhopped, liquid malt extract
2 lbs. light dried malt extract
1 lbs. two row pale malt
0.75 lbs. Crystal malt 20 L
0.7 lbs. Carapils malt
1 oz. Cascade hops at :60
0.6 oz. basil leaves at :10
0.5 to 1 lb. honey at :5
0.6 oz. basil leaves at :0
Wyeast 1056: American Ale yeast
Directions
Steep the grains in 2 gallons of water at 148˚F for 30 minutes. Remove grains from wort. Stir in liquid and dry malt extracts and begin boil. Add hops, basil, and honey as detailed above. After boil, add the wort to two gallons of cold water in the fermenter and top off to make five gallons. Stir well to aerate and pitch yeast. Ferment at 70˚F.
Interested in brewing beer with herbs? Check out Brew Your Own Herb Beers!
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Bryan Roth is a beer nerd and homebrewer living in Durham, North Carolina. You can read his thoughts on beer and the beer industry on his blog, This Is Why I’m Drunk, and send him suggestions on how to get his wife to drink craft beer via Twitter at @bryandroth.

Want to start homebrewing but don’t know where to begin? Allow me to walk you through the basic brewing instructions.
Brewing is the process of mixing water, malt, and hops to create a sweet, sugary mixture called wort. When yeast is added, it consumes the sugar in the wort and ferments the wort into beer. As a beginner, you can brew very simply using hopped malt extract. All you need to do is mix the malt extract with water, add the yeast, and allow the beer to ferment for about two weeks. At that point the beer is ready to be bottled. Two to three weeks later, most low- to mid-gravity beers will be ready to drink.
Below, find step-by-step basic brewing instructions for creating your first batch of beer made from malt extract.

1. Assemble your equipment – A Steam Freak Beer Making Starter Kit includes all the equipment you need to get started homebrewing. (I actually still use most of the equipment I bought over five years ago!)

2. Choose a beer recipe – The Steam Freak Starter kit also includes your first recipe kit. Start with something you and your friends will enjoy drinking. Any of these can recipe extract kits also work well for a first batch. Dark beers are generally more forgiving, so I often recommend starting with a brown ale or Mexican Cerveza.

3. Clean the equipment – You wouldn’t cook in a dirty pan would you? The same goes for brewing. Your equipment should be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized before brewing.

4. Mix the ingredients – The exact procedure will vary depending on the recipe you’re starting out with – just follow the basic brewing instructions that come with the kit. Some recipes are boiled on the stove before fermenting, in which case you’ll need a brew kettle. Others (like the Munton’s Connoisseur kits) are just mixed with water, sugar, and yeast right in the fermenter. These are far and away the easiest way to brew.

5. Allow to ferment for about 2-3 weeks – Just leave it alone at room temperature.

6. Bottle – This is one of the more labor-intensive parts of homebrewing. Basically, you will mix about 4-5 oz. of priming sugar with a cup of water and place it in the bottling bucket (the one with the spigot). Then, transfer the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket. Next, attach a transfer hose and bottle filler to the spigot and fill and cap about 48-50 twelve-ounce bottles. Your beer recipe kit will come with instructions for how to do this.

7. Wait 2-3 weeks and enjoy! – During this time, the yeast in the beer consumes the priming sugar and carbonates your homebrew.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?! Now you have several weeks worth of delicious, homemade beer!
Have any questions about these basic brewing instructions? Feel free to leave a question 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.

Sooner or later we all reach the limit on our brewing equipment. When it comes to brew kettles, standard procedure is to start with a 5-gallon kettle for partial mash brewing, then eventually upgrade to an 8-, 10-, or 15-gallon kettle in order to advance to all-grain brewing and brew bigger batches.
But brew kettles can be a big investment. To bridge the gap between your current kettle and the next size up, you can utilize high gravity brewing to brew more beer with less space. In other words, you can brew 15 gallons of beer with your 10-gallon kettle. This will allow you to maximize your brew kettle output before moving to a larger size kettle.
So how does this work?
Think about your typical 5-gallon, partial mash recipe kit. Usually what we do is mix the ingredients into a 3- or 4-gallon boil, then add water (preferably clean, chlorine-free water) to the fermenter to bring up the volume to five gallons. This can also be done with your own homebrew recipes and on a larger scale.

Scaling the Beer Recipe to Maximize Brew Kettle Output

Scaling the grain and/extract side of the recipe is pretty straightforward. As a homebrewer, all you need to do is increase the malts and malt extracts in proportion to the batch size. Say for example the five-gallon recipe you usually make in your 7.5-gallon kettle uses 6.6 lbs. of malt extract. To brew a ten-gallon batch, still use the same amount of water for the boil, but double the malt extract. After diluting in the fermenter, your original gravity should be pretty close to what it is when you brew the five-gallon batch. (Things are a little more complicated when brewing all-grain, but the same principles apply.)
The tricky part with scaling recipes into high gravity versions is controlling hop bitterness. IBUs are directly influenced by hop utilization, which is a factor of boil gravity and boil time. The higher the gravity of the boil, the lower the hop utilization. To compensate for the lower hop utilization, we need to do more than double the hops to arrive at the same IBUs.
To figure out how much hops to use, work backwards. Say we want the finished beer to have 40 IBUs. We’re planning to brew five gallons of a 1.080 beer, which will be 1.040 after diluting with five gallons of water. That means the IBUs of the brew pre-dilution should be 80. As an example, it may only take 1.5 oz. of hops to reach 40 IBUs when doing a full-volume boil, but it will take 4.3 oz. of the same hops added at the same time to impart the same amount of bitterness in the higher gravity brew. These calculations can be tricky – use an IBU calculator to help you sort it out. In some cases you may want to add half the malt extract at the end of the boil (a late addition) in order to maximize hop utilization.

Limitations of High Gravity Brewing
To simplify the calculations above, I’ve used a 1:1 ration for dilution (one gallon dilution water for every gallon of wort). In reality, this is about the upper extreme of how much you’d want to dilute a homebrew. Diluting a high gravity boil can certainly be effective, but you want to avoid creating a beer that tastes watered down. Diluting before fermentation will help to avoid this.
Have you every tried brewing high-gravity beers to maximize your brew kettle output? How did it go?
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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.

Those homebrewers with a competitive mindset will naturally be drawn to participating in homebrew competitions. Those that aren’t should still consider participating. Not only is it a great way to get feedback on your beers, it’s a fun way to interact with other beer lovers and an opportunity to have some pride in your hard work.
If you’re ready to compete with other homebrewers, consider these tips for winning in a homebrew competition. Use these 8 pieces of advice to improve your chances at winning top prize.

Know Your Competition

1. First, keep in mind that there are generally two kinds of homebrew competitions: Those that are judged by the BJCP Style Guidelines, and those that aren’t. Your approach may vary depending on what kind of competition your participating in.

Tips for BJCP Homebrew Competitions

2. Brew to style – This is one of the most important tips for a homebrew competition I can give you. Judges will likely be reading directly from the style guidelines as they’re judging your beer. To be successful in these types of competitions, it’s crucial that your beer is an exceptional example of a given style. Designing Great Beers is a good starting point for developing recipes according to style guidelines. If you have a beer that just kind of fits in a category, you’re better off submitting it in the Specialty Beer

3. Plan ahead – Ideally, you’ll have plenty of time before the competition to formulate a recipe based on the style guidelines. Better yet, brew the beer more than once so you can really dial it in.

4. Watch out for the 2014 Style BJCP Guidelines – The BJCP announced changes to the BJCP Style Guidelines, that went into effect in 2015. Some competitions may be quicker than others to transition to the new guidelines, so be sure to check with your competition organizer. Review the changes at BJCP.org.

5. Become a BJCP Judge – Learning to become a beer judge will help you become very familiar with how these competitions work. It will also expose you to a wide range of styles and improve your sensory skills.

Tips for Festival Style Homebrew Competitions

6. Be creative – For non-BJCP homebrew competitions, you can throw the style guidelines out the window. Sometimes the competitions will have other qualities they’re looking for: best beer with local ingredients, best beer name, best IPA, best Belgian beer. The goal here is to simply make the best beer you can make. Many of these types of competitions will also have a People’s Choice Award or a Best In Show decided by celebrity judges. In this case, it often helps to showcase an unusual technique or ingredient that will make your beer stand out from the crowd. So, the number one tip in these types of homebrew competitions is to be creative.

7. Market your beer – Colorful, easy to read signs are eye catching and let people know what you’re pouring. Creative, tongue-in-cheek names will often get people’s attention.

8. Market yourself – Smile and invite people to come taste your beer – the more people try your beer, the better your chances at a People’s Choice Award. Above all else, have fun!

For many, homebrew competitions are one of the most enjoyable aspects of homebrewing. Hopefully, these tips for winning a homebrew competition will make it even more fun. Have you participated in homebrew competitions before? What tips would you add to the list?
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David Ackley is a beer writer, brewer, and self-described “craft beer crusader.” He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder of the Local Beer Blog.