When homebrewers make a five-gallon beer recipe, they expect to end up with a full five gallons of beer. To avoid the frustration of ending up with less beer than you bargained for, check out these five ways you can be sure to end up with your proper allotment of homebrew — to minimize the loss and maximize the beer:

1. Pour all the trub from the kettle into the fermenter. Many homebrew books call for creating a whirlpool in the brew kettle during the chill-down phase, making it easier to leave behind the hops and protein material in the kettle. The thing is, depending on your beer recipe and your equipment, you could easily leave a half-gallon or more of wort in the kettle. To maximize the amount of beer you end up with, try pouring everything into the fermenter, where the hops and the protein will eventually settle out. (I highly recommend reading the Great Trub ExBEERiment to see how this might affect your finished beer.) If you still want to keep the trub out of your kettle, try pouring the wort into the kettle through a strainer to minimize your beer losses.
   

2. Top up to 5.25 or 5.5 gallons in the fermenter. Many extract beer recipes call for adding enough water to make five gallons of wort prior to fermentation. But it’s important to remember that the trub in the fermenter can take up as much as half a gallon of wort or more. To account for these losses, add enough clean, chlorine-free water to the fermenter to make a total of between 5.25 and 5.5 gallons of wort. Remember, you are not trying to have more than 5 gallons of liquid, you are trying to make up for the volume the trub is displacing.

3. Boil your hops in a straining bag. This can be particularly effective for your hoppier homebrews like IPAs. Instead of pitching the hops directly into the boiling wort, try putting them into a muslin bag This way they can be easily removed from the wort post-boil. This works well for dry-hopping, too.

4. Cold crash. Dropping the temperature of your fermented beer prior to bottling will help yeast, hops, and other material settle into a compact layer at the bottom of the fermenter, maximizing the amount of beer you get from every batch. When fermentation is completely, drop the temperature to 30-40˚F for a few days or longer. This cold maturation phase also helps improve beer flavor. Bottle condition at room temperature as usual.

5. Use a refractometer. Every time you use a hydrometer to test your beer’s gravity, you lose about a half-pint. With a refractometer, all you need is a couple drops. Please note that a refractometer works best before fermentation. After fermentation begins, you will need a calculator to compensate for the alcohol present in the beer.

What are some ways you maximize your homebrew yields? Do you have any quick tips on how to lose less of your homebrew beer?

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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 and editor of the Local Beer Blog.

Lagers differ from ales in that they are fermented at a much cooler temperature. Simple right? But the exact procedures and temperature schedule for fermenting lager beer may vary. Below are some general guidelines for fermenting lager beer at home.
While ales typically ferment at room temperature (65-75˚F) all the way through the fermentation, a lager’s fermentation schedule is completely different. Lagers ferment at about 45-55˚F, and then go through an extended lagering phase at temperatures 10-15°F below the primary fermentation temperature.
If you’re brewing lager beer without a fridge, this usually means you’re brewing lagers in the winter, placing the fermenter in a cool basement, possibly rigging up a swamp cooler to help keep the fermenter in the desired temperature range. Alternatively, a spare refrigerator or chest freezer can be made into a fermentation chamber with the simple addition of a temperature controller. This allows the homebrewer to control the lager fermentation temperature to within a degree of the desired target, and to brew lagers year-round.

Many of you want to know how long it take s to brew a lager beer. The typical lager fermentation temperature schedule looks something like this:

• Primary fermentation – About 1-2 weeks at 45-55˚F. The exact time will vary on a number of factors, including the gravity of the beer, fermentation temperature, and the health of the yeast. It’s up to the brewer to judge when this period is complete, using either visual cues, gravity samples, or plain sixth sense to decide when to move on to the next step. When in doubt, follow guidelines as stated by a trusted homebrew beer recipe.

• Diacetyl rest (optional) – If you are fermenting at a warmer temperature, using a yeast strain known for diacetyl production, or if diacetyl is detected, a diacetyl rest can help the yeast “clean up” any buttery off-flavors due to diacetyl in the beer. Once fermentation noticeably slows down, simply allow the fermentation temperature to rise 10-15˚F and hold for 1-2 days.

• Lagering – The lagering phase is sometimes called cold maturation. This period, which can last four weeks or longer, helps with flavor development and with clearing the beer.

After the lagering period, bottle or keg as you would normally. If bottling, store the bottles at room temperature until ready to drink. Occasionally, the cold phase can inhibit yeast from creating carbonation in the bottle. If this is the case, you can open each bottle, add a few grains of dry lager yeast, and recap with new, sanitized caps. When in doubt, just go with your standard bottling procedure and be patient.

Here are some additional tips if you’re just starting out with brewing lager beer :

• Choose a yeast strain depending on the style of lager beer you’re brewing. For example, I’m brewing a German schwarzbier, so I’ll be using Bavarian lager yeast. Of course, there aren’t any rules that say you can’t use a Czech strain in a German beer, or a German strain in an American beer. As you brew more and more lagers, you’ll get a better sense of how individual yeast strains perform.

• Pitch plenty of yeast. As a rule of thumb, a lager fermentation requires about twice as much yeast as an ale of the same gravity. This is to help them plow through the rigorous lager temperature schedule more solidly. Use a yeast pitching calculator to figure out how much yeast to buy and whether to make a yeast starter.

• Determine your fermentation temperature. If you can get specific when brewing lager beer. You can do this by using a temperature controlled fermentation temperature chamber, that’s great. Choose your temperature based on yeast producers recommendations and the experience of others. Aim in the middle of the range if you’re unsure.

• Do a diacetyl rest. Just to be safe, I recommend a diacetyl rest. Allow temperature to rise at the end of primary fermentation. With a fermentation chamber, this can be easily done be increasing the temperature about 10- 15˚F for a two-day diacetyl rest. Then drop the temperature for the lagering phase. I know it’s one more step in the lager fermentation temperature schedule, but it’s well worth it.

• Be patient. Brewing lager beer takes quite a bit longer than brewing an ale, but it’s worth the wait. Use the following temperature schedule and timelines for the final lagering phase (depending on temperature): 3 – 4 weeks at 45°F, 5 – 6 weeks at 40°F, or 7 – 8 weeks at 35°F. Higher gravity lagers will need a longer lagering phase to fully mature.

• A note on pitching temperature: Some brewers recommend that you pitch yeast at the primary fermentation temperature, some say pitch warm then bring the temperature down, the idea being that this will help kick off fermentation. Do what works for you.

This is the basics of brewing lager beer at home –how to approach a lager fermentation temperature schedule, timeline, diacetyl rest, etc. Realize that there are many variations on this, but there is enough information here to produce an excellent lager beer.
If you’re used to brewing ales, maybe it’s time to try a lager. Here are 3 Homebrew Lager Recipes you can try.
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David Ackley is a beer writer, homebrewer, 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.

OK, let’s be honest. Not every batch you brew will be the best beer ever. (I’ve certainly made my share of sub par homebrews!) So let’s say a batch doesn’t turn out quite the way you want it to. You may even suspect infection. What do you do? Dump it right away and try again? Try to blend it with another batch? Pass it off on your friends? How do you go about handling beer brewing problems.
Here are my suggestions:
1. Wait – As homebrewers, one of the hardest things to do is wait for beer to be ready. More often than not, what we suspect as a fault may just need some time to mellow out. That off-flavor may just be a symptom of green beer. Did you add too much chipotle to your chipotle porter? Just give it some more time to see how it develops. Some beers take many weeks – if not months – before they’re ready to drink.
2. Take notes – Regardless of whether this batch is salvageable or not, it’s a valuable learning experience for the future. Be sure to write down not just the recipe and what you did on brew day, but also flavor characteristics and how they change over time. The more information you can glean from handling a homebrewing problem, the sooner you will become a better brewer. Two or three years from now when you want to brew another chipotle porter, these notes will be invaluable for creating a well-balanced recipe.
3. Consider blending – I’m a big advocate of blending homebrew. Commercial breweries blend beers all the time. Chances are, your favorite pale ale is actually a blend of several batches of the same beer. This helps the brewery ensure that they deliver a consistent product within a small range of specifications. But while commercial brewers have enormous tanks for blending, it’s a little trickier for the typical homebrewer.
What I suggest is brewing a batch to blend with the original beer, but instead of blending them in the fermenter, blend the two beers in the glass. This way, you can play around with the blending ratio, and if you ultimately decide the problem batch isn’t worth saving, you’ll only lose one batch instead of two. From there, you might be able to infer how you would adjust the recipe in the future.
4. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again – Although a botched batch of homebrew can be discouraging, don’t give up! You’ve undoubtedly learned quite a bit from your mistakes. Apply this experience to your future batches and they are bound to turn out that much better!
What other advice do you have for handling beer brewing problems?

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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.