You’ve probably noticed a huge rise in the number of gluten-free products on grocery store shelves. Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that about 1% of the US population suffers from Celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder affecting the small intestines. A rapidly growing number of people are choosing to go gluten-free for other dietary and health reasons, and in the home brewing world it’s no different. Gluten free home brewing is become more prevalent.

But what is gluten?
Gluten is a protein found in certain cereal grains such as barley, wheat, and rye. It’s this protein that causes bread dough to stick together and hold its shape.
Obviously barley, wheat, and rye are all common ingredients in home brewing. There are a few breweries that make gluten-free beer from barley and wheat, then use an enzyme to break down the gluten in the beer. According to the USDA, these beers may be labeled “gluten-free”, but trace amounts of gluten remain and these beers are not suitable for people with severe Celiac’s disease.
Fortunately, there are several gluten-free grains which can be used in gluten free homebrewing, including:

• Oats (must be labeled gluten-free)
• Sorghum
• Quinoa
• Rice
• Corn
• Millet
• Buckwheat

Among these, rice and corn are very frequently used in home brewing recipes. They are commonly used to brew light lagers. Rice and corn are a cheap source of fermentable sugars, so for a very large brewery, the savings can be significant. On the other hand, rice and corn contribute little flavor and color. If you or someone you know has a severe gluten allergy, take extra care to make sure the gluten-free grains that you use are not contaminated with grains that have gluten.

Gluten Free Home Brewing with Sorghum
Sorghum is considered one of the grains which most closely resembles barley in terms of brewhouse performance making it a great substitute in a gluten free beer recipe. Examples of commercial beers made with sorghum include Bard’s and New Grist. Even Guinness makes a version of their stout made with sorghum for their African market.
For gluten free home brewing, one option would be to malt your own gluten-free grains. However this is a challenging and time-consuming process. The alternative is to use a sorghum extract. One could then experiment with small amounts of gluten-free grains to contribute flavor and body. You can also use adjunct sugars like cane sugar and molasses to increase gravity or alter color.
Brewer’s Best takes out the guesswork out of gluten-free brewing with a gluten free beer recipe kit. The kit includes:

• 6.6 lbs. Sorghum Extract
• 1 lb. Golden Candi Syrup
• 8 oz. Maltodextrine
• Orange and lemon peel
• 2 oz. Cascade hops
• Yeast

The result is a lightly colored, moderately hopped Belgian-style pale ale with a flavorful blend of floral and citrus character.
Consider buying two kits at a 10% discount and experiment a bit with the second one! What gluten-free creations can you come up with?
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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.

2016 is here and I thought it would be a good time to reflect a little. I am having a lot of fun exploring a wide range of topics involving making beer at home. From bottling your homebrew and organizing your gear, to recipes, techniques, and tips, the E. C. Kraus Homebrewing Blog is a wealth of information. And as a way to brewing in the new year, here are ten of the most read homebrewing posts of all time.

1. 10 Home Brewing Tips For The Beginner – Just getting started? Here’s some practical advice that will help you to avoid the pitfalls and make you a better brewer, faster!

2. 6 Tips for Improving Mash Efficiency – Not only does improving mash efficiency get you more sugars from the same amount of ingredients, it also helps you to become a more consistent brewer.

3. 7 Skills That Make You a Better Homebrewer – Focus on developing these skills, and brewing great beer will become second-nature. Become a talented brewer.

4. So You Wanna Go Pro? Tips for Entering the Craft Beer Biz – Here are a few tips to help you on your journey of becoming a professional homebrewer.

5. How Do I Increase the Alcohol Content of Homebrew? – Need your beers to knock you in the head a little harder? Here’s a simple guide that will show you how to ramp up the alcohol.

6. Base Malt Explained: Profiles & Comparisons – Base malt is the foundation of any all-grain beer recipe. Here’s a quick overview that will help you to understand when to using one over the other.

7. A Quick Guide To Home Brewing Water Chemistry – Water makes up over 98% of most beers, yet it’s one of the most neglected ingredients. Here’s some basics that will go far in helping you shape your water profiles.

8. Using a Brew-in-a-Bag (BIAB) System to Make Your Beers – Brew in a Bag (BIAB) is a great way to transition into all-grain brewing without a significant investment in equipment. Check out the post for step-by-step instructions for brew in a bag!

9. Whole Leaf Hops vs. Pellet Hops – Which is Better? – Learn when to use whole leaf hops over pellets and vice-versa. There is a difference. Find our what it is…

10. Why It’s Fun to Experiment with Beer Brewing – Part of the appeal of brewing your own beer is you can get creative. For many this is the only way they’ll brew… be damned any recipes. Here some insights on how to get a little creative without risking the entire batch.

Thank you for visiting the E. C. Kraus Beer Making Blog. We hope you follow us through 2016 for more!
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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.

When homebrewers are asked the reason why they brew their own beer, many will mention that it’s a great way to save money. This may be true, but very few will say it’s the real reason to homebrew. Besides, homebrewers often make a sizable investment in new equipment and enjoy expanding their home brewery arsenal with new gadgets and gizmos.
So why do homebrewers brew their own beer? Why go through several hours in the kitchen or garage standing over a boiling brew kettle, followed by several weeks waiting for the beer to be ready to drink? The short answer is because they love it. More extensively, here are the 10 reasons why you should brew your own beer:

1. To exercise creativity – Many describe brewing as an art form. In fact, we often refer to it as a “craft” because of the highly demanding, constantly changing nature of the brewing process. The average homebrewer is bound to experience many ups and downs as he modifies past beer recipes and stumbles upon new ones. It is the creativity of the brewing process that provides immense satisfaction.

2. To have fun with friends – Home brewing is an extremely social hobby. What better reason to get together with friends, share your passion with them, exchange ideas, and enjoy some cold brews?!

3. To get geeky on science – If we’d known chemistry would help us make beer, we would have paid more attention in high school! Homebrewers get to assume the role of mad scientist as they master using complex instruments like hydrometers. You’ll certainly feel like a lab student at times, such as you find yourself calculating IBUs or adjusting brewing water. Homebrewing doesn’t have to be very science intensive, but some people really that part of it!

4. To challenge yourself/learn something new – Homebrewing doesn’t have to be difficult, but many brewers enjoy challenging themselves to make better beer as they experiment with new homebrewing equipment, new ideas, and new recipes. There is an endless amount of knowledge to be gained about beer and brewing, and there are countless homebrewing books and online resources on the subject. The best part of it is that you can grab a homebrew and call it “research”!

5. To drink beers that can’t be found elsewhere – This is my favorite reason for brewing my own beer. Can’t find a gruit, cranberry lager, or ale infused with papaya? When you’re craving a beer you just read about but can’t seem to get your hands on it, simply brew your own!

6. To enjoy a hands-on hobby – Homebrewers are big advocates of DIY projects like building a mash tun or sparge arm. You can really lose yourself in your work, and many homebrewers have described the process as meditative and cathartic.

7. To take pride in something you made yourself – “Look mom, I did it!”…We all like to flex our egos from time to time, so why not bask in the glory of your work for a change? Especially when you can drink your work!

8. Homebrew makes AWESOME gifts – There’s just nothing better than a homemade, consumable gift. Now you can stop worrying about holiday gifts for friends and family…your beer will make great stocking-stuffers!

9. To participate in a timeless tradition – Man has been making beer since before recorded history. In other words, homebrewing has always been fashionable and is certainly not going out of style any time soon…so what are you waiting for?!

10. To prepare for armageddon – If !#*! hits the fan, you should know how to make alcohol, plain and simple. Your services will be in high demand!

So, what’s your favorite reason for brewing your own 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 of the Local Beer Blog.

One of the reasons that 1.2 home brewers in the United States have picked up the hobby is that brewing your own beer is a simple, enjoyable pastime that you can do from the comfort of your own home. It’s easy enough for beginners to pick up without much prior knowledge and it’s a great hobby for sharing with friends!
However, if you don’t store your brew supplies and ingredients in the right conditions, you might expose your supplies to mice, spoil the ingredients, or even accidentally have a beer bottle explode! Here’s what you need to know in order to properly store your home brew supplies and ingredients.

Storing Brewing Ingredients

Malted grain and malt extract should be stored between 50-70 degrees. Store malted grains in dry, airtight containers to keep out vermin, and store liquid malt extract in its original can, using the expiration date to judge its timing (once opened, its shelf life will be about three months). Otherwise, your liquid malt extract can be prone to spoilage and contamination.
Hops, meanwhile, should be stored in a freezer to avoid heat, light, and oxygen, while yeast should be stored in the fridge. Hops should be stored within an air-tight container to prevent freezer burn, and they can last up to a year in the freezer.
Yeast can be stored within the manufacturer’s original packaging and according to the manufacturer’s expiration date.

Storage Tips

Organize your small items (like stirring spoons, racking canes, and brushes) using hooks or a pegboard so that you can easily see and grab what you need. Other small items, like bottle caps and airlocks, fit perfectly in compartmentalized toolboxes.
For larger elements like fermenters, use plastic shelving to create vertical storage. You can also keep unused bottles safe from breaking by storing them in file cabinets.
For dry ingredients that add that little something extra to your beer’s flavor (spices, Irish moss, gypsum, and Burton water salts), make sure to keep them at room temperature in airtight bags. Do not refrigerate your dry ingredients.
The taste of your home brewed beer depends completely on the quality of your ingredients. By storing them safely and according to best practices, you’ll achieve the perfect flavor profile for your original beer. Cheers to home brewing!
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About the Author: Kristen Geil is a Digital Content Writer/Blogger at Digital Third Coast, a SEO company in Chicago.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Having stabilized and clarified my Shiraz winemaking kit, this homebrewer has now bottled his own wine. Now, I’m enjoying the fruits of my labor. The bottling process ended up being fairly straightforward, though there were a few key differences between bottling wine and bottling homebrewed beer. In the end though, the wine turned out great! In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the final steps of making this wine kit and then share my tasting notes.

Bottling the Wine

After stabilizing and clarifying the wine, I simply let it sit in the fermenter for several days, allowing the clarifying agents to do their work and pull any remaining sediment from the wine to the bottom of the fermenter. At this point, the wine was already in a bottling bucket. While the instructions called for racking one more time, I decided to omit this step since the samples I pulled from the bucket were already clear. The bottling bucket has about 1” of clearance below the spigot, so I was able to draw the wine off the sediment without pulling any into the wine bottles. Unlike beer, there’s no need to add priming sugar, so at this point the wine was ready to go.
With my bottling bucket in place on the counter and about 30 bottles cleaned and sanitized, I set to filling each bottle. To do this, I rigged up my bottling wand directly to the spigot on the bucket. One technique that I’ve found works well is to use a short, 2” segment of hose to connect the wand to the bucket. This way, I can easily sit in a chair to fill beer bottles and don’t have to deal with an unwieldy 3-ft. section of hose. This ended up working just as well for filling wine bottles as it does for beer bottles. You can see an example of what this looks like here.

Corking & Finishing
The next step – and herein lies a big difference between bottling beer and bottling wine – was to cork the wine. Since I don’t have a wine bottle corker, I elected to use these mushroom corks, which can be put into the bottles by hand. I was a little concerned about whether they would fit correctly, but as far as I can tell, they’re working out just fine. No leaks!
Finally, to finish the wine, I got a set of these heat shrink capsules for putting around the top of the bottle. As far as I know, they’re purely cosmetic, but they seem like a nice touch. At first I wasn’t sure how to apply them exactly – I tried using a hair dryer, but that didn’t produce a very tight fit. But a quick YouTube video showed me the best way to do it: Just heat up some water in a pot, then, holding the capsule over the bottle, carefully submerge the top of the bottle to shrink the cap. Sure enough, about 15 minutes later I had 30, great-looking bottles of wine!

California Connoisseur Shiraz Tasting Notes
So I bet you’re wondering how the wine turned out! Here are my tasting notes:

• Aroma – big fruity aroma, mostly strawberry; alcohol is noticeable but not overpowering
• Appearance – ruby red, great clarity
• Flavor – again, strawberry notes upfront, spicy with some mineral character
• Finish – dry and acidic with a bit of alcoholic bite, but smoother once it has a chance to breathe
• Body – medium-light
• Overall – I’m pretty pleased! I generally drink a more full-bodied red, but I don’t detect any faults in this wine. I suspect that some of the alcohol and acidity will smooth out over time.

Conclusion

All in all, this has been a great experience! Not only has making this wine taught this homebrewer a few additional techniques, but I’ve now got 30 bottles of perfectly enjoyable wine to share with friends and family – a nice divergence from my homebrew. I’ll be making more wine soon!
Are there any other homebrewers who have made wine, as well. When did you start making wine at home? What are some of your favorite styles to make?
Review the earlier posts in this series below:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

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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 and editor of the Local Beer Blog.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
After degassing my Shiraz winemaking kit, now it’s time to stabilize the wine and clarify it. Things have gone pretty smoothly so far, but with bottling day on the horizon, I need to start getting bottles ready for filling.

Stabilizing & Clarification
As expected, this next step was pretty straightforward:

1. Sanitize a stirring spoon
2. Mix in the potassium sorbate (the stabilizer)
3. Mix in the kieselsol (the clarifier)
4. Let it sit for another 5-7 days

Done! So far, I continue to find this winemaking this pretty efficient!
Now for what is likely to be the most labor intensive part of this whole process: removing labels from 30 used wine bottles to get them ready for filling.

Removing Labels from Glass Wine Bottles

As a seasoned homebrewer, I‘ve known about the “joy” of removing labels for some time. Luckily, after a couple years of brewing, I’ve accumulated plenty of clean, label-free bottles and have since moved on to kegging, so I haven’t had to remove any labels in quite some time. But still, I remember how difficult removing labels can be.
So even though I was mentally prepared for the job of removing label, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. But I just reminded myself that it would get me one step closer to having some 30 bottles of red wine ready to share with friends and family, so last night, I decided to go ahead and get the process started.
Luckily, Ed has shared some tips for removing wine bottle labels on the E. C. Kraus Winemaking Blog. The gist of the instructions include:

• Soaking the bottles in hot water and One Step over night.
• Hopefully the easy ones will slide right off.
• The more difficult labels will take some elbow grease (and a scraper of some sort) to remove.

Thankfully, most of my salvaged wine bottles had paper labels, so sure enough, most of them came off without too much extra effort. (Somehow I’d managed to sort out the plastic-adhesive type labels out early on.)
So in a few more days, I’ll blaze forward and bottle this wine! I’m not entirely sure about how the corking is going to go (note to self: go buy some corks!), but if things continue to go as easily as they have been, pretty soon I’ll be pretty well stocked with Shiraz!
Review the earlier posts in this series below:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Are you a homebrewer interested in winemaking? So far, I’d highly recommend it!

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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 and editor of the Local Beer Blog.

I’ve been brewing for years, and I still break out the beer bottles when it’s time to package my beers. Oh, I’ve thought many times about investing in a kegging setup, but I still can’t justify it to myself, either in terms of price or function. Just like most things in life, there are pros and cons when it comes to bottling vs kegging homebrew. When I balance them out from my personal point of view, the scales tip towards bottling, and here’s why.
First and foremost is the cost. For the amount of beer I brew, I’d need three or four kegs at a minimum. The cheapest I’ve seen for a set of four used kegs (without the related hardware) is $130. Yes, I might find a good deal on craigslist, but I live in Boulder County, Colorado, a home-brewing hotbed, and finding good used brewing items is very difficult. Of course, beyond the kegs themselves, I’d need the CO2 tank, regulator, hoses, etc. In the end, it would be several hundred dollars to get started. If you have the funds for a draft system, by all means go for it, for those of us on a tighter budget, kegging will just have to come later.
The other reason I don’t keg is lack of space. I have a “beer fridge” in my basement, so I suppose at worst I can commandeer half of that for kegs, but we actually use the beer fridge for food too, so I can’t use the whole fridge. I could probably find another fridge on craigslist for free, but I don’t really think I want three refrigerators in my house!
The big benefit of kegging, many people say, is the ease by which “bottling day” is reduced to just filling a keg and slapping it on a CO2 thank and that’s that. And, I know that works for a great many people, but to be honest, bottling never really seemed like that much of a chore to me. I generally rinse my bottles well after use, so on bottling day, I throw them in the dishwasher on “hot wash” with no soap, take them out, give them a shot of sanitizer with a bottle rinser, fill and cap. Bottling at batch of beer really only takes me about 90 minutes, and I realize kegging is quicker, but in the grand scheme of things, 90 minutes isn’t a huge deal for me.
Another benefit of bottling – beer bottles are essentially free. I still buy beer, and when I do, I re-use the bottles whenever possible. Also, I just picked up over 100 bottles off of craigslist for free because I am brewing a batch for a wedding, and didn’t want to lose 50 or so of my own bottles. Though in a pinch, or if you want a special kind of bottle, most homebrew shops do carry beer bottles.
Lastly, I know this doesn’t fit into most brewer’s pros and cons list for bottling vs kegging, but I like beer bottles. I like that I can grab a six-pack and take it to a friend’s house; I like that I can have several varieties in my beer fridge and grab whatever I am in the mood for; and finally, there’s just something inherently nostalgic about a bottle of beer that you don’t get with a keg hidden off in a fridge somewhere.
If you’ve been considering getting a kegging setup, but you have reservations about doing so, just know that there’s nothing inherently wrong with bottling your beer, and you’re no less of a brewer because of it. There are pros and cons to everything, and it is no different when it comes to bottling vs. kegging your homebrew.
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John Torrance is a database developer, gadget lover, and avid home brewer living in Lafayette, Colorado. When he’s not actively brewing, he’s generally daydreaming about what he’s going to brew for his next batch. John also makes and sells brewing-related items, which are available at Fermentropy.com.