You’ve just purchased a new brew kettle for homebrewing and can’t wait to fire it up. But brewing right away with that new brew kettle may cause some issues with your beer. Before you make the first batch with your new gear, consider this two-step cleaning regimen to prepare your kettle for brewing.

1. Cleaning A New Brew Kettle.
A new brew kettle that just arrived on your doorstep needs to be thoroughly cleaned. Who knows where it’s been before you received it. If it was recently fabricated, there may be some machine oil residue on the kettle. A regular brewing grade cleaner will work well in most cases, but in a rare situation with stubborn residue, your standard kitchen dish soap may be needed. (Note: This is the only time I’ll recommend using dish soap on your brewing gear. The soap can harm the head retention properties of your beer.)
Wash your new brew kettle well. Rinse your kettle very well. Boil some water in the kettle for several minutes, and do a smell/taste test or the water to make sure it comes out clean without any oily or metallic tastes or aromas. Cleaning a new brew kettle is important to having a great-tasting, maiden-batch of homebrew.

2. Passivating A New Brew Kettle.
What? Never heard of passivating a brew kettle? Unfortunately, I didn’t know either until I experienced some strange off-flavors in a couple beers I brewed with a new stainless steel brew kettle. Passivation is a chemical process that forms a protective layer around the inside of the brew kettle. Stainless steel is primarily made of iron, and passivation is what makes the metal stainless. Iron, interestingly enough, can cause off-flavors, as well as contribute to haze. Passivating a new brew kettle is very necessary for brewing good homebrew beer.
If when you boil water (or beer) in your brew kettle and allow it to dry it out, then see black spots or rainbows, your kettle needs to be passivated. Luckily, this is a fairly straightforward process.
First, you need an acid. Star San is an acid anionic cleaner that’s great for stainless steel. The acid reacts with the metal to form the protective layer inside the brew kettle. Simply sprinkle the Barkeeper’s Friend into the kettle with just enough water to make a thin paste. Spread it around the kettle with a washcloth. After several minutes, rinse the brew kettle very well, and wipe dry with a towel. If the towel comes out clean, you’re in good shape. Allow the new brew kettle to air dry for a few days. The combination of the acid treatment and the air will continue to passivate the kettle.
Just remember, cleaning your new brew kettle and then passivating it are key treatments. Do these two things, and your kettle will reward you with many fine batches of homebrew!
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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.

Patience. It’s one of a homebrewer’s many virtues, and a necessity for avoiding a green beer taste.
After bottling or kegging a batch of homebrew, it’s very difficult to resist sampling the beer before it’s ready. But your patience will be rewarded by giving the beer the time it needs to improve before you drink it. This waiting period – usually two or three weeks at a minimum – is referred to as conditioning or maturation. Beer that is too young is called green beer because of the way it tastes.

What is green beer? What is the green beer taste?
Green beer is beer that isn’t ready to drink yet. Though beer almost always gets better with time, tasting the beer early can be a good exercise to learn just how drastically time can change the beer. If you’ve ever tasted your original gravity wort sample, that’s pretty close to the green beer taste. The bitterness is very strong. The flavors just don’t blend together very well. What may be perceived as a fault or an infection may just be an indicator that the beer needs more time to condition. Aging will help to make the beer taste better!

What happens during conditioning?
Conditioning is really just a fancy word for aging. What we call green beer needs time before it’s ready to drink. Some conditioning takes place during secondary fermentation. Yeast consumes some byproducts of fermentation (like diacetyl), which removes some undesirable flavors from the homebrew, making the beer taste better. The yeast and other particles settle out of suspension, resulting in a clearer beer. Other flavors from the malt, hops, and yeast have time to meld together.
Conditioning also takes place in the bottle or keg. The beer carbonates and flavors continue to develop. If you’ve used priming sugar, the yeast will float around eating it up and producing carbon dioxide. This carbon dioxide not only create bubbles in the beer, it helps to drive off oxygen, which has the potential of making your beer go stale. The yeast will settle out in time.

At what temperature should I condition my homebrew?
Many beers go through a warm conditioning period and cold conditioning period. “Warm” or “cold” is relative to the beer style being made. Secondary fermentation, what might be considered a warm conditioning period, usually happens at or near the normal fermentation temperature for the homebrew. For lagers, a diacetyl rest (a couple days at about 55-60˚F) can be used to reduce buttery diacetyl flavors in the beer. After bottling, beer should be held at room temperature for about two to three weeks to allow the yeast the carbonate the beer.
The green beer taste is often improved by a cold conditioning period. During cold conditioning, flavor and clarity continues to get better. Cold conditioning can happen at temperatures as low as freezing, though I find that giving bottles several days in the refrigerator can make a big difference. Sometimes it’s easier said than done!

How long should beer be conditioned and aged?
That depends on the beer style. Most ales of moderate gravity only require a couple weeks of conditioning to remove the green beer taste. Hoppy beers are generally best consumed fresh. High gravity beers on the other hand tend to get better with some age. Barley wine, imperial stouts, doppelbocks, and other beers with high alcohol content may continue to improve over the course of a year or longer. Try saving a few bottles of each batch to sample three, six, or twelve months down the road to learn what time can do you your homebrew.

What’s the best environment for conditioning?
The keys to reducing the green beer taste in your homebrew are a steady, moderate temperature during warm conditioning (so the yeast can carbonate the beer) and steady, cold temperature for cold conditioning. It’s also important that it’s dark during the conditioning phase, otherwise beer can become light-struck or skunked.

Conclusion
Proper conditioning makes all the difference between delicious homebrew and one with an icky green beer taste. The next time you break into your batch early, remember, it will likely get better with age.
How do you condition your homebrew?
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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.

Compared to homebrewing beer, making hard cider at home is a much easier process. Since there’s no mash and no boil, it can be less labor intensive as well. Plus, you’ll be able to use the equipment you have on hand already, so why not give making hard cider a try? Read more to learn how to make hard cider at home with this 5-gallon recipe.
Hard cider used to be quite a popular beverage in the US. Remember Johnny Appleseed? All those apples weren’t just for apple pie! Up until prohibitionists and temperance unions started demonizing the consumption of alcohol, hard cider was about as popular as beer, if not more so. Everybody knew how to make hard cider.
Today, craft cider is riding on the heels of the craft beer movement, taking up more and more shelf space every year. Craft cideries are popping up all over the country. You’ve probably seen, and maybe even tried, ciders from Woodchuck and Crispin.
The most basic hard cider recipe requires just two main ingredients: apple juice, and yeast. There are a limitless number of variations on cider, plus some additional items that might come in handy for achieving certain characteristics. For now, let’s go over the basics of making apple cider.

Apples, Juice, or Cider?
Fall means apple season! If you’re lucky enough to live near some apple orchards, you have a fresh local ingredient in abundance right now. Ask your local apple farmer what varieties will work best for making hard cider. Cider makers often use blends of different varieties to produce a cider. Get yourself a fruit press or find some fresh, unpasteurized apple cider at your local farmers market.

Even if you don’t live near an apple orchard, chances are that your local grocery store carries soft (non-alcoholic) cider this time of year. Choose a cider that has no added flavorings or preservatives.

If you can’t find either of the above options, pure, 100% apple juice will work, too.

Yeast
Many of the yeasts used in brewing beer or making wine will work for making hard cider at home, too. Wine and champagne yeast have a higher alcohol tolerance and tend to finish dry. For a sweeter, fruitier cider, use an ale yeast, such as Nottingham. Wyeast 4766: Cider and Red Star Pasteur Blanc are both suitable for higher gravity ciders. Fermentis SafCider AB-1 yeast creates a balanced cider, you can create a crisp and aromatic drink with the AC-4 yeast, or go for a sweeter cider with the AS-2 yeast.

How To Make Hard Cider
Unless you want to take chances with a spontaneous fermentation of your hard cider, it’s important to stabilize your juice before pitching yeast.
If using filtered apple juice from the store, you will first heat the juice to stabilize it. Hold the juice at 180°F for 10-20 minutes. Let it cool, then pitch your yeast as directed on the package. Proceed as you would normally for a regular batch of homebrew, being sure to do a secondary fermentation.

If using fresh cider from the farmer’s market, use a crushed Campden tablet to stabilize the must. This will ensure that there aren’t any wild yeasts or bacteria interfering with your fermentation. Pitch your yeast as directed and proceed as above. That’s how to make hard cider. It’s really that simple.

Hard Cider Recipe (5 Gallons)
from Homebrewing for Dummies
5 gallons preservative-free apple juice
1 packet Nottingham ale yeast
2 oz. yeast nutrient
Primary fermentation: 8 days at 70°F
Secondary fermentation: 21 days as 70°F
If desired, add priming sugar at bottling time for a sparkling cider, however if you do this make sure you bottle in beer bottles or Champagne bottles. Regular wine bottles will not hold the pressure.

Have you ever tried making hard cider before? How did it turn out? Do you have any information you’d like to share on how to make hard cider?

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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.

On a basic level, mashing is a very straightforward part of homebrewing: simply soak the crushed grains in hot (146-160˚F) water for an hour to extract the fermentable sugars. Occasionally though, a homebrewer may want to employ a protein rest, a short mash step at a lower temperature before raising it to the normal range. Here is some additional information on this topic, including how to do a protein rest.

What is a protein rest? When and why should you do it?
A protein rest is a short mash at 113-131˚F used to activate certain enzymes in the malted grains that break down protein chains. The homebrewer will simply mash in at a lower temperature than usual do the protein rest. As to how long to do a protein rest, it’s usually only about 15-30 minutes. After that the temperature is then raised to the normal mash temperature (also known as the saccharification rest).
Why break down protein in the beer? Randy Mosher explains:

“At 113-131˚F, proteolytic enzymes chop up some of the long protein molecules into smaller chunks. The length of a protein (or fragment) determines whether it will contribute to the body of a beer, aid in head formation and head retention, or simply be a nuisance as a haze former when the beer is chilled.”

Mosher goes on to say that in most cases, modern malts do not need a protein rest. In fact, John Palmer points out that “using a protein rest on fully modified malts tends to remove most of the body of a beer, leaving it thin and watery.” But if you experience issues like chill haze, it may be worth doing.

Are there certain styles of beer that deserve a protein rest?
As a matter of fact, yes. Most of your homebrews will probably not need a protein rest, but there are a few exceptions:

• Those that use less-modified malt.
• Traditional styles such as a traditional American lager or Munich Dunkel.
• When decoction mashing.
• When using a high proportion of unmalted grain. (25% or more)

Since most malts on the market these days are well-modified, you may never need to do a protein rest. But if attempting to brew a style authentically, a protein rest may be in order.

How to Do a Protein Rest
If you have a heated mash tun, doing a protein rest is easy. Simply raise the temperature mash from step to step. This is called a step mash.
If you use a mash tun cooler, a protein rest is a little more tricky. How to raise the mash temperature from the protein rest to the saccharification rest? The best way is to divide your mash water. Use about half of it for the protein rest, then heat the remaining water and add it in to raise the overall temperature of the mash to the target saccharification temperature. This is called a decoction mash.
Calculating the appropriate temperatures can be a challenge. I recommend using some brewing software to help with the calculations, but here’s an example from a batch I’m brewing this week. This should giving you a little better understanding of how to do a protein rest:
Target protein rest temp: 122˚F
Target saccharification rest temp: 154˚F
Pre-boil volume: 6.75 gallons
Mash procedure:

1. Dough in using 11.5 qts water at 148˚F. Hold at 122˚F for 15 minutes.
2. Add 10 qts. water at 190˚F to raise temperature to 154˚F. Hold for 60 minutes.
3. Add 10 qts. water at 207.5˚F to raise temperature to 168˚F for mash out. Hold for 10 minutes.
4. Sparge with approx. 5 qts. water at 170˚F to collect about 6.75 gallons of wort.

The exact numbers will depend on your equipment and your beer recipe, but this should give you a good idea of how to incorporate a protein rest into your homebrew procedure.
Whether you’re a homebrewer that uses a step mash or decoction mash, doing a protein rest can be a great way to add a different dimension to you brews. How long should the protein rest be? At what temperature should the protein rest be at? These are all questions for you to answer. Just take good notes and follow the guidelines laid out here and you’ll do fine.
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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.