Motivated through Part 1 of this series, filtration of brewing water can vastly improve your brewing, often through the use of reserve osmosis (RO) water. While RO water can be easily purchased at corner stores and/or home delivered, apartment home dwellers, especially those living in dense urban centers, may find access to RO water limited/cumbersome … Continue reading
One of the most challenging aspects of apartment (and tiny kitchen) brewing is finding a good, fast, and reasonable source for heating water and boiling wort at the apartment scale. So much so, it’s a constantly reoccurring question on most homebrewing forums (see long list at end of post). First time homebrewers often start their … Continue reading
Before getting bitten by the homebrew bug, my in-the-apartment creativity was centered around cooking and general culinary arts. From vegetarian/vegan cooking experiments to ice cream making, I enjoyed focusing my efforts on the wide spectrum of cooking areas and techniques. Recently, looking to change things up a bit, I thought I’d combine these two passions … Continue reading
The Chico ale strain (Wyeast 1056 American Ale, WLP001 California Ale, Safale US-05, Danstar BRY-97 West Coast, etc…) is the prototypical American ale yeast strain. Known for its clean, neutral fermentation profile and relatively high degree of attenuation, the Chico Ale strain is a great (and arguably most common) ale strain choice for clean American … Continue reading
It’s been awhile. No particular reason for the hiatus, only that the IG:Homebrewing writing/editing (coupled with grad school) earlier in 2015 increased my writing energy threshold; hence, my slowly getting back into blogging and general swing of things. No matter; while my blogosphere airwaves were mostly static in the later half 2015, I was fortunately quite … Continue reading
After 12 months in the barrel and over 8 months of conditioning in the keg, the saison from the 2014-2015 Austin ZEALOTS Barrel Project is tasting wonderful. Sour, light, and crisp, this past years’ barreled saison came out surprisingly well. A continuation of the barreling series, this post is the follow-up of mostly my personal … Continue reading
Readers of the Apartment Homebrewer blog may have noticed a few changes over the past year, namely the reduced frequency of posts and a couple of hints at a winter project. While I was away from blogging (and currently slowly getting back into it), I was still very busy writing about homebrewing. Keeping this project … Continue reading
I didn’t want to start this tech series with the typical brewing water motivation, but here it is anyway (read this as if Ben Stein was reciting this to his high school class). 85-95% of beer is made up of water so unsurprisingly great beer starts with great water. Not only for taste/flavor considerations (for example making sure your … Continue reading
I have to say it’s fantastic to be back brewing in my apartment. Three months of empty carboys is really a sad sight. Fortunately, last week I was able to crank out not one, but TWO brew days! SMaSH Session Saison The first brew day was a session-style saison using a SMaSH recipe in which … Continue reading
It’s been a busy past 10 months (or so) and unfortunately not with homebrewing in my small apartment. Three conference abstracts/presentations (for grad school) and a soon-to-be-announced brewing-related winter project kept me busy from regular brewing (and blogging). In fact, I haven’t been able to whip-up a batch since April. Luckily, this changes today as … Continue reading
The Apartment Homebrewer 