How To Brew Beer Faster

Good morning. Today is the best day of the year in NYC - the New York City Marathon. To get an ideal of the scale of this event - last year there was 51,453 finishers with 148 different countries represented. Good luck to all the runners! I will be drinking some homebrew and cheering them on.

-Brandon Copeland

How To Brew Beer Faster

Brewing beer used to be a lot harder - if you were going to brew a beer 100 years ago, you needed to acquire barley and hops (maybe farm it yourself), go about germinating/kilning until you have malted barley to the specifications you need. Then you would need mash/lauter/brew, and for yeast you’d probably have to harvest it yourself from a beer you got at the pub. This is all assuming you had the correct equipment to take all of these steps - everything was manual.

Nowadays, you can purchase ingredients directly from the store - if you want a particular malt that was kilned a specific way, odds are you can just add it to your cart and it will be at your door in a week. There is equipment specifically designed for homebrewers (like our favorite Brewzilla Gen 4) that provide everything you could possibly need to brew beer - no more DIY required.

To speed things up further, there are different methods of brewing now that don’t require you to brew all grain, meaning you can skip the mashing/lautering step and go straight to the boil. Malt extract provides wort in a condensed syrup form, so all you need to do is add it to water and bring it up to a boil before brewing like normal. This has traditionally been a great way for new brewers to get into the craft an even as a solid alternative to all grain brewing - you can make some incredible beers using malt extract.

There are also advances in hops and yeast - further down in the article you will see a highlight for hop extracts, but there have also been the introduction of cryo hops which leverage a cryogenic separation process that intensifies the aroma and flavor of the hops. For yeast, instead of using dry yeast packets, there are liquid yeast packets with smack activation that can be fresher and higher quality. Or if you hate making starters, there are pre-canned yeast starters that take the pain out of your prep day.

In the next 2 issues, we will explore recent innovations in the brewing space that make homebrewing even more accessible to the masses. I will be trying out these methods myself and will be reporting back with my take on the experiments!

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Beer Trivia Question

🍺 In the spirit of marathon day, what is the fastest time on record for someone running a half marathon (13.1 miles) while chugging a beer every mile (13 beers)?

Read to the end to find out if you're right!

Brewgr Recipe of the Week

WEST COAST STOUT

The name of this beer instantly got my attention - a West Coast Stout? I had never heard such a thing. Turns out, it’s a thing and boy do I want to try one. As you’d imagine, it’s a highly hopped stout. I may try Sierra Nevada’s version of this before trying to brew it myself, but this recipe seems like a solid place to start!

Credit: Brewer 142910

Poll Results: Have You Done Anything Consistently For 52 Weeks?

This wasn’t a beer focused poll, but we had some pretty great responses. Some items that people wrote in were: baking bread everyday for a month, rock climbing once a week for a year, exercising 3 times a week, and my favorite - drinking a beer a good beer once a week. Consistency is key, right?

Homebrewing Ingredient Highlight

Abstrax Hop Extracts

Abstrax Hop Extract is a new hop extract being offered by MoreBeer. The claims for extract is that you don’t get any unwanted plant compounds, just pure extracted flavor. I have not tried these myself, but I would like to on a future brew to see if it stacks up to these high claims. I will say, after using wet hops grown in the garden on the last brew, which turned out to be one of the best beers I’ve ever brewed, I’m skeptical that getting further away from the “natural way” is the answer. But I’m always willing to try new technologies/products.

And the Answer Is...

🍺 There are contested answers, but the best documented case was a college senior Emmet Farnan who completed the race in 1:43:42. He recruited friends to stand at each mile marker and have a cold one ready for him to throwback. Now those are real friends…