Brewing beer for beginners can be a daunting task. There are so many things that can go wrong, and even the most experienced brewers make mistakes from time to time.
Even expert and professional brewers make errors. If you’ve ever attended a homebrew club meeting or read through the threads on a message board for homebrewers, you’ve probably seen all kinds of mistakes. When making your beer, faults range from minor to almost disastrous.
Common Mistakes in Brewing Beer for Beginners
Learning to avoid common homebrewing mistakes in your search for the ideal brew will help you save time, money, and frustration.
1. Putting Enough Yeast
The most typical error homebrewers make, which can significantly affect how your beer turns out, is not saving enough yeast.
Making a starting or rehydrating dry yeast and ensuring you are pitching enough yeast is one of the easiest things a brewer can do to ensure they get the most out of their yeast culture and a rapid start to your ferment.
Although dry yeast has a far larger cell count than liquid yeast, you dramatically lower these numbers if you don’t rehydrate your dry yeast.
2. Temperature regulation
Keeping your yeast inside the correct temperature range is essential if you want the desired outcomes.
On the box or the manufacturer’s website, you can typically find the temperature range for each yeast strain.
Outside of this range, fermentation can result in hot or fusel alcohol, which can significantly reduce the appeal of your beer.
Temperature control is one of the most significant setup adjustments any brewer can make.
3. Using chlorinated water from the tap
The chemistry of the water undoubtedly influences the final flavor of your beer. Still, there is something in tap water that, if not removed, can damage your beer far more quickly than having an improper sulfite/chloride ratio.
It’s excellent that chlorine and chloramine make the water safe for ingestion by the general public.
Chlorine can make chlorophenols present in brew beer, giving it an unappealing flavor that is highly plastic- or band-aid-like.
Chloramine is readily removed by using Campden tablets to disinfect water before brewing. If your tap water includes chlorine, putting your brewing water in an open container overnight or boiling it can let the chlorine evaporate into the atmosphere.
4. Putting off completing the task at hand
Typically, novice brewers will start with the extract brewing method, which uses dry or liquid malt extract.
All-grain brewing is a bit more complicated and requires equipment most novice brewers don’t have.
When something can go wrong when you are not paying attention, it will. Boilovers, open spigots, and open fermenters with pets sipping your priceless wort are all the results.
These mistakes could be the most expensive ones you ever make.
5. Using Volume to Measure Solids Rather Than Weight
It’s critical to understand that not all tablespoons are made equal, whether you’re discussing coriander for your beer, gypsum for priming sugar, or any other ingredient.
Calculating how much priming sugar is needed by weight and not volume is essential.
Exact measurements are crucial in brewing, particularly when it comes to repeatability.
Measuring by volume is incredibly inefficient for brewing since many powders can compact or clump when being measured.
When it comes to making sure you know how much of whatever you are using, a decent scale that can measure down to 1/10 of a gram is incredibly invaluable.
6. The processes of sanitizing and cleaning
Many new brewers misunderstand when someone says their equipment has to be cleaned and sanitized because they believe they can do it simultaneously.
Anything that comes in contact with it must be sanitized. Otherwise, you’re at risk of a bad-tasting beer.
Cleaning must come before sanitizing since sanitizing unclean things is impossible.
Cleaning involves removing filth or build-up from a surface; only after that can it be sanitized to eradicate any potential wild yeast or germs.
Sanitizing will require you to add only a gallon of water to some ounces of bleach and then use a sponge to clean the fermenter and the lid.
Secondly, please clean up your bottles and other tools (including bottle filler, siphon hose, racking cane, etc.) before filling them with the final product.
7. How to Take a Final Gravity Reading with a Refractometer
A refractometer is a brewing tool that more brewers should invest in because it makes taking your beer’s final gravity (FG) reading much more comfortable.
The main benefit of using a refractometer over a hydrometer is its accuracy.
With a refractometer, you only need a few drops of wort or must, whereas a hydrometer requires at least a few hundred mL.
Another significant advantage is that you can take the reading while the wort is still hot.
The final gravity of your beer is an essential brewing parameter since it allows you to determine the alcohol by volume (ABV).
8. Using inadequate kit instructions or incorrect information
One of the most frustrating things for new brewers is brewing a batch of beer, waiting weeks or even months, and then realizing it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to.
Unfortunately, this situation is too common since many brewing kits contain inadequate instructions or incorrect information.
As a result, the brewing process can be highly confusing, and it’s easy to make small mistakes that can lead to big problems.
To avoid this situation, research before brewing and only use reliable sources of information.
If you’re unsure about something, it’s always better to ask an experienced brewer or brewing forum for advice.
Also, many equipments and ingredient kits come with all the items you will need for the bottling process. A starter kit should include a fermenting bucket, bottling bucket, bottling wand, bottle capper, auto-siphon, transfer tubing, hydrometer, airlock, and sanitizer solution.
9. Taking insufficient notes
In brewing beer, it’s essential to take good notes to remember what worked and what didn’t for future batches.
Unfortunately, many new brewers don’t take brewing seriously enough and either don’t take any notes or only take fundamental ones.
As a result, they often forget critical details that could make all the difference in brewing a great beer or brewing a terrible one.
To avoid this problem, make sure you take detailed notes during every stage of the brewing process, from brewing to bottling.
It’s also a good idea to take pictures to remember what the beer looked like at various stages.
10. Not cooled to a temperature suitable for fermentation
Many new brewers make the mistake of not cooling their wort to a temperature ideal for fermentation before adding yeast ferment. You may also use a chiller or ice bath to lower the temperature of your wort.
As a result, the yeast can’t ferment properly, and the beer doesn’t taste right.
It’s often said that brewers make wort, and yeast makes beer: if you want a healthy fermentation, you’ve got to have healthy yeast.
One of the best things you can do to promote yeast health is to provide plenty of oxygen at the start of fermentation.
To avoid this problem, cool your wort to the correct temperature before adding yeast.
CHECK OUT: How to Build the Perfect Homebrewing System from Scratch
Conclusion
The brewing process is delicate, and even the most experienced brewers make mistakes.
You can save time, money, and frustration by being aware of these common brewing mistakes.
Anyone can brew great beer at home with the right brewing equipment and a little bit of knowledge.