Keg Conversions Made Easy – A Guide To Making a Great Craft Beer
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If you have decided to join the long and hallowed tradition of becoming a beer brewer, then you need to make sure that you are doing it right. There are a lot of mistakes that you can make whenever it comes to brewing your own craft beer, and you don’t want to have to keep wasting valuable time and ingredients while you work to get it right.
Thankfully, there are plenty of tips and tricks that you can use in order to make your craft beer amazing, and here’s what you need to know!
Focus On Keg Conversions
Beer equipment comes in all shapes and sizes, and whenever you first start out, you need to make sure that you know exactly how much beer you are making. But more than that, you also need to know how much your equipment can hold. This is where keg conversions come in, and while it is a bit of math, understanding keg conversions isn’t too hard.
The main question that will need to be answered is how many beers can fit into a standard keg. Whenever you are first starting out as a craft beer brewer, you might focus on fitting all your beers into the standard half barrel. Which is actually pretty good because half barrels are the standard measurement for beer storage (or at least the most common option).
A standard half barrel keg will hold 124 16 ounce pints of beer, and 165 12 ounce cans or bottles of beer. Perfect if your craft beer is something that people will want to return to again and again.
Prepare The Ingredients
Of course, if you want a beer that people are going to keep on coming back to have, it needs to taste very very good and you need to make sure that you get the ingredients right. This includes the yeast, which adds some credence to the old saying: “Brewers don’t make beer. Brewers make wort, and yeast makes beer.”
So we need to make sure that the wort and the yeast are the best things possible, and here’s how to do both. The yeast is actually pretty easy, because all you need to do is buy a ready to use package of healthy yeast cells. Then you just need to keep them preserved until you are ready to brew your first batch of beer.
Next comes the wort, which needs to be mashed. Though don’t worry, the process actually involves very little mashing. Instead, all you need to do is to take crushed malted grain and soak them in hot water for a specified amount of time. It’s a lot like making instant oatmeal, just with a few more steps to get the final product.
The wort is then poured into a separate container and drained, before it is boiled with the hops and brewed into the beer we all love. The wort is boiled in order to be sanitized and caramelized, and also so that the flavor of the hops can be extracted.
After the boiling process is done, you simply add the yeast and allow the chemical reaction to do its thing! You will have good beer in no time!
Take Your Time
Finally, beer making is a slow process as you wait for the beer to mature and wait for the chemicals to do their thing. Don’t be afraid to properly store the beer and simply wait it out, because eventually the beer is going to be ready. With a little carbonation, it will be perfect to drink, and you will have made your first of many batches!
