Grindstone Brews

  It's time for SCIENCE!!!! At the end of last week's blog, I had just pitched the yeast into the wort. The yeast is the magical ingredient that turns what is essentially sugar water into the nectar of the gods...beer. Airlock ( Bob the Brewer ) Yeast is a single-cell organism (1). I like to think of them as tiny little bugs. These bugs' favourite food is sugar. It's how they live and die. These sugar bugs' entire life goal is to go around your beer and eat as much sugar as they can. However, just like humans, when you eat a lot, you get full. When you get full, you have to release some of that waste. Yeast releases two byproducts; carbon dioxide (CO2) and ethyl alcohol (1). The ethyl alcohol is what we are looking for. It's that intoxicating ingredients that make the nights fun and the morning painful. It makes the beer alcoholic. The carbon dioxide is just the yeast burping. We do want our beer to be all bubbly but at this stage, you can't control how much...

 This is it, don't get scared.  All the research over the last couple of weeks has led to this, the actual brew. I have my ingredients prepared and I know what each of them does. Now I need to put each of them to work and create a wonderful beer. Brew Day Preparation Robobrew (BreqHq) Brewers are expert cleaners. Contamination can lead to very bad beer so the first step of brewing beer is to make sure all the equipment is cleaned and sanitized. I started by washing everything that would come in contact with the beer with Oxyclean. Then I used an iodine-based sanitizer to clean every surface that I had just washed. If I cleaned the kitchen as well as I did before this brew day, my wife would ask me to brew every weekend. There are many different types of equipment used to make beer. It can be as simple as a pot on your stovetop or as complex as the brewing equipment that you see at a brewery. For this blog, I was able to borrow a piece of equipment called a Brewzilla from a fri...

        I want to brew a great beer. To brew a great beer, I need great ingredients. Back in 1516, Germany passed one of the oldest still-enforced food regulations, The Reinhetsgebot. Also known as the 'purity law', this states that beer shall only have four ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast 1 .  Beers have changes quite a bit in the last 600 years and today, commercial beers have many other ingredients but for our purposes, we are going to focus on these four main ones. For this week, I researched each of the ingredients and then went to my local homebrew shop to get advice and gathered everything that I needed to brew a great beer.  Water Beer Connoisseur (2021) This ingredient is very obvious. Beer is mostly water so you need to add a lot of it to make beer. What Ididn't realize is that the water can turn a good beer into a great beer. Specific locations around the world are known for their beer mainly due to their water sources. The water in N...

Hi and welcome to my genius hour blog! For this blog, I plan to answer the question “How do you brew a good beer at home?” Ustrzycki, T  ©, 2019 Beer itself has been traced back to the Sumerians around 4000 BCE 1 . For centuries humans have been brewing and enjoying this beverage. However, along the way the science of brewing has evolved quite a lot. There are entire textbooks devoted to the main ingredients of beer; water, barley, hops and yeast. Those combinations of four ingredients can create amazing variations in the aroma and flavour of a beer. Today, craft breweries have become a common sight in many communities across North America and the list of ingredients have expanded beyond the four that I mentioned above. I wanted to try my hand at brewing beer because it is the perfect combination of science and art. Like baking, brewing can be easily accomplished but the science behind it is magical and complex. It’s a wonderful science project; from the chemical process that conv...