Grindstone Brews

  Kitchen Sink IPA (Ustrzycki©2023) After many long weeks, my beer is finally ready for tasting. Kitchen Sink IPA is ready to go. The project was definitely a success and the proof of this is in the headache that I am rocking on a Wednesday morning after sampling a wee too much of it last night. I wanted to approach the review of my beer as subjectively as possible. It's really hard to get feedback on homebrewed beer because everyone wants to be nice and say it's amazing. Most of the time, the feedback I received was shock that I created a good beer. Of course, I created a good beer because I wouldn't serve you a bad beer. To evaluate my beer, I wanted to compare it to one of my favourite beers, Lone Pine IPA from Sawdust City. This would allow me to use a commercial example to see how my beer is stacked up. Kitchen Sink IPA (left) vs. Lone Pine IPA (right) (Ustrzycki©2023) Appearance: Kitchen Sink IPA:  My beer was burnished gold in colour and had a fluffy, off-white head ...

  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...