When I started brewing, I blindly assumed that a 60- or 90-minute mash was always enough. Nothing could be further from the truth: plenty of factors affect the conversion of starch into sugar. That's why on every brew day I now check whether that conversion is really complete, and the iodine test is my simplest tool for it.
The iodine test is very straightforward: you put a few drops of iodine solution on a sample of your wort. If there's still starch in it, it turns blue, purple or black. If the colour just stays yellow or brownish, all the starch has been converted into sugars and you can carry on brewing. More sugars also means higher efficiency, so you really always come out ahead.
Here's how I do it: I scoop a tablespoon of wort from the mash onto a small white plate, let it cool for a moment and add a few drops of iodine solution. The colour tells me right away whether I need to keep mashing. Once my measured SG came out lower than the recipe said; thanks to the test I immediately saw that conversion wasn't finished yet, and I calmly mashed a bit longer.
Do keep an eye on the conditions, though, because they determine how quickly the starch is converted. The mash temperature is best between 62 and 72 °C, the pH between 5.2 and 5.6, and pale malts contain more active enzymes than dark, roasted grains.
My tips: always use a white plate, because the colour change is hard to see on a dark one, and rinse the plate right away so you don't mix in leftover wort. I like to combine the iodine test with a refractometer: once the SG stops rising, the starch test confirms whether conversion is complete.
Source: Hopblog.nl
One of the things I love most about the world of homebrewing is that you don't need a brewery, a bar, or any intention of selling a single bottle. This weekend, October 10th and 11th, Porto Alegre will host the 14th State Competition of ACervA Gaúcha, the association of homebrewers from Rio Grande do Sul, and many of the recipes originated in garages, with equipment assembled at home.
The competition typically receives between 100 and 200 entries, and in 2026, there's an exciting development: for the first time, it will cross the border, with the participation of the Uruguayan Homebrewers Club. The Uruguayans already account for nearly 15% of the entries and participate both in the competition and as judges. The invitation arose from a meeting between homebrewers from Rio Grande do Sul and Uruguay during a competition in Paraguay.
The judging follows the guidelines of the BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program), with the entries divided into approximately a dozen categories, and judges from various regions of Brazil, including São Paulo, Paraná, and the North of the country. The beers that stand out the most advance to the "Best of Show" category, which determines the top three, and the gold medal winner qualifies for a national competition the following year, during the Blumenau Beer Festival.
The most fun part is on October 11th, starting at 2:00 PM: the awards ceremony at 4Beer, located in the Quarto Distrito (Avenida Polônia), with live music and socializing. Admission is free, and drinks are paid for at the bar. Stepping onto the stage, receiving the medal, and then enjoying a beer with it pinned to your chest – it's hard to imagine a better way to conclude a homebrewing competition.
Competition page:
https://beerawardsplatform.com/xiv-concurso-estadual-acerva-gaucha
Source: GZH
Temperature control is one of those upgrades many homebrewers think about sooner or later, and a Brulosophy article by Brett Cortelletti gives a clear overview of the glycol option. The starting point is familiar: yeast produces heat, so the beer can be warmer than the room during peak fermentation, which can derail an otherwise careful batch.
A glycol chiller is a refrigeration unit with a reservoir of chilled glycol-and-water mix. A probe reads the beer temperature, a controller switches on a pump, and the cold liquid circulates through the fermenter's cooling system before returning to the reservoir. Unlike a fermentation chamber, which cools the air around the vessel, this cools the fermenter itself.
The article is honest that this is more involved than simpler methods because you add pumps, tubing, coolant and upkeep. For occasional correction a chamber may be enough, while glycol makes more sense for lagers, stepped schedules and regular precise cooling. What surprised me is the point that holding fermentation temperature is not the hardest job. Cold crashing near freezing puts a much heavier load on the unit, so a chiller that handles several ales may struggle to crash them at once.
For buying, the advice is to size the unit by cooling load, not fermenter count, and to plan for the most demanding use. Check BTU/hr, pump strength, tubing length and insulation, plus electrical, ventilation and noise needs.
Maintenance is mostly routine: watch the glycol level and clarity, inspect tubing and fittings, keep the condenser and airflow clear, listen to the pump, and refresh the glycol following the manufacturer's guidance.
Source: Brulosophy
Jacques Bertens opens his article on Hobbybrouwen.nl with a confession: he mixed up bentonite with diatomaceous earth when he wrote on the forum about grain pests in his malt stock. He corrected that mistake, and a useful piece came out of it. I liked that an author starts so openly.
Bentonite is a clay mineral formed from weathered volcanic ash. Its negatively charged clay platelets bind the positively charged proteins that cause cold haze, after which everything settles out. Diatomaceous earth works differently: it is mainly a filter aid. PVPP also works differently, because it binds polyphenols.
On use he is clear. Not in the boil or whirlpool; there carrageenan (Irish moss, Whirlfloc) does the job better. Bentonite belongs on the cold side, after the main fermentation, when transferring to the lagering vessel. It suits clear beers such as pilsner, helles, kölsch and blonde, and less so hoppy or deliberately hazy beers like NEIPA, weizen or witbier.
The practical tips are useful. Choose food-grade sodium bentonite and let it hydrate first: 10 g in 100 ml warm water, for 4 to 8 hours or overnight. Start with 0.2 to 0.3 g per litre, so 4 to 6 g for 20 litres. Test on small samples first, because too much also strips foam and mouthfeel proteins. Expect some extra sediment and beer loss, don't dose right before bottling, and don't inhale the dry powder.
His final verdict is sober: you don't necessarily need bentonite, but if you use it, do so deliberately and at a low dose.
Source: Hobbybrouwen.nl
Hops are harvested once a year, so whatever you buy has to last you until the next season. A recent post on the BeerSmith blog walks through how hops age and how to slow it down, and I found it a handy refresher.
Dried hops are mostly cellulose with about 10 percent water, plus hundreds of flavor compounds. The alpha acids give bitterness and the aroma oils give that fresh hop smell, and the aroma oils are the more fragile part, so they usually fade first. The article names four enemies: heat, light, moisture and oxygen. Heat is the big one, since decomposition roughly doubles for every 15°C (27°F) rise. Oxygen is what turns hop aroma into that stale, cheesy smell.
The Hop Stability Index tells you how much alpha acid a variety loses in six months at 20°C, and the usual rule of thumb is that hops are still fine for bittering until they have lost about half of it. BeerSmith even has a Hop Age tool to estimate this.
The advice itself is simple. Keep unopened hops in their original sealed foil bag in the freezer, where they can last a year or more depending on the variety. On brew day, smell and taste a little before you add them, even if they are brand new, because packaging or harvest problems happen. For opened packs, vacuum seal them in a freezer bag or purge a resealable bag with nitrogen or CO2 from your kegging setup, then freeze it in the dark. And use opened hops as soon as you can.
None of this is exotic, but I like that it is easy to follow. A vacuum sealer and some freezer space may protect your hop budget better than any fancy gadget.
Source: BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog
A good malt mill can last a homebrewer a lifetime, and a recent BeerSmith post walks through what to look for. I found the first point the most useful: a malt mill is not a flour mill. Flour mills, whether stone, burr or impact, grind grain to a fine powder with no intact husks. Husks are the filter bed during sparging, so flour-fine malt tends to cause a stuck sparge and extra particles in the kettle.
The recommended design is a dual roller mill, usually with steel rollers. Crushing between two rollers pulverizes the inside of the barley kernel while keeping larger husk pieces whole, which also helps when you lift the grain bag in a BIAB or all-in-one system.
The author lists the features he considers important. Look for dual steel rollers, often with a knurled texture to pull grain through; his has a 12 tpi knurl. The gap should be fully adjustable, and he runs about 0.039 inch (1 mm) on his mill, adjusting for the malt. A hopper of 7 to 15 pounds lets you load most of a batch at once. A solid wood or metal base helps, with the mill typically resting on a standard 5-gallon bucket.
One practical tip stuck with me: mill well away from the brewing area, because crushing creates dust and malt carries natural bacteria you do not want near fermentation or cooling gear. Finally, a long metal arm or the option to connect a household drill makes the work easier, and some mills come with a motor. In a comment, a reader noted that three-roller mills also work but are mostly commercial.
Source: BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog
This is shocking news for anyone who loves home brewing gear. I learned from a note article that Ss Brewtech, known for stainless fermentation tanks such as the "Brew Bucket," will end its business by the end of 2026.
According to the article, on September 9, 2026, parent company Middleby announced it would dissolve the Middleby Brewing & Distilling Solutions Group itself. The brands affected are Ss Brewtech, Deutsche Beverage + Process, and Wild Goose Filling, and the wind-down is expected to be largely complete by the end of 2026. Middleby acquired Ss Brewtech in 2019, reportedly for about 36.8 million dollars.
The numbers tell the story. The Brewing Group's 2025 revenue was 24 million dollars, but its Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of about 9 million dollars, and a similar level was expected for 2026. Ss Brewtech itself cited falling demand, price competition, and an oversupply of used equipment. According to the Brewers Association, the number of U.S. craft breweries at the end of 2025 was 9,578, down 2.9% from the year before. With 300 new openings against 481 closures, closures outpaced openings for a second straight year. Equipment from closed breweries flows into the used market.
The irony is that the products last too long. One forum post reportedly said, "I've used my Brew Bucket for ten years and it's still like new." Stainless tanks rarely cause trouble, but what worries people are the proprietary parts: controllers, pumps, temperature sensors, glycol chillers, and specialized gaskets. Ss Brewtech says it will sell its parts inventory at a discount ahead of the closure.
The Japanese distributor also said the announcement came suddenly, and that maintenance for Wild Goose's can filler is moving toward continued domestic support (not confirmed). The article took the view that craft beer is not ending, but that the market is maturing. If you use this equipment, it may be worth thinking about securing spare parts now.
Source: note
I have always repeated the rule that lagers must ferment cold, so a roundup of Brülosophy's past lager fermentation temperature experiments caught my attention. The author, Marshall Schott, gathers twelve of their exBEERiments, each run as a triangle test: tasters get three samples, two identical and one different, and try to pick the odd one out. A result only counts as significant below p = 0.05, and he is careful to say that a non-significant result does not prove temperature has no effect, only that this panel could not reliably tell the beers apart.
Out of the twelve, only three came out significant. One used SafLager W-34/70 at a very warm 82°F (27°C) against 60°F (16°C), and the one tester who noticed a difference mentioned sulfur. Another used WLP940 Mexican Lager, where eleven tasters preferred the cool version and nobody picked the warm one. The third used Imperial L17 Harvest, where the correct tasters could not even agree on what was different. Several brewers also ran their own semi-blind tests and felt sure of the difference, yet the blind panels did not back them up. Even the 19 BJCP judges in the first test found the odd sample only seven times.
What I found interesting is the pattern in the yeast. The strains behind Pilsner Urquell-style beers were non-significant every time, while all three significant results involved Frohberg-type strains. The author's takeaway is that yeast may be more robust than many of us believe, and that a 20°F (10°C) gap is smaller in practice than it sounds.
Personally I read this as permission to relax a little, not to throw out the thermometer. If you cannot hold a lager chamber at 50°F, these results suggest a cleanly fermented beer at a warmer temperature is still very drinkable, and it is a good reminder to test things on your own beer instead of trusting tradition blindly.
Source: Brülosophy
Whenever home brewing comes up, I keep wondering about one thing: in Japan, you can't brew at home even to the alcohol level of ordinary beer. I read a long note article that traces the background of this through the history of the liquor tax, so here are the key points.
First, the current situation. As of 2026, Japan's Liquor Tax Act generally requires a liquor manufacturing license to make any beverage at or above 1% alcohol. The National Tax Agency says that while buying home beer kits is not itself prohibited, the finished product should stay below 1%. So the situation is less a ban on brewing as a hobby and more that the fermentation levels common overseas are effectively out of reach.
According to the article, rural villages in the Edo period had a custom of "jijo jiin" (brewing one's own sake and drinking it), and making alcohol for personal use was part of everyday culture. The turning point came in the Meiji era. In 1899 the liquor tax became the top source of national tax revenue, reaching 35.5% of the total. In the same year, home production of alcohol was banned outright. The article also notes that after the Sino-Japanese War, the liquor tax was raised three times in five years, from 1896 to 1901, to secure revenue.
Another striking part was the comparison. In the United States, President Carter signed H.R. 1337 in 1978, which made home-brewed beer exempt from federal excise tax and legalized home brewing. In Japan, the minimum production volume was lowered from 2,000 kiloliters to 60 kiloliters in 1994, which triggered the "craft beer liberalization." But what was relaxed was production as a business, and home brewing was not included.
The author admits that home brewing rules alone cannot explain why Japan's craft beer got off to a slow start, but suggests that the difference may lie in the depth of the amateur brewing community with actual experience. As someone who loves home brewing, I found that learning the history of the rules changed how I see the situation. (Laws differ by country and region, so please check the rules where you live.)
Source: note
Why does a beer's foam sometimes collapse after a few weeks? A detailed article on Hobbybrouwen.nl points to an unexpected culprit: the yeast itself. That was an interesting angle to me, because we usually look at malt, hops and clean glassware.
Foam is carried by proteins from barley malt, mainly LTP1 and Protein Z, together with bitter compounds from hops. Yeast, however, contains an enzyme, Protease A, that can cut those proteins. In a healthy cell it stays locked in the vacuole. Under stress, such as a shortage of nutrients, high temperature, high starting gravity or too little yeast, the cell releases more of it, and when cells die and their walls break down, the whole contents are released.
The tricky part is that the enzyme keeps working after the yeast is gone. Racking or filtering does not remove the dissolved enzyme, and in unpasteurised beer it slowly cuts proteins in the bottle. The effect is therefore most visible in beers that sat long on the yeast cake or were stored for a long time.
Shedding differs per yeast strain, sometimes by a factor of two to three. Clean American ale strains, highly flocculent English strains and lager yeasts are known for good foam retention. Saison yeasts need extra attention, because they ferment warm and deep and run short of nutrients towards the end. The author honestly says that manufacturers do not publish figures per strain, and that his table is a guide, not a ranking.
The practical lesson: pitch healthy and in ample quantity, feed the yeast, don't ferment too warm, and rack off in time. As a homebrewer you have a lot of control over those things.
Source: Hobbybrouwen.nl
West Coast Pils is a hybrid style that began around 2015 at Highland Park Brewery in Los Angeles, mixing the crisp base of a German Pilsner with the loud hopping of a West Coast IPA. Jordan Folks at Brülosophy tried it in their Short & Shoddy format, where you deliberately cut corners and see whether the beer still turns out well.
The recipe was a 6.5 gallon batch of 92 percent Pilsner malt and 8 percent flaked rice, aiming for about 1.047 OG and 5.25 percent ABV. The shortcuts were a 30-minute single infusion mash at 150°F (66°C), a 30-minute boil, a little amylase enzyme, and fermentation at 64°F (18°C) in the basement instead of a temperature-controlled chamber. Hops were Nelson Sauvin in the boil, then a big Citra and Nelson Sauvin hop stand, and a dry hop with Citra products and Nectaron. Yeast was Imperial L13 Global. The beer finished at 1.007, was cold crashed, fined with Biofine Clear and conditioned for about two weeks in a keg.
Twenty-six tasters tried it after reading the style description. Only three of them reported any off-flavor: one diacetyl, one light-struck and two astringency. The author noticed a slight buttery note when the beer was young, but it faded with conditioning, and he called the result super clean and delicious.
I enjoyed the reader comment too, where someone asks whether West Coast Pils deserves to be its own style or is just a Bohemian Pils for hopheads. Either way, the main takeaway for me is encouraging for anyone short on time or equipment: a quick, imperfect process can still give a very good beer.
Source: Brülosophy
Few brewing variables are discussed as categorically as pitching rate: underpitching gives esters and fusel alcohols, overpitching gives a flat beer. A review by Jacques Bertens on Hobbybrouwen.nl shows the picture is more nuanced, and converts everything into grams of dry yeast per litre, which is far more practical for homebrewers than counting cells.
The conversion is simple: one gram of dry yeast holds roughly 10 billion living cells, so 0.1 g per litre corresponds to about 1 million cells per millilitre. For a 1.048 beer the working range runs from a low 0.6 g/L, through 0.9 (standard top-fermenting pitch) and 1.2 (generous), up to 1.8 g/L, the classic norm for lager yeast. At a different gravity you scale accordingly.
The article explains what happens in the fermenter. With too little yeast, cells must divide more often, stay longer in the growth phase and produce more esters and higher alcohols. He also notes that oxygen and unsaturated fatty acids suppress ester formation, and that a low pitch raises the demand for amino acids, which can lead to more fusel alcohols. Diacetyl is linked to the yeast's valine synthesis and disappears again when the beer gets enough conditioning time.
He looks at eleven dry yeasts available in the Netherlands, in five categories: neutral American top-fermenting strains, Belgian and spicy strains, wheat-beer strains, lager strains and kveik. He adds a fair caveat: strain-specific research is scarce, and many studies use industrial lager yeasts. I read it mainly as a good reason to experiment with your own pitching rates.
Source: Hobbybrouwen.nl
