Brewing Better Beer, Part II

In an effort to help homebrewers as I move towards more advanced brewing, I'm continuing my series "Brewing Better Beer". Here's a few more recomendations. I only get into the basics and not in-depth on the topics. Feel free to ask me if you'd like to know more.

1. Late addition or flameout hops add more flavor and less bitterness. New England IPAs usually have very small amounts of bittering or early addition hops and more at the end.

2. Whirlpool your kettle. This allows all the hops and and particles to gather in the center of the kettle. When using a valve at the side of the kettle, you can avoid getting them into your fermenter. The cleaner the wort goes into the fermenter, the better! Use a hop screen or bags for your hops. You don't want a lot of trub in the fermenter.

3. Cool your wort quickly and pitch the yeast early. Lots of people really like the new Imperial canned liquid yeast, and I've seen homebrewers that have won awards recently, using it. Or you can use Wyeast or make a yeast starter. This will definitely help fermentation for a cleaner beer.

4. Throw out your plastic buckets! You don't have to, really, but I've found that switching to glass and especially stainless fermenters really makes your beer taste less "homebrewy."

5. Temperature: maintain a consistent temperature throughout fermentation.  Start off a few degrees cooler than your ideal fermentation temperature and let the fermentaton bring the temperature up itself and then maintain that temperature. Use a chest freezer and a temperature controller or another method. Once fermentation completes in about a week or less, raise the temp with a heat wrap, brew belt. heating pad, fermentation wrap, etc. and do a diacetyl rest, then start crashing it down to  about 32 degrees.

6. Purge any oxygen in secondary fermentation (conditioning) with co2. Keep it under a few pounds of pressure if possible, but make sure that primary fermentation is complete or you will blow your fermenter.

I hope this helps you out.
Dave