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Informative Articles

Best Recipes: Root Beer Float Milkshake
Make this cool, frosty Root Beer Float Milkshake for a real walk down memory lane. Did you enjoy root beer float as a kid? Maybe you drank them in high school when you went out to eat with your friends at the local burger hang out? Maybe you’ve...

Important Health Update
Copyright 2005 Wayne McDonald Staying healthy does NOT start when you get sick, when you refill your prescriptions, when you are scheduled for surgery or when your doctor says you have six months to live. Your health is an important long-term...

Is Fried Food Bad For You?
KFC changed its image by retiring the slogan Kentucky FRIED Chicken. Instead, they became known as serving up Kitchen Fresh Chicken. Long are the days of Wesson Oil commercials that proudly encouraged yummy fried chicken for dinner. When was the...

Is Moderate Drinking Good For You, Part II
Author’s note: here we begin Part II. This was necessary due to the GoArticles restriction on article length, this being the completion of the first section, Part I. How alcohol might protect the heart There are several plausible biological...

May's Featured Holidays and Recipes
There are three great days in the month of May that I would like to talk about...Cinco de Mayo, Mother's Day, and Memorial Day. I will share a brief history and include a couple of delectable recipes. Happy May! ...

Possible Pitfalls
There are as many reasons you’ve given yourself to eat as there are minutes in a day. Storm clouds do it for me. They trigger a memory from when I lived in Florida and went deep-sea fishing in Key West. When a squall was imminent, we’d pull our...

Single for the holidays? Not a problem with these 5 tips.
Thanksgiving, Christmas- Kwanza. Whatever you celebrate this season, being single doesn’t suck as much as you think. I know how it feels- cruising up to Aunt Sally’s house in an ugly wool sweater, sitting squished at the kid’s table because you...

The Insecurity Blanket: Pillow-Talk Your Worries Away
Are you looking for an effective way to improve your intimate relationships? The insecurity blanket is a semi-revolutionary yet simple tool , which can do just that. But first, it’s important to establish the most common causes of bad...

The Reality of the Date Rape Drug
Each month, more than ten women of all ages and backgrounds contact our Adoption Center with the same experience -- they have been victims of a date rape drug and are now pregnant. Most of the time, these women do not know who the biological father...

Wine Making and Home Brewing: What's the deal?
When it comes to making alcoholic beverages at home, wine making and home brewing is considered sort of a 'niche' market. You either know how to do it or you don't! This is very hard to believe as wine making and home brewing has been going on for...

 
 
 
Beer Making Tips..The Affordable to Great Beer.

Brew low cost beer. The amount of time you spend on brewing beer makes the small difference in cost between "just OK" ingredients and top quality ingredients a minor point. Either way, the cost of brewing a 5 gallon batch is much cheaper than buying a couple of cases of beer in the store.

Beer is made of cheap ingredients, so it doesn't hurt to buy the best. Surprisingly, the cheapest way to brew beer gives you the best results: all grain brewing is the cheapest way to brew when grain is bought in bulk.

You do need a grain mill and a mash tun, so there is a small investment in equipment needed. But you should be able to brew excellent quality beer for less than $2 per gallon, and you could brew a mild ale for as little as $1 per gallon, or less than 10 cents per bottle (one gallon is about 10-1/2 12oz bottles). Most of my pilsners are about $1.50 a gallon brews.

Other ways to reduce the cost of your beer are by growing your own hops and reusing yeast from the fermenter. Easy to do, and it means that I don't have to buy yeast more than once every half year or so. The hops should last e through most of the winter brews. So all you need is grain, which is about $0.70 per pound in a bulk purchase (much of the cost is in shipping).

Beer Brewing Equipment Basic, simple, cheap equipment that gets the job done. Sometimes it adds to the challenge. Vut through the mystique of brewing and remember that illiterate alewives brewed for centuries

 


using tried and true recipes and procedures before the dawn of kegerators, ph meters or hydrometers.

Beer Keg Brewing. After using bottles for years, you can jump to the corny keg (Cornelius keg). This is an important step because it makes brewing so much easier. You can still bottle, but just a few bottles per batch, and use a corny keg to fill the bottles. You can use corny kegs as secondary fermenting vessels. You can try out method where you leave the beer in the primary for about two weeks until it clears nicely, and then upi carefully siphon it over to a corny, avoiding transferring any trub.

Bulk Purchase of Grain and Hops.I purchased about 300lbs of grain and 5lbs of hops from North Country Malt. I have two bags of pilsner, two of Munich, one of pale ale and one carapils. This should cover my base malt needs for a year. I can make my house favorite recipes (pilsner, altbier, pale ale) with the ingredients I have on stock. I hope to work through this supply in about a year, which is the shelf life. I will also order specialty malts and hops as special recipes require.

Beer Drinking Philosophy. Beer is good food. Beer is healthy when used in moderation. Beer is a great beverage.

About the author:

Shannon Brown is the owner of wemakebeer.com. This site caters to home brewers around the world and has numerous links and resources. You can visit the site at: http://www.wemakebeer.com