Coastal Brew Day Blog

  What’s Wrong With My Beer?   Sometimes bad things happen to good brews. Seemingly everything can go correctly on your brewday, but in the end, an element fouls up, or a mistake was made, and your beer has to go down the drain. The list below, organized into types of mistakes, identifies and solves some of the most common fouling of beers. Sometimes the fix is simple, like aging, or adding an element during secondary fermentation. Other times, it's more tragic and you have to pitch your entire batch due to infection. So if you have issues with your beer, use this as a resource to help you identify and fix the issue. Group 1 - Acetaldehyde (Green Apples): Not enough oxygenation when before pitching yeast, yeast needs more time to work.  Solution: Agitate beer in fermenter, repitch yeast, let beer age longer. - Diacety l (Buttery, Movie Popcorn, Butterscotch): Potentially infected batch. Caused by temperature fluctuation, improper sanitation, lack of nutrients and oxygena...

Tips and Tricks, Vol. 1  We're brewing another Belgian Stout this week, so if you want to learn more about that, see a recipe (a really good one) and get into that big beer world, check out the Bourbon Barrel Belgian Stout entry. So instead of repeating ourselves, we are going to help you out with some tips and tricks we've learned along the way. We've made pretty much every mistake you can possibly make, so we decided to help you not live like us.  - How to avoid bottle bombs : Bottle bombs, or when over-carbonation creates a foam volcano billowing out of the bottle, or even exploding due to the extra pressure. Exploding bottles can take out the neighboring bottles as well, a tragic event that does occasionally happen. To avoid this, and under-carbonation as well, a good practice is to stir your primed beer (beer with priming solution) well before your bottle. After every 4-6 bottles you fill, or 5 minutes if you take your time, stir the mixture again. This will ensure tha...

Witbier The Witbier, or Belgian Wit, comes from a very specific place. Hoegaarden, a small village in the Flanders region of Belgium, was the birthplace of the Wit all the way back in 1445. The beer grew in popularity and the enclaves surrounding Hoegaarden desired it at a feverish pace. Its popularity carried it well into the 20th century, with 13 breweries operating in the 19th century. However, after the destruction two massive wars caused the region, the breweries had to cease operations, with the last one shuttering in 1957. About ten years after that, however, a native of the region named Pierre Celis revived the Wit in a small brewery he started in the barn on his family dairy farm. His Wit grew, and the Hoegaarden brewery started to succeed in the town for which it's named. Since Celis brought the style back, it has steadily regained its popularity. In the United States, commercial Wits like Blue Moon and Shock Top are produced by the mega breweries, while craft breweries o...

DOPPELBOCK As it is with so many European brewing styles, the Doppelbock was developed by the Monks. Friars in Bavaria adapted a traditional Einbecker beer, what we know as a Bock, and made it bigger, darker, and more ready for the annual celebrations that Germans take so seriously.  The Bock was created in the German city of Einbeck. Einbeck, a smallish city (about the size of New London) with a rich brewing tradition, was once part of the Hanseatic Trading League during the 14th-17th centuries. One of its main functions for the League, other than being a trading post, Einbeck was a brewing region. Their local brew was the lager that eventually became known as a Bock.  As the Hansa League expanded south, the Bavarian brewers wanted in on the action. The monks of t South German region enjoyed the beer of Einbeck so much that they decided to make their own version of it. Things got interesting when the Bavarian vocal dialect bastardized the town name Einbeck to "ein bock," or ...