Better Ingredients, Better Beer

Understanding and using fresh ingredients along with developing your own recipes can really be the key to making great beer. The process is important, but if your ingredients suck, then no process in the world can fix it. 

Garbage in, garbage out. 

I avoid pre-made recipe kits because I can’t control the freshness.

Ditch the Kits

Kits are great when you're first starting out because you don't have to think about the beer. You just brew it. And if it sucks, blame the kit maker, right? But kits are not gonna level-up your all-grain brewing. Mainly because it's hard to find a fresh kit. Especially if you're ordering online.

Drink with Intention

One of the things I like to do is pick a style you want to brew and drink the best examples. 

Take notes. Look for color, mouthfeel, hop bitterness, aroma, head retention, everything you can think of. Pick your favorite and look for a clone online. 

Better yet, hope the brewery published the recipe.

Start Simple

A better way is to start with a SMaSH beer and build on it. 

Pick one or two malts you really like that will work with the style and a single hop. 

To develop a recipe, I like to improve one thing each time I brew it until I consider it near-perfect. Because it'll never be perfect. 

I'll show you how I develop recipes over time and in this course, we're gonna brew a simple beer to focus on the process.