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I think the John Palmer's How to Brew Beer is the best place for a brewing newbie to start. Not only is it a great resource, but it's free online, or you can buy a dead tree version. Mosher's books are indeed very good, but not the best place to start, IMHO.

See http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html

I think the John Palmer's How to Brew Beer is the best place for a brewing newbie to start. Not only is it a great resource, but it's free online, or you can buy a dead tree version. Mosher's books are indeed very good, but not the best place to start, IMHO.

See http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html

For more information than you'll probably ever want about beer brewing, see How to Brew, by John Palmer (free online, also available in print).

Although the Palmer book is for homebrewers, apparently getting rid of haze is something that commercial breweries are extremely interested in, and they spend millions of dollars on research. As far as I can tell, it would mainly be an issue for American-style lagers (e.g., Budweiser), which are transparent enough that the haze would be noticeable. However, tannins and haze can also correlate with taste and shelf life (oxidation). As a homebrewer, I've never really worried about it much.

I'm not clear on why they want to use genetic modification to control when flocculation happens. There are tons of varieties of yeast that you can buy, and one of the criteria you apply when you're selecting a strain of yeast is how alcohol-tolerant it is. A less alcohol-tolerant strain will respond earlier to the stress of the alcohol by flocculating out. Since there are already so many different strains with different flocculation properties, I don't really see what the genetic modification gains you.

The most important aspect in choosing the style of beer you brew: Water. The profile of your water will impact your beer far more then the hops or the malt. Which is why traditional regional beers are just that, regional.

John Palmer's book (which the first edition is now free online for personal use... I highly suggest if you like it, you might want to buy the new edition...) Has a page on how to chart your water to the best beer it is suited for: http://howtobrew.com/section3/chapter15-3.html

And this is one of the reasons the microbrewery across state lines might not have any issue in sharing recipes and advise, your beer, unless you open next door, will never come out the same.

Could I save a few dollars by home brewing? Maybe.. but let's not forget all the "learning" batches, the time it takes, and the waiting! Oh, the waiting!

I always say that the most difficult thing to learn about brewing is patience. ;)

Find a homebrew club in your area, or just a local brewer (most of them are really friendly and happy to help out a beginner), and it will cut way down on the learning curve. It's really not that difficult to make beer as good as or better than anything you can buy in the store (even the more expensive stuff). The best place to start, if you're interested, is http://www.howtobrew.com/

I know quite a few people already responded to your beer methodology, but the beer nerd in me can't help but put in a few words along with them.

First of all, you're absolutely right that his beer is probably gonna taste like crap (or "sparkling pond water" as John Palmer puts it). That said, there's nothing wrong with using extract, or "beersyrup" as you call it (though admittedly the pre-hopped stuff is worthy of derision). A lot of award-winning beers have been made from extracts with steeping grains. Most people start out doing a few extract beers, then move on to all-grain. Some people never move on to all-grain because they're happy with the beer they get from extract and don't want to go through the extra work that all-grain takes. On the other hand, all-grain is cheaper and gives you a lot more variables to tweak to control how your beer will turn out. It really just amounts to how cheap you are and how much time you want to spend.

As far as your methodology... either you're not articulating it well, or you don't really have the method down (at least not the method most people tend to use). Straining for clarity? What? Are you actually boiling the wort or not? I'm not going to lay out the precise steps that need to be followed as some people seem to be trying to do, but I will add on another recommendation for John Palmer's How to Brew, as well as Denny Conn's batch sparging instructions, Basic Brewing Radio, and The Jamil Show. There are also various forums that can be incredibly helpful as well.

Back on topic... the Bender statue is pretty much awesome, even if all it looks like all it really does beer-wise is hold a 5 gallon plastic bucket. Now, a temperature controlled stainless steel conical fermenter Bender, that would really be something...

Wow, that was a bit um... loose with the brewing process. You seem to add your hops to the mash and not the boil which seems to be missing altogether, and your description of lautering is also interesting. Anyone wanting to really know how to make beer check out http://www.howtobrew.com/. Yes the guy is peddling his book on the website, but the older edition is there at http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html and is free to read online. It will take you through both extract and all grain brewing.

Wow, that was a bit um... loose with the brewing process. You seem to add your hops to the mash and not the boil which seems to be missing altogether, and your description of lautering is also interesting. Anyone wanting to really know how to make beer check out http://www.howtobrew.com/. Yes the guy is peddling his book on the website, but the older edition is there at http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html and is free to read online. It will take you through both extract and all grain brewing.

Agreed, the beer he is brewing will be absolutely disgusting. Probably far too malty, with no smoothness.

I am a homebrewer, and the method you described is just one of many different ways. The temperature for boiling the mash, the times for addition of the hops, the types of barley and hops used, even the type of yeast will all affect the quality and flavor of your beer.

If someone on Slashdot is interested in starting a homebrew project the best place to start is with this book. It gives basic instructions for creating a basic beer, but it also dives into the science behind beer and allows the hackerish among us to experiment and understand what's going on in the fermenter. The entire book is available for free online, but I bought a hard copy as well to have handy during brewing sessions.

You might not be making them right if you feel the need for filtration is just. I have been brewing for quite awhile now and have rarely had cloudy brew, or for that matter "bits" floating around in it. You might want to brush up on your brewing habits. http://www.howtobrew.com/

...than free as in speech.

I appreciate the cuteness of these guys' efforts. But really the homebrew culture has practiced free and/or open source values for a good 30 years. In homebrewing circles, what I've noticed is a huge number of true hackers working in both hardware and software (equipment, recipes) and something else--methods and techniques. It's this last that I feel is the most "free." It gives the willing learner or enthusiastic amateur serious tools to make really world class beer through better knowledge of the various factors involved. This knowledge transfer circumvents--even disrupts--the whole copyright/IP issue.

Lots of people, myself included, recommend John Palmer's book on how to brew. It's available online for anyone to read. Since he's kept the copyright, clearly noted on the home page, it's only "free as in beer." But it embraces so much learning that a person could walk away from it, make several dozen batches of beer and write their own dang book. Then they could open source that if they really had the gumption to, I suppose.

But the point is, there's so much practical knowledge available online for free that anyone can become a brewer, and they subsequently couldn't be stopped from teaching other people how to brew--either through direct contact or through an open source/GPL/Creative Commons licensed document of their own. Functionally, that seems about as "free as in speech" as something can be.

I basically had to cheat to pass my high school chemistry final and was only moderately decent at things like physics. But I'm now quite a bit more comfortable with water chemistry, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, the chemistry involved in starch conversion, the biology of yeasts and microbial life forms, etc. All on a very practical level. And with a noble goal, too!

There's a lot of great hackers in the beer world and they're not being particularly protective or proprietary about their methods. It's a pretty impressive hack to look at a 10 gallon water cooler and say, "Hey I could use that for holding 10 pounds of ground malted grain and 1.2 qt of hot water per pound for 60 minutes at about 152F. If someone did that, heck, all those starches in the malted grain would probably turn into sugars. Then if I've thought ahead and built a manifold inside that cooler that outlets thru where the spigot used to be, I could drain out just the water and sugar into a big pot on my stove. Boil with some hops, cool, add yeast and keep everything sanitary... I gotta tell a bunch of other guys on the internet about this!" Hack complete, information shared with the world, copyrights never get involved. Sure you can buy a Phil's Phalse Bottom for convenience and there's a place for that kind of "licensed hardware" but if you wanted it, the info is out there to DIY. The knowledge is loose, and there's not much can be done about it. The information wanted to be free pretty badly, and for good reason! (40-80 cents per 12 oz. serving of beer that rivals Guinness, Paulaner or SNPA? I'm all over finding out about that!)

The process of brewing beer is easy, but not quite THAT easy.

A good introduction to brewing is How To Brew by John Palmer. The entire 1st edition of the book is available on the web for free at the URL above. (Perhaps predictably, it's free as in beer, not as in speech :)

At least it is in my home: How to Brew.

Read it at: http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html