Contents
Why this website
This website started life as a book!
I had recently retired from the corporate world where I was a research scientist involved in the development of instrumentation to perform chemical analysis. So like a lot of other people suddenly out of a job, I had to decide on how to spend my time. After I had sobered up, I decided to write a book on my favorite hobby – homebrewing beer. I’ve been homebrewing for over 50 years (shudder) and feel that I’m sort of getting to the stage where I understand at least something about this topic and wanted to share my great experiences and spectacular failures with others.
After writing the first 400 pages for my book, I realized that I was never going to finish it! I kept changing and updating the content and was continually adding new topics that it grew into a huge monster without shape or form. Aaaaaaargh! Not what I wanted at all.
This website is intended to be a sort of surrogate book (WebBook?) and hopefully can easily grow and adapt as I change the content. I think it might be even easier than producing a book because formatting and distribution would be much easier and if I screw things up, I can quickly fix them before the lawyers get involved.
There were some unexpected benefits in moving to a website, I can now provide readers with things like software listings, CAD drawings and videos – all direct from the webpage. In the project pages, I have moved all the technical stuff regarding construction to downloadable files to keep the webpages relatively short and tidy.
There were some significant disadvantages in producing a website. I now had to learn how to setup website domains and how to use a website content manager like WordPress and all its various themes and plugins in order to put this website together. This took several weeks, so the transition from book to website took much longer than expected.
So what’s different about this website? The title Homebrewing for Cheapskates and Anarchists provides some clues. I wanted to choose a title that reflected a slightly offbeat approach to homebrewing. All of us pick up little hints and tips as we progress through our humble lives as amateur beer brewers. Some of us get as far as designing our own recipes, preparing our own ingredients and building our own equipment to help with our hobby and obsession. This saves us money and we get to do thing differently from everyone else. Success in this respect enables us to enter competitions and may even help us win valuable prizes and receive unfathomable glory. This is what this website is all about.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term “Cheapskate”, it means someone who doesn’t like spending money (or is a “tight-arsed git” as he/she might be called in England). I also like the sound of the word “Cheapskate” so it had to be included in the website title. The other key word in the title is “Anarchist”. Although this may immediately conjure up visions of civil unrest and terrorism, I’d like to think it can equally apply to someone who just doesn’t stick to the accepted rules. You don’t have to be a terrorist to brew beer! I did consider the word “Radical” for the title but the very radical Randy Mosher had already adopted the word “Radical” for his wonderfully radical book called “Radical Brewing”. So “Anarchist” it had to be. Actually I really like the term “Anarchist Brewer”TM – it sounds sexy (it would look good on a T-shirt, too – perhaps I can also sell these in a variety of styles, sizes and colors and provide an order form somewhere in the website at some later indefinite date).
So, this website is simply for homebrewers who don’t want to spend a lot of money and are not scared to do things a bit differently – and so it obviously helps if they have some English ancestry (I am was English myself). Although, these days vendors seem to stock anything I need, my parsimonious roots still compel me, whenever possible, to develop my own solutions to my various brewing needs. After all, why pay for something that you can do or make yourself (which is very anti-American)?
In this website you will find a lot of projects and tips for assisting with the homebrewing process that I have either developed myself or refined from ideas stolen from others. In the latter case, I have strived to acknowledge the source but that wasn’t always easy so please bear with me. If you feel compelled to write to me and complain that I didn’t recognize you as the originator of an idea that appears in this website, please accept my apologies and I will endeavor to fix the error and publish a grand apology.
So now you have a bit of background, I want to tell you about the website content – what’s in it and how it’s structured. I am a very firm believer in entropy – if you throw a bag of nuts into a room full of monkeys, give them a few million years, and they will build a Nutella factory (forget Hamlet, the typewriters and the expert philosophers with their infinite monkey theorem). My approach to writing the content has been much the same, I flitted from subject to subject according to where the mood took me. This was very productive initially and I wrote many thousands of words very quickly but as the content grew further, so did the degree of chaos. I soon produced a product with about 60 topics – all half finished.
One of the very big benefits in using a website medium rather than a book was in making the production available incrementally. Once a topic had been completed, it would be added to the site. It may take decades to complete but the material would be available as soon as it was ready.
So what sort of things will you find in this website? For the projects I’ve tried not only to describe how to make the device or material but also to give some background (even to the extent of showing some chemistry and physical equations) and guidelines on how and where to use it. You will learn about fascinating new ways of using dental floss and a 2×4 (that’s American for a big piece of wood). We also dive into the realms of microcontroller units (MCUs) to control and monitor some of the things we do. To be even more anarchistic, the use of a 3D printer to build some of the stuff I needed is explored.
Hopefully much of the material contained in these pages will be of general interest to homebrewers – both novice and expert. My sincere wish is that you will try some of these ideas yourself and be a better (smarter, richer and lazier) brewer as a result. If you like or don’t like what you read or have some ideas of your own that you would like to see included, please use the comment boxes. If you do like this website, tell all your little friends and everyone else and leave wonderful reviews on other websites. If you don’t like what you read, please keep it quiet and go elsewhere.
Website content
The website is divided up into different areas of interest.
Techniques
Is mostly about some unusual tricks that can be used while making the beer to make it better or enhance some of its characteristics.
Recipes
This section contains details of some of the more crazy beers I’ve made. Some even turned out good. Don’t expect to find 50 different recipes on how to make an IPA here.
Projects
The bulk of the website’s content resides here and this is it’s main purpose. Here you will find lots of wonderful things to build to help you make the best beer in the world and impress your friends.
Technology
Some of the projects will require some advanced technology like microcontrollers, sensors, optics, circuit design, CAD design, software development and a 3D printer. It’s not the intention of this section to provide a comprehensive guide to all of these but more to put them in the context of building stuff for homebrewing.
Account
To post comments on the webpages, requires registration. Only a limited amount of information is needed to create an account – mainly your email address. This information will be kept private and not displayed on the website or shared with anyone else. Registration can optionally put you on the mailing list.
About the author/developer
I suppose I had better say something about myself and who were my greatest influencers and supporters in the writing of this material. However, I’ll skip over those last bits and just talk about me.
I was English but I’m currently a real American living in the USA. I’ve been brewing beer at home for over 50 years; which is a rather sobering thought when I consider how much beer I must have made and drunk over that time period. If I conservatively estimate one glass of beer per day; that means that I have made and drunk over 16,000 pints! Assuming that these were Imperial pints and not the wimpy American equivalents, that represents about 9 tons of beer. Unfortunately, I was discussing this statistic with the “Naughty Nurse” (some sort of brewing acquaintance and happenstance National Beer Judge) within earshot of my long-suffering lady wife and she immediately starts yelling at me (as I should have expected). Apparently, she felt that my 9-ton assessment was a gross underestimate and the true value should have been more like 20 tons. Under duress, I felt compelled to agree. Now, that’s a lot of beer. It also raises all sorts of logistical and ethical questions. I suppose it’s good that this was spread over all those years or else I would have had issues with storage, bathroom plumbing arrangements, mobility and medical treatment if all that volume of beer was consumed at once. I would have a lot of (temporary) friends, though.
At this point I would expect many readers are busy calculating their own Personal Lifetime Beer Consumption Index (PLBCI). If anyone can beat 20 tons (and I suspect that there will only be a few million of you), please drop me a line.
Hopefully, brewing for 50 years does give me some serious street credibility points in writing material like this. It also means that I have been brewing beer at home much longer than anyone else could do legally in the USA. I should be famous. Unfortunately, one day, I bumped into Dr. Terry Foster who is a prolific author of homebrewing books and articles. Apparently, he was English and now lives in the States, too, and he’s been brewing beer much longer than me. A hard act to follow!
Making a lot of beer doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re making good beer although there’s a remote chance it may help. I’m sad to admit that most some of the beer I have made over the years hasn’t been very good. When I was a young man in Manchester, England (all those years ago), we only made home-made beer for one reason – it was very cheap and it got you drunk fast! The British taxation system ensured that purchased beer was expensive so homebrew was always an attractive option – especially for impoverished students. ‘Boots the Chemist’ was (and perhaps still is) a big chain chemist’s store (aka a pharmacy in the States) in Britain and at that time they offered a line of homebrew kits which, for many homebrewers, was the only option available. These kits contained a can of hopped liquid malt extract which was added to a plastic garbage bucket and mixed with an equivalent amount of sugar and diluted to 24 imperial pints with tap water. I don’t think boiling was recommended but we never read the instructions. The kit also contained a sachet of (presumably) dried bakers’ yeast which was added to the mix which was fermented in the garbage bucket (yes, we did take the garbage out first). About a week later it was ‘ready’ to drink. We were often too impatient to bother with bottling the stuff so it was often just scooped into a glass and drunk immediately. I remember a party where the fermentation bucket was left in the center of the room and guests scooped in their emptied glasses to fill them. The stuff tasted disgusting but it hit the spot and the parties were great (from what I remember of them).
Ah… those were the days. Buying grains, hops, yeast etc. wasn’t really an option. Even trying to get a good pint in a pub was becoming a serious challenge as the big ‘industrial’ brewers at the time were systematically buying up the small craft brewers and shutting them down and converting their pubs to sell more mass produced product. Those were the bad days for beer in the UK. I remember the “Red Revolution” very well.
Then along came CAMRA and, prime minister, John Major who between them (CAMRA for activating the good-beer-buying public and Major for passing laws mandating the sale of good beer in bad pubs), totally transformed the Bristish beer drinking culture. Britons became more sophisticated and demanding in the choice and quality of the beer they drank. Homebrewing also started to see resurgence – people began to appreciate that beer doesn’t just come out of a can: there are things called ingredients somewhere in that beer. I was fortunate to live through this renaissance – but just at the time when things started to get really interesting; my job was transferred to the USA.
Living and working in the USA is very different from doing the same in the UK and it’s not just because people talk funny, drive on the wrong side of the road, don’t like Marmite and all the light switches are upside-down. One of the biggest differences I found when I arrived in Connecticut 27 years ago was that I couldn’t really find any beer I liked. This was the ultimate horror scenario. Nearly all I could find was what may today be termed “industrial” grade beer. If I was really lucky, I could find some Sam Adams or Sierra Nevada beers. However, what really surprised me was that there was a great homebrew store about 5 miles from my house. The name of this store was Maltose Express and is owned by Mark and Tess Szamatulski and it is still up and running during the dark days of Covid. Mark and Tess wrote the successful Clonebrews series of books to help people rip off reproduce recipes from their favorite commercial breweries. I don’t know if they will still speak to me after this website goes live but I think I am a good customer of theirs and I am plugging their book so I live in hope. What amazed me about their store when I first entered it, 27 years ago, was the vast array of grains and hops from the UK that I could never find when I lived there. I guess if you want to make beer using good English ingredients, you have to first move to the States. Moving to the States was the turning point in my homebrewing career.
Perhaps homebrewing really continued to improve in the UK but I’m not so sure. Some time ago I looked at the current UK National Homebrew Competition website and they appear to be limiting entries to 250. That’s about half the entry limit for a local competition in the States. Last year’s US National Homebrew Competition accepted about 10,000 entries! I know the UK is a small island but a lot of people live there and drink beer.
Contributors and acknowledgements
I’ve indicated earlier that I wasn’t going to discuss the people that helped and supported me in the production of this website material. Extreme guilt compels me to acknowledge that I did indeed get a lot of help from many people – especially to tone down some of the language I was using and to fix a lot of the many exaggerated and optimistic claims. I would like to thank all those involved and will even give special mention to them here:
Jane, my long suffering wife
I could say that my wife Jane, of 43 years, fully supports my homebrewing obsession. I could say that she doesn’t complain when I cover the kitchen floor with sticky boiling fluids. She doesn’t mind that I use her saucepans to carbonize caramelize special extracts. She appreciates the subtle wafting of malt and hop aroma throughout the house on brew days. She enjoys that I fill up the house with buckets and kegs and other equipment of some deviant industrial origin. She really likes those strange huge big glass bottles in our basement with dark ominous liquids in them with mold apparently growing on top of them. She likes it when I disappear over weekends to participate in homebrew competitions. She enjoys that I sit around the house drinking beer all day and is always quick to refill my glass.
I could say all that – but it wouldn’t be totally true.
Okay, none of it is true.
But (and this is a big but), she still lives with me and still talks to me and we love still each other dearly (especially if I’m not holding a glass of beer at the time). This means that homebrewing and being married is not always totally incompatible. In fact, I think she is pleased that I’ve found a nice safe hobby that is relatively cheap and rewarding and attracts nice friends (ok, that last bit is probably a bit of a stretch). The alternatives could be much more worrisome – I could be a drug addict, an alcoholic, a womanizer, an embezzler or even worse, a politician (which probably includes all those things, anyway).
You will find that I make occasional mention of my long-suffering wife throughout this book. These references aren’t really directed at her critically but are more to highlight those moments in homebrewing when some special consideration and accommodation to those around you might be well-advised. So, if you have a special person in your life who is peripheral to and sometimes tolerant of your homebrewing, you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.
Sarah, my daughter
Sarah is a wiz with computers (she writes software to keep the International Space Station in orbit). She helped me with many of the technical details in setting up a WordPress website. Without her help, much of this site would have looked much worse and wouldn’t have all the fancy features we managed to stick in it.
Min, my son’s nice friend from Korea
Min is a wonderful young lady and is apparently one of the best commercial graphic designers around today. I was very pleased and honored that she was able to review the website to improve my choice of colors etc. (blue, purple and orange apparently weren’t a good choice). Now it looks like a work of art.
Gerry, the Naughty Nurse
My friend Gerry has been a great supporter of this enterprise and if it wasn’t for him the material would not be nearly so good. In fact, it may not have existed at all. He has been invaluable in making suggestions on the content and particularly because of the many ways he showed me on how not to brew good beer.
He is a BJCP rated National Beer Judge and knows a bit about coffee making, too. One of his many claims to fame is that he has a commercial beer named after him. The Naughty Nurse English Pale Ale made by City Steam Brewery Café in Hartford, Connecticut, was named in his honor. The picture of the Naughty Nurse on the bottle label looks nothing like the real Naughty Nurse as you will see in the photographs below. I can’t understand why they didn’t use an image of the real Naughty Nurse – they must have some misguided marketing people there!
The Naughty Nurse Bottle Label The Real Naughty Nurse
Gerry is obsessed with flavor elucidation and was writing a book on that topic before Covid hit. It’s now in a hiatus – mainly, I think, because he has too much information and too many ideas to fit into his book. He should build a website like me.
Christina, the Naughty Nurse’s long-suffering wife
I should be awarding Christina the most praise (after my wife of course), for not only producing many of the wonderful original drawings used in this book, but also for staying married to Gerry and moderating his activities – not an easy undertaking. She is a lovely woman and I feel privileged to have her contributing so much to this book – it would be a much sadder product without these drawings.
The Underground Brewers of Connecticut
My local homebrew club has been a big influence on my brewing habits. Although the members have changed over the years, if I ever wanted to know what was wrong with any of the beers I brewed, these guys will tell me. This club is the second oldest in the States and started conducting educational experiments with beer well before homebrewing became properly legal.
Mark and Tess Szamatulski, MaltoseExpress
I mentioned Mark and Tess earlier. I should have bought shares in their homebrew store. They have a great range of products and back it up with great advice if needed. They certainly helped me learn how to make at least some good beer and provided the best ingredients in order to do it. Go and buy stuff from their store and tell them I sent you.