Blog — beer education

Summary: We made a triple-decocted sausage-spiced caramelized-first-runnings hefeweizen which blew off all its yeast, spontaneously soured and spent 5 days bottle conditioning in my oven. Then we made beer judges drink it. Recipe Selection: My brewing buddy Mike and I decided to brew a Spice, Herb, or Vegetable entry for the Royal Finger Homebrew Competition. To test some ideas, I made tinctures and concentrates of blueberry, ginger, cranberry and orange zest to mix into a pleasant English porter I had made earlier in the year. The results varied from undrinkable (astringent cranberry) to unpleasant (biting ginger). Several beers and much...

Recently I ran into an issue that I have not had to deal with in the past: a stalled out fermentation. I have had quite a few homebrewers come by the shop asking why they are stuck in the mid 20’s with their wort - beer limbo liquid. Let’s get into it. When it comes to stalled fermentations there are a few easy places to start: Yeast health - old yeast, poorly stored. If you did a starter, it will probably be pretty obvious if the yeast isn’t super healthy. If you didn’t, you should. Yeast Starter - Did you...

Here's the first blog post from the newest member of the Short Finger Brewing Co. team, Graham Orser. Graham is an experienced homebrewer and fermentation enthusiast. Beer, cider, rice wine, etc. You name it, he's made it. If you've got follow-up questions about this post, feel free to contact him at graham@shortfingerbrewing.com.                                                                                               The first alcoholic beverage I...

One of my favourite things about homebrewing is the ability to create essentially any style of beer imaginable. Sometimes it’s a creative process — “What if I put figs in a brown ale?” — but other times you try a beer and think, “I just want to make exactly that!” This happened most recently when I cracked open a bottle of Amber Ale from Bell’s Brewery, a craft brewery based out of Michigan. Cloning Bell’s Amber Ale is a little more tricky than some other beers because the brewery uses a proprietary yeast strain. Luckily, Bell’s beer is bottle conditioned,...

I’ve been wanting to brew a 100% local beer for several years now. I made a few attempts a couple years ago, but at that time the locally produced malt was only getting at best 50% efficiency on my setup and - on top of that - had some pretty odd flavours that, try as I might, I just couldn’t get used to. So I was very happy when I learned of Ontario Select Malt this spring, which is produced by Canada Malting.Technically it’s not local to this part of Ontario, but it is at least from this province!Coupled with...