Brew Year's Resolutions

I've been binge listening to the Experimental Brewing podcast ever since I first discovered it a few months ago. If you haven't checked it out, I wholeheartedly recommend you do, it's awesome (although I know Denny Conn, one of the co-hosts, would object to my use of that word).

I'm still a year behind on my listening, but as luck would have it I made it to last year's Christmas episodes by Christmas this year. Inspired by what they did on last year's Christmas episodes (which I bet they repeated this year, but can’t say for sure), I've decided to come up with my own Brew Year's Resolutions, or in other words, my homebrewing resolutions for this year.

Me pondering my Brew Year's Resolutions with Tool's Long Time No See

1.- Get back to mashing in my cooler, rather than the bucket of my Bulldog Brewer all-in-one system. I haven't been getting as good efficiency lately as I used to, and I suspect it's at least partly due to how much water is necessary to cover dead spaces around the bucket and how well the water circulates through the grain.

2.- Work on mash pH control. Another reason I credit with my loss in efficiency, partly related with what I said in resolution nº1. The extra water I need for the mash no doubt screws with my usual water to grain ratio. This I suspect means that the grain by itself no longer lowers the pH of the mash enough to get to the 5.2-5.5 area in which the enzymes like to get their starch conversion party on.

3.- Learn a thing or two about water treatment. I have only recently started playing with my brewing water and I’ve already noticed a substantial improvement in my beers. I want to delve even further into this obscure and magical world, see what else it can do for me.

4.- Get into brewing different styles and hone the ones I already do. Over the past few years I’ve tended to focus on brewing Belgian styles, such as Belgian Pale Ales, Belgian Blondes, Wits, Tripels and Quads, as well as a bunch of other stuff that can’t really fit into a single style (something also very Belgian). I have also done this without necessarily repeating many of my recipes, which kind of makes each beer a crapshoot. I feel it is time to test my consistency by picking a recipe and more or less sticking to it, obviously with the necessary tinkering to improve the result over time. Nonetheless, in order to keep things interesting, I intend on trying my hand on brewing new styles. This will widen my horizons, hopefully make me a more versatile brewer… but more importantly, it will keep me from considering my homebrewing this year a sort of Sisyphean task involving brewing the same thing over and over again.

5.- Finally make it to this year’s Spanish homebrewers convention. I’ve been meaning to attend the convention for a number of years now, but life always got in the way. This time however, I have already taken the time off and planned the trip, so I’m quite confident it will finally happen. Knock on wood.

I could go on and on with homebrewing plans for this year, but I feel it is wise to leave it at these five. That way I think there’s a better chance of actually following up on some of them. I’ll try to keep you updated on how I do, unless doing so hampers my obsessive water treatment studies (I don't think I need to tell you that's a joke).

What are your Brew Year's Resolutions? Let us know!