Thursday, August 8, 2013

The Online Homebrewing Community

When I first started home brewing in December of 2011 I was given the basic brewing kit from Midwest Supplies and two all-grain brewing recipe kits.  The basic brewing kit comes with about everything you need to brew a batch of simple extract beer except for the boil pot.  Since I was given all-grain recipe kits I needed a whole lot more than what came with this basic kit so I was left to the wolves to find my way.  Without the internet and all it's glorious resources available I can imagine that my home brewing journey would have been a much more arduous endeavor.  In an effort to assist in speeding that evolution from aspiring brewer straight to all-grain brewer I figured I would go ahead and compile all the resources that I found helpful to me.

The resources available fall into a few categories: forums, youtube, blogs, podcasts, and magazines.  Forums are usually hard to navigate and tend to be full of unnecessary and potentially inaccurate information that can be confusing to a new brewer.  Youtube has proven to be a great resource since it combines a few methods of communication which has a tendency to be much easier to understand for the uninitiated. Blogs can also be great and all-inclusive, it is a great medium to hash over topics in great detail.  Podcasts are a great way to pass the time and can be a fantastic resource for brewing knowledge if you can pay attention and take some notes while listening.  Then lastly there are magazines which are a great professionally produced medium for communicating written home brewing knowledge but the topics covered may not be exactly what you are looking for at the time of publishing, once you build yourself a library of magazines you are in good shape.

My favorite video when I was researching for my first batch:
Easy All Grain Brewing - Batch Sparge Method

This video is great, I probably watched it ten times before my first batch and a couple times while working on my first batch.

I also found this one helpful once I realized that chilling 5 gallons of wort without an immersion chiller takes forever:
How to make an immersion wort chiller.

Don has several other great videos and even a few of him reviewing some of my brews that I made and sent him in thanks for his helpful videos:



I also found his website to be very helpful and have fashioned several of my batches off of his recipes:
www.donosborn.com


 YouTube Channels 


Some of my other favorite YouTube channels that I highly recommend to home brewers are:



Forums that I have found to be useful at times are:
HomeBrewTalk.com - the largest brewing forum on the web, within HomeBrewTalk you will find several great clone recipes, here is a link to a recipe database: Can You Brew It Database
BrewingNetwork.com: http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/forum/


Blogs


Here are the best blogs that I have found, usually you can scroll through and find any topics that interest you:



Podcasts


My favorite podcasts, usually there are new episodes weekly or biweekly and the archives lend a wealth of knowledge, you can jump around in the archives or start from the beginning if you are a glutton there are over 5 years of episodes on most of these.  I find it easiest to access these via the iTunes store, Podcasts app on the iPhone, or the TuneInRadio app on your phone:



Magazines:


  • Brew Your Own Magazine - great magazine that I subscribe to.
  • Zymurgy - I would like to start getting this one, comes with your Amercian Homebrewers Association subscription.







Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)