The Brew Bag Blog

There are some misconceptions in the home beer brewing culture that lead me to write this post. Efficiency is a simple term in brewer's lingo. It means the degree to which the starch in grain, with the help of enzymes, is converted to sugar(s) during the grain mash and transferred into the boil kettle. The explanation of the conversion of starches to fermentable sugars is very complicated and involves PH, water temperature, and enzymatic hydrolysis. I won't go any further on this ( because I don't know much more), but will say that all brewers key in on this term...

Rex Slagel, founder of Brew In A bag Supplies and creator of the The Brew Bag® will be speaking at the conference this year. His seminar is:  Brew In A Bag: It Really Works!  Thursday, June 12 4:30 pm – 5:30 pmLocation: Salon A-D Brew In A Bag explained! We’ll cover every aspect of this method, including a few tips that will unravel the mystery of water volume and gravity. You will learn about equipment, insulation methods, bag material and uses, lifting techniques, and cooling. To spark ideas, we’ll show photos of rig set ups and solutions as seminar attendees...

In a recent article discussing different methods of brewing, the author differentiated "all-grain" from Brew In A Bag. I had to read the sentence twice. BIAB does not use extract, does not come in a kit, (although Brewer's Best is now offering six BIAB kits that include the hops, grain, priming sugar, yeast, and caps) and utilizes the same mashing schedule as the "all grain" method. Now here's the kicker - to make beer using a brew bag you start with grain, that's right, BIAB uses nuttin but grain! I'll tell you what's happening across the USA - new and...

The utilization is influenced by the vigor of the boil, the total gravity of the boil, the time of the boil and several other minor factors. The vigor of the boil can be considered a constant for each individual brewer, but between brewers there probably is some variation. The gravity of the boil is significant because the higher the malt sugar content of a wort, the less room there is for isomerized alpha acids. The strongest bittering factors are the total amount of alpha acids you added to the wort, and the amount of time in the boil for isomerization. Understandably then, most equations for IBUs work with these three variables (gravity, amount, and time) against a nominal utilization. As mentioned earlier, the utilization for alpha acids in homebrewing is generally accepted as topping out at about 30%.

http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter5-4.html