I hope everyone has had a chance to brew some delicious stouts this winter and a Märzen this spring on their BEERMKRs. As we approach summer, we’ll be transitioning back into classic summer seasonal MKRKITs like the Summer Seltzer, ‘Murica, Session IPA, the recently launched Stargazer Dry Hopped Pilsner, and re-launched Patio Pilsner. We have a lot of exciting new MKRKITs planned over the next couple of months, so watch your email and the BEERMKR app for announcements.
Over the past number of months our company has been going through some growing pains. We’ve had some changes to customer service that saw response times lengthen and the repair queue (for those in it) lengthen as well. For this, we can only apologize and say that we are working to address the issue, which is a small team with not enough time in the day to get everything done that needs to get done.
The major reason we’re so strapped on time is actually a great one – this winter and spring, BEERMKR has been part of Techstars! For those unfamiliar, Techstars is one of the best startup accelerators in the world. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Instacart all went through a startup accelerator. Accelerators help the founding team take the company to the next level through intense partnership, mentorship, and investment. We’re spending a lot of time addressing the nuts and bolts of what makes BEERMKR special, and positioning the company correctly to scale to the next level.
Wow. We opened up pre-orders for a batch of BEERMKRs coming in and we’re already half way sold out! If you are interested in buying a BEERMKR for delivery in June 2023, be sure to head over to the pre-order page before they are gone. I’m sure a number of you have noticed new pricing as well for BEERMKRs. We experimented with different prices on our hardware in 2022, and we found the ideal price point was a good deal lower than we were charging last year. From a company perspective, prices dictate a lot: sales pace, amount of ad spend required to acquire a new customer, and so on. After lots of experimentation and study, we have found that lower prices on BEERMKRs yield a healthier company structure all together.
Yesterday we also made available refurbished BEERMKRs. These are BEERMKRs that ended up back in our hands after a return, a repair, or other customer service related exchange. Our crew has cleaned up these units and gotten them ready for a new home. We’re offering them at a significant discount to new BEERMKRs and we only have a limited supply of them, so be sure to check them out while you can.
We’re still working on getting the remaining international orders sent out. Many of these are aging, and we apologize for the delay. We have big plans for international, but the recent problems in global logistics, particularly in China, have hampered our ability to execute on this. Our goal is still to ship our next build by the end of this year to our international customers and include strategic MKRKIT support in Europe. We already have an agreement signed with a fulfillment center in Germany to fulfill MKRKITs, because without access to MKRKITs, bags, and SteamHops, the value proposition of BEERMKRs is lower.
]]>The 5DAY Stout has smooth, complex notes of roasted barley and chocolate malt and a touch of black patent to add depth. The Golding and Fuggle bring the bitterness into delicate balance with the robust body. The Kveik yeast complete this beer in just 5 days, however the dark malts will require this beer to sit for a few more days before reaching its peak flavor.
Stouts usually require a few weeks to age and reach its peak flavor. Since this is a 5DAY beer, we needed to ensure that it could be drinkable within the first few days in the tap. To accomplish this, we built the grain bill to be on the lighter side for a Stout, but still stylistically qualify as a Stout. We kept the dark malts under 10%, which was plenty to add that dark color and flavor, but not enough to overwhelm. Our Chubby Stout by comparison is a higher ABV, more aggressive Stout, uses 25% dark grains split between roasted, chocolate, and two dark caramels. The more of these big grain based flavors you add, the longer it takes for all of those flavors to come together. I like to think of Stouts like cooking a chili. It takes a long time for all those flavors to come together. If you enjoy it too soon, you’ll be able to identify the individual components. Give it time to sit and those flavors merge to create something special.
This Stout is composed of 2-row, flaked wheat, roasted barley, chocolate malt, and black patent. The 2-row brings most of the fermentable sugar and the flaked wheat brings structure and dextrins for non-fermentable sweetness. The roasted, chocolate, and black patent malts bring a deep, robust, dark grain profile. We are using a blend of the three to add depth and complexity that you can’t achieve with just one dark malt on its own.
The English hops Goldings and Fuggle balance this beer with bitterness and a hint of hop flavor. Their noble characteristics (spice, earth) compliment the dark grains and produce the profile you would expect in a Stout.
Since this is a 5DAY beer, we are using Kveik! This is a true super-yeast that will eat through all those fermentable sugars in a day and get your beer ready to drink as soon as possible. The yeast settles out quickly, so be sure to check the bottom of your brewbag and run the vibe motor periodically if you see excess yeast accumulating. A few good flicks with your finger can dislodge stubborn yeast.
]]>We are back with StartEngine for another raise! A lot has happened since our last raise on StartEngine so let’s dig in.
I am extremely happy to say our product is in better shape than ever. When we launched BEERMKR at the end of 2020, we were in the thick of the COVID crisis, dealing with strained supply lines, and working through our first in-the-wild usage of BEERMKR. Over the first 6 months of them being in customer’s hands, we updated everything from the valves to the app to make the system more reliable and easy to use.
While we are happy with BEERMKR’s reliability today, there are still improvements that we are excited to continue working on. As we approach our third major build, we have a number of hardware and firmware revisions in the works for the BEERMKR and BEERTAP that will improve upon and streamline the already great user experience. The updates include a BEERTAP regulator with an on/off knob for gas which will prevent over foaming, an angled CO2 entry for the BEERTAP to allow for easier CO2 screw-in, adding bluetooth connectivity to improve initial setup, and a host of other small changes to improve the overall quality of the device.
As of this writing, we have 23 active MKRKITs available for purchase in our store with another half dozen in the works through the end of the year. Between our in-house MKRKIT recipes and custom recipes, our 2,000+ BEERMKRs in the wild have brewed over 200,000 beers!
During COVID, the at-home beer brewing market home appliance market saw very strong growth numbers as people were at home due to shut-down orders. This was very good for our business as we had a totally new group of people with extra time on their hands looking for something fun to do.
While new people interested in brewing was great news for us, we did still see a number of challenges. Freight costs from China quintupled, prices of grain and USA domestic freight increased, and inflation has hit levels not seen since the 1970s. In response to these increased input costs, we were forced to increase prices across our entire product line, moving the average price for MKRKITs from $17 to $19 and our machine MSRP from $579 to $649. Not all of these changes were received well by our customers but they were necessary to maintain the company.
We're excited to be moving forward as a company. A major part of this is ensuring we have capital available to build more BEERMKRs, MKRKITs, and make investments in our products. As such, we're back on StartEngine to raise another round! If you believe in what we are doing, please head over to our StartEngine page for more info.
]]>5.5% ABV, 38 IBUs
Hey everyone, it's Chris, lead brewer at BEERMKR. Here's a blast from my past. Manley Pale Ale is my original APA recipe from 1994. I brewed this recipe more than 30 times until I got it where I wanted. Tweaking hop varieties until IBUs balanced the maltiness for a smooth well rounded beer. I think you will enjoy this copper colored American Pale Ale as much as I do. Cheers and here's to many more years of brewing!
Grains
2-Row, Caramunich II, and Carafoam make up the grain profile for this beer. It has a classic pale ale body that has a touch of copper. The caramel malts give this beer a nice sweet sweet body.
Hops
Willamette and Brewers Gold bring the 38 IBUs of bitterness and an earthy backbone to the beer, and a Cascade yeast hop addition adds a hint of juicy grapefruit to the finish.
Yeast
The famous Chico strain is used to make this beer light, fruity, and exceptionally clean.
]]>The Hopshake IPA is a velvty IPA with loads of tropical fruit and citrus hop notes. The flaked grains and opulent hops give this beer a NEIPA-like quality, and the honey malt and lactose fill out the mouth feel and add a perception of sweetness. This is an IPA-lover's milkshake IPA.
When crafting this milkshake IPA, we wanted to create a beer that has all the creaminess of the milkshake style, but still holds true to the IPA namesake. So many milkshake IPAs have fruit additions and they skew away from the IPA style and we wanted to ensure this beer was an IPA first. However if you want to add fruit, you can! We recommend orange, blueberries, guava, or peaches. Fresh or frozen fruit should go in with the grain at the beginning. Aim for 1lb, and be sure to smash it up before it goes in.
The grain body is composed of 2-Row, Flaked Oats, Flaked Wheat, Carafoam, Honey Malt, and Lactose. The flaked grains give the beer structure. The Carafoam adds a residual sweetness. The Honey Malt brings a complex sweetness that resembles darker tinted honey. The lactose brings creaminess and a touch sweetness.
We are proud to use the Ales For ALS hop blend in this beer, and a percentage of the proceeds on the sale of this beer will be donated to the ALS Therapy Development Institute.
The hop bill consists of Amarillo® 60-Minute Steamhops for bitterness, and Lemondrop, Eureka!, and Ales For ALS hop blend as dry hops. This composition sways between citrus and melon to pine and resin.
West coast yeast is used to bring notes of red fruit and a clean finish.
AMARILLO® is a trademark owned by Virgil Gamache Farms, Inc.]]>
Introducing the Summer Seltzer!
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The seltzer craze is still in full effect, so we decided to jump in and launch a super easy, fast brewing, customizable Summer Seltzer!
As we spend the last few months looking for awesome flavor combos, the BEERMKR team just could not agree. So instead of pushing a single flavor on everyone, we figured we'd just let you all decide for yourself. Consider the Summer Seltzer a blank canvas. Have a look at what's in your fridge, your garden, or get crazy with it! Below are a list of ideas, or maybe even guidelines, for how to customize your Summer Seltzer.
Citrus Fruits
Just play the hits, right? This one is super easy and sure to please. Grab some lemons, limes, oranges, or whatever (or all of them?), and get zesting. For this, only use the zest, no fruit or juice.
Ingredients:
Oranges (3-5 large) or Lemons (4-5) or Limes (5-6)
How To:
Add to Brew Basket during Brew setup along with the corn sugar.
Cucumber Mint
Sounds refreshing, eh? Well it is!
Ingredients:
2-3 cucumbers peeled and chopped
10-15 fresh mint leaves
How To:
Add mint leaves to Brew Basket during Brew Setup.
Soak cucumbers in a 'neutral spirit', like vodka, to sanitize, then add to the Brew Basket at the Crash step.
Dry Hopped
Not quite ready to stray too far from your IPAs? Well, this hoppy seltzer is great to mix things up on an especially hot one.
Ingredients:
About 12g of raw hops
How To:
For bitterness, add hops during the Brew Setup step. If you're looking for a more floral 'dry hop' flavor and aroma, add during the Crash Step.
Fruit
This one is especially open ended. Fruit... Try strawberries, kiwi, mango, cherries. Mix and match to find some tasty combos.
Ingredients:
1lb of fruit, roughly chopped
How To:
Add to Brew Basket during Brew Setup.
Margarita Seltzer
This one was a TOTAL crowd pleaser in the shop. Swapping the corn sugar for agave gives it a tequila hint. It's been pretty hot in Boulder lately, and we've gone through a few batches of these.
Ingredients:
550g light Agave syrup
2-3 Oranges (zest only)
5-6 Limes (zest only)
How To:
Swap the corn sugar for Agave, and add everything into the Brew Basket during Brew Setup.
Floral (Lavender or Hibiscus)
If you're looking for a slightly more sophisticated taste, try these floral options. Or mix with a fruit of your choice!
Ingredients:
150-200g of food grade Lavender flowers or dried Hibiscus petals
How To:
Add to the Brew Basket during the Brew Setup.
]]>This beer is a pre-prohibition American Lager, styled off of the beers that that were brewed early in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Brewed with barley, rice and a bit of corn for a touch of sweetness. A touch of german hops keep the IBU low with just enough bitterness to balance the sweetness of the corn. Light in body and color.
America's brewing scene in the late 1800s looked much like the beer scene we have today in the 2020s: a few high quality breweries in every town, with some cities sporting dozens or more. Beer was then and is now largely a local affair with a few national brands. Amazingly, the 1800s saw twice as many breweries per capita in the USA than we have today.
Sadly, we all know what happened to these local brewpubs. Consolidation and competition thinned the number down to 1/3 of it's peak between 1875 and 1915, then came prohibition which zapped this number down to zero legal breweries in the USA. Since the end of prohibition in the 1930s, that number remained painfully low until the late 1970s when homebrewing was officially legalized by congress. What happened over the next 40 years was nothing short of remarkable. These newly minted homebrewers took their skills to market and built the craft beer revolution. Thanks 'Murica!
]]>West Coast IPA - 6.5% ABV - 65 IBU
For this West Coast IPA, we've partnered with Ales for ALS. All proceeds on the sale of this MKRKIT go to ALS Therapy Development Institute. The special hop blend Ahtanum, Ekuanot, Loral, HBC 630, HBC 586, and Citra. This blend produces a distinctly piny and resinous hop profile with notes of stone fruit and a touch of citrus. This excellent hop blend sits on top of a classic light bodied malt bill designed to let hops play the central role.
ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that impacts over 450,000 people worldwide and there is no cure, and an average life expectancy of 3-5 years after diagnosis. That’s why we’ve paired with Ales for ALS. They are a national fundraising and awareness organization that donates to the ALS Therapy Development Institute through the lens of of craft beer. Every year they partner with hop farms in Yakima Washington donate a unique hop blend to select breweries around the country. These breweries create a special brew and donate a portion of the profits to the ALS Therapy Development Institute. This year over 200 breweries from around the world will brew their own ALS beer, including BEERMKR!
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Few beer styles inspire the same level of revelry as an Imperial IPA. The Imperial IPA is the epitome of craft beer – malts, hops, and yeast, all pushed to their absolute limits, but like a formula 1 race car, holding the line and making it look easy at the same time. Pliney the Elder, Headdy Topper, Maharaja, all beers viewed as a step above regular IPAs for their excellence and opulent use of ingredients.
Enabling this style on the BEERMKR wasn’t easy. It required a lot of tweaks, process development, as well as a new part for the BEERMKR, the Hop Filter, to prevent clogs when using so many hops. It also required a double mash to get the lofty 9.8% ABV.
The grain bill is very simple. All 2-Row with a touch of Munich. Because the OG is high (1.096) and the FG is also high (1.022), this beer finishes sweet with plenty of body, eliminating the need the need for caramel or dextrin malts. Some big IPAs like Pliney the Elder actually use dextrose (corn sugar) to dry out the body for exactly this reason.
Holy hops batman, this beer has a lot of hops! 102g to be exact. It is bittered with CTZ at 60, 30, and 10, and opulently dry hopped with Simcoe, Centennial, and CTZ. The result is a piny, resinous, slightly fruity, west coast hop profile that doesn’t disappoint. The CTZ bittering additions produce 83 IBUs, resulting in 0.86 GU:BU ratio.
US-05 produces the classic west coast hop profile: soft fruit, clean esters. Because of the high gravity in this beer, expect a much longer fermentation than normal.
We hope you love this beer as much as we do. Throughout it’s 9 month development in the BEERMKR brewing lab, this beer has consistently been the most popular beer amongst the BEERMKR staff. We just can’t keep taps of this beer around very long!
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This 5Day Wheat is light and approachable with enough hops to make it undeniably American. For a lesser hop character, add just half of each hop bag.
This Wheat Ale will be good immediately upon carbonation. We recommend leaving the beer in your BEERMKR for as long as it takes to achieve the optimal level of clarity. The beer will be good immediately upon carbonation and will be great within a week.
This 5Day Wheat is composed of 2-row, wheat, and flaked wheat. The wheat brings a creamy and sweet character to the body and the flaked wheat brings structure. The result is a 4.9% ABV beer that doesn't taste thin.
The hop bill consists of Cascade, Willamette, and Hallertau Tradition. The Cascade brings most of the bitterness and notes of citrus. The Willamette and Hallertau Tradition bring an earthy spiciness to the beer with a floral nose.
This beer is fermented with Kveik, a yeast that ferments out completely in under 24 hours. It has a subtle profile of citrus and pineapple, and drops out quickly. It needs a few days at cold temperatures to flocculate, and we recommend using Clarifier to fully polish the beer.
]]>“Grain to glass in 5 days? That’s preposterous!”. If that’s what you’re thinking, you would have been right 3 years ago. However a game changer in the brewing industry came to us all in the form of a new commercially packaged yeast strain called Kveik. This yeast is actually quite old. Hailing from Norway, this yeast is a farmhouse strain that has been happily fermenting beers for Norwegians for hundreds of years. The flavor profile is exceptionally clean with no real noticeable flavors at all. That makes this yeast well suited to ferment styles that are heavily dependent on other ingredients to bring the flavors like the hops from an IPA or the dark grains in a Stout.
Kveik is able to completely ferment out a beer in under 24 hours, and it can do it without producing any of the off flavors yeast are known to produce when fermenting too hot and too fast. Fermentation takes place around 100º F, and your beer is ready to drink within a day or two of pitching your yeast. Wild!
Counting in brew time, fermentation time, cold crash, and carbonation, you can be drinking a Kveik beer in about 5 days from start to finish. This is the perfect way to try different flavor combinations back to back to see how big of a difference they make on your beer.
]]>Ever wondered how lagers arrived in Mexico? What makes a Mexican lager different from a traditional lager? You got questions, we got answers.
So how did Lagers make it to Mexico?
While Mexico has a long tradition of fermented drinks, the origins of the Mexican lager are linked back to the 19th century. When Austrian and German immigrants started settling in Texas and Mexico, they brought their lager recipes along with them.
What makes a Mexican lager different from other lagers?
The Mexican lager is secretly just a Vienna lager, but brewed with adjuncts like corn or maize, which is native to this area. Many of the darker amber colored Mexican lagers present in the market have a more similar grain bill to those of their Austrian forefathers.
When did the Mexican lager get so popular?
Back during Prohibition, beer obviously wasn't being brewed here in the States, giving Mexican brewers a major opportunity. Much of that growth game during those prohibition years, and now Mexico is the worlds largest beer exporter with over $4 billion in sales annually.
Does Mexico only brew yellow lagers?
Not at all! Even some of the more traditional Mexican brands have darker varieties available, and there is a burgeoning craft beer scene. Here's a killer list of micro-breweries to check out in Mexico!
Cervecería de Colima – Across their five main beers, they have a German Pilsner, American Pale Ale, Porter, Tropical IPA (yes, in Mexico,) and a Session IPA. When in Jalisco and Colima, find it. Amazing branding and very cool bottles, too.
Baja Brewing – The Por Favor Mexican IPA and the Pelirroja Amber Ale. Go find a cantina if you are close by.
Cerveza Minerva – From Jalisco, they are making beers of all styles including IPAs and Belgians. If you see a Dorado de Guadalajara, grab one.
Monzón Brewing Co – Magical place in Puerta Vallarta with a great taproom. Make sure to try the White Noise Hefeweizen.
Los Muertos Brewing – The West Coast IPA, Revenge, Agave Maria Amber Ale which uses Victory Malt. Awesome food and atmosphere.
Puerto Juárez Brewery – This is the nano-brewery jewel of the Cancun area. Tasting menus, hazy IPAs, brown ales, and amazing people. Fermin Lopez Flores is doing great things. Don’t skip this one if you are heading down to the beach destination.
]]>One of the major benefits of using BEERMKR is not having to bottle beer. There are however some scenarios where bottling your beer is the right move. For example, if you're brewing a Märzen and want to cold condition it throughout the summer so it's matured and ready for Oktoberfest. Or if you are brewing an Imperial Stout and don't want to devote an entire BEERTAP to a 10% ABV monster. Bottles are a great way have just one at a time. Bottles also great for sharing with friends.
The BEERMKR Bottling Kit allows you to take any beer you've brewed in your BEERMKR and bottle it for safe keeping. It comes with the following items:
Using a 3ml pipette, measure out 1.5ml of Star San Concentrate and squirt it into the empty spray bottle. Fill the spray bottle up with water until it's full. Star San is a food-grade acid-based sanitizer that doesn't require rinsing. It is flavorless as well so it's perfectly fine for it to come in contact with your beer.
Arrange 12 bottles on a drip tray. We like using the one that is included with the BEERTAP. Using the Star San Spray Bottle, spray down the inside of each 12oz bottle, ensuring you wet the entire inside of the bottle. Then tip the bottles upside down to drain the sanitizer.
Spray the inside and outside of the bottling wand so it is completely wet. Get enough Star San inside the bottling wand to partially fill the tube. Then move the tube around so it is completely sanitized. Grab a spare GreyValve (gasket color doesn't matter), give it a good rinse under the sink, then spray it down with Star San. If you don't have a spare GreyValve laying around, just disconnect it from your WasteBag. Connect the Bottling Wand to the GreyValve.
Array 12 bottle caps next to your bottles and spray them down so they are wet.
Decide how much carbonation you want. Low carbonation (stouts and porters) require 3 drops. Normal carbonation (IPAs, pale ales, most American styles) require 4 drops. High carbonation (belgians) require 5 drops. Count out the total number of drops you'll need for your bottles and spray them down with Star San.
Place your sanitized drops into the bottles. Again, that's 3 per bottle for low carbonation, 4 per bottle for normal carbonation, and 5 per bottle for high carbonation.
Disconnect the BrewTub from the top port of the BeerBag and remove the BrewTub. Spray down the top WhiteValve with Star San. Connect the GreyValve of the Bottling Wand into the top WhiteValve of the BeerBag.
Press the bottling wand to the bottom of your first beer bottle. Beer should begin flowing. If it does not flow, give the bag a bit of a press to start the flow. Once the flow starts, gravity will take over. Check the line and make sure there aren't any bubbles in the line. If there are, raise the bottling wand up above the bag and let the bubbles work their way out of the wand.
Gently press the bottling wand on the bottom of each bottle, filling it up. Let the beer get up to the very top of the bottle before removing the wand. The displacement of the wand itself will create the right amount of headspace. Fill up all 12 bottles.
Place bottle caps on the tops of each bottle and cap it with the red capper. Just center the capper over the bottle cap and press down with the two levers. We recommend capping each beer bottle as you go to prevent the beer from being exposed to oxygen.
The bottling process can be a bit involved. It is messy, it takes time, and it exposes your beer to oxygen and bacteria. Do your best to minimize splashing of beer and to reduce any exposure to air. Also be sure you get sanitizer on every part thoroughly. It only takes a little bacteria to ruin a batch of beer, so be vigilant with the sanitizer!
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What is a Märzen?
Märzenbier, or simply Märzen (pronounced “mare-tsen”), is a German beer style that was historically brewed in March. In the 16th century, it was a high gravity, high bitterness beer designed to last through long periods of storage. It was often the last beer a brewery would produce before the summer season where brewing was prohibited by 16th century German law. While not yet having a firm grasp on microbiology in the 1500s, Germans understood that beer made while it was hot outside didn’t taste good, so it was written into law that the brewing of beer could only occur between September 29th and April 23rd.
How did Oktoberfest start?
In October of 1810, crown prince Ludwig of Bavaria married princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. The entire city of Munich was invited to the wedding and the stores of remaining Märzen were opened and consumed over the multi-day celebration. This was the very first Oktoberfest. Why do we celebrate Oktoberfest? Beer! What better excuse to celebrate a holiday then unleashing your stores of Marzen. Since this inaugural impromptu Oktoberfest, the folks in Munich have been celebrating every since.
When is Oktoberfest?
Contrary to the name, we actually celebrate Oktoberfest in September! Why do we celebrate Oktoberfest in September? Well, the reasons couldn’t be more selfish. Basically, the weather is better. Longer days and warmer weather make for a more exciting beer drinking holiday.
How does a Märzen become an Oktoberfest?
Borrowing its name from the autumn festival, the Oktoberfest beer style simply refers to an aged Märzen, one that was brewed in the spring to be enjoyed in the fall. The dark base malts and relatively high alcohol content plays a large role in the Märzen’s evolution into refined, rich, smooth lager.
How do you brew an Oktoberfest beer?
To create an authentic Oktoberfest, ready for the fall festivities, you have to brew a Märzen at some point in March or April. If you are using your BEERMKR to brew it, just pick up the Märzen/Oktoberfest MKRKIT and get to brewing. We also recommend using the water chemistry kit to adjust the brewing water to match that of Munich. This really adds to the authenticity of the beer.
What’s the best way to age you Marzen?
After your beer has finished, we highly recommend bottling it for the long aging process instead of keeping it in the BEERTAP. Aside from occupying your BEERTAP for 6 months and preventing you from using it with other brews, the BEERTAP was only designed to hold beer for 3 months. The BeerBag and BEERTAP separate out yeast and sediment from your finished beer, but the yeast and sediment remain in the bag. This is detrimental to long term aging as the yeast can autolyze, or self destruct, after many months making your beer taste sharp, meaty, and sulphuric. Also, the BEERTAP is a forced pressure system that can lose pressure over long periods of time. If the pressure is gone entirely, oxygen has a chance of creeping in. Therefore we recommend keeping beer in the BEERTAP for 3 months or less.
Bottles on the other hand get you a few things that your BEERTAP can’t. First is yeast and sediment removal. With bottles, we leave all that yeast and sediment in the bag while bottling so the bottles are perfectly clean and ready to drink. The second is oxygen control. Glass is impermeable to oxygen and when the bottle caps are sealed, there is no chance of carbonation escaping or oxygen getting in. Therefore, bottles are the perfect vessel for long aging your Märzen into an Oktoberfest!
After bottling your beer, it’s best to let your bottles sit at room temperature for 2 weeks so they can generate CO2 and carbonate the beer. After 2 weeks, we highly recommend placing the bottles in a refrigerator to age for 6 months. Tuck them in the back, hide them in the salad drawer, wherever you can find space to stow them. This will give them an authentic cold condition that will develop the famous Oktoberfest flavor profile over the long summer. Then when Oktoberfest is in full swing in the fall, your bottles of Märzen will have made the transition to Oktoberfest.
Prost!
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What exactly is the difference between a porter and a stout? Great question!
Nowadays it’s actually pretty hard to tell. Porters have deviated so much from its origins that it is now almost indistinguishable from stout. That said, it didn't start that way.
In the1800s a "stout" was technically a stronger – or stouter – version of a porter, which was a common brown beer. So basically was a high ABV porter. And brown stout was . . . a stout brown beer. So understandably, things quickly got muddled. Historians have found that many British porters and brown stouts in the early 19th century used identical recipes (that pretty much solves the case of the roasted barley myth.1). In 1817 Daniel Wheeler invented a technique for roasting malt until it looked like espresso (now known as ‘black patent’). While England was still enjoying their porters based on brown malt, up in Ireland, Dublin breweries embraced the use of black malts. Combined with Dublin’s soft water, the resulting beer was dry and sharp. Hello Irish Stout.
To help disambiguate Stouts from Porters in the eyes of a very confused craft beer loving public, many American craft breweries label their more aggressive dark beer as the Stout, while their softer, smoother, lower alcohol content dark beer is the Porter. Breweries like Bells, Deschutes, and Stone Brewing tend to follow this general rule of thumb. Thank you for setting us all straight.
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In honor of Stout Month, we set out to answer some of the most burning questions about Stouts:
In order to truly understand the stout, you must drink the stout. So we decided to sit down with 5 separate stouts for a blind taste testing to put our stout knowledge and beer reputation on the line.
How does the game work?
Well, each contestant will sit down with 5 stout samples; 4 commercial and 1 made on BEERMKR. At first tasting, we won’t know what beers are in front of us; we just sniff and sip and let our brains go wild. Next, we’ll reveal the 5 beers and attempt to match each sample with its correct bottle.
Who are the contestants?
The BEERMKR team, of course. Going down the line we have Brett, who is admittedly, “just not that into stouts”, but would be considered a man of moderate beer knowledge. Up next is Aaron, our resident Stout lover and all around beer nerd. And finally, we have Matt, who learned everything he knows about Stouts during our last office hours (but man oh man does this guy know a lot of other stuff).
So three contestants with vastly different knowledge and tastes in beer. Let’s see how they do!
So how did we do?
Not bad at all! Matt, total dark horse, leaned hard on strong analytical thinking and sound reason, went 5 for 5. Aaron swagged right in and nailed all 5 as well (though boldly made some blind predictions, which were wrong…). Brett admittedly got lost in his own brain on the Guinness, and was unable to comprehend that it was the same family as the other beers, ultimately pegging it as a Porter, going 3 for 5. (This also brings up a great question we hope to answer another time, but what is the difference between a Stout and Porter?). So all in all, the founders of a company specializing in beer brewing equipment are relatively competent in their beer tasting! Huzzah!
What did we learn?
Well, there is an enormous variety in stouts these days. There are Breakfast Stouts, Coffee Stouts, Milk Stouts, Imperial Stouts, and the traditional Guinness style stouts. There stouts with heavy roasted notes, with a full rich body, and much lighter drinkable stouts. And there are adjuncts a plenty! This dark style, for whatever reason, lends itself to fun additions like chocolate, oats, coffee and more.
American craft stouts and Ye Olde Fashioned stouts are related, but feel like distant cousins. Aside from the dark color, sipping side by side, you'd hardly put them in the same family. Taking a sip of an Imperial Stout next to a frothy Guinness, and the latter feels almost like a light beer (which technically, it almost is, calorically speaking…). The American craft stouts are, across the board, much higher ABV. They also come hard with heavy roasted notes, as well as plenty of fun adjuncts. While Guinness, in comparison, almost feels like a session beer. And given the pub culture and the way the lads put them down, it makes all the sense in the world. An afternoon in a cozy pub taking down Imperial Stouts would put you on your arse in a heartbeat.
There’s plenty more to learn about stouts, and we encourage all our brewers to taste their BEERMKR brews right next to commercial samples. It’s incredibly rewarding to start to analyze beers a little closer and pick and choose what you enjoy most. Look at the labels, see what ingredients they’re using vs. what our recipes are made with. Sometimes a small tweak can go a long way. The beauty of BEERMKR is the ability to customize! We want everyone to brew and enjoy the best beer possible. Cheers!
]]>High ABV Stouts have been around forever. In fact, Stout was originally used as an adjective to describe a beer that was higher in alcohol content. A Stout Amber for example, or a Stout Porter. In time Stout became it’s own classification as a dark beer, and in American craft beer, it has taken on yet another adaptation to simply be “aggressive dark beer”. Imperial Stout takes it up a notch further and usually comes in above 10% ABV.
The BEERMKR Imperial Stout is a huge beer, coming in at 10.5% ABV with an all-grain mash. In the machine we achieve this with process called “double mashing”, which is exactly what it sounds like. We run the brew cycle twice with two sets of grain to extract even more sugar.
This Imperial Stout is all about the grains. A huge amount of 2-Row gets the fermentable sugar content into high gravity range. Biscuit malt brings a nice toasted, nutty flavor profile that is similar to baked goods. Melanoidin malt provides a hearty amount of, you guessed it, melanoidins! This malt is often used as a substitute for decoction mashing where the wort is removed from the grains and boiled separately to concentrate sugar and produce malliard reactions. Malliard reactions are responsible for the browning of bread crust in the oven, and the browning of sugar when creating caramel.
So far in the grain profile we have light fermentable sugar from the two-row, baked goods profile from the Biscuit malt, and complex browned sugar profile from the Melanoidin malt. To make it a Stout, we need to add some dark grains. To accomplish this, we are using both Black Malt and Roasted Barley. Black Malt is malted barley, like 2-Row, that has been kilned at high temperatures until it’s very dark. Doing this to malted barley provides a more neutral, clean flavor profile. Roasting unmalted barley results in a bit more astringency which can dry out the flavor profile, and that is exactly what Roasted Barley is. Using both Roasted Barley and Black Malt allow us to balance the dark flavor profile and dial in how aggressive we want the dark grain profile to be.
We don’t have many hops in this beer, just a single 60-minute addition of Magnum to bring the bitterness to a respectable 62 IBU. The resulting bittering units to gravity units (BU:GU) ratio is 0.56. This is computed by dividing 62 IBUs by the original gravity after moving the decimal to the right two places (1.103 starting gravity = 110.3 gravity units). This ratio gives the brewer guidance on how balanced the beer will be. For comparison, Light Lagers have a BU:GU ratio of 0.30 (not very bitter), IPAs are between 1.0 and 1.2 (very bitter), German Pils is around 0.6 (moderately bitter). What this calculation doesn’t do is factor in the bitterness derived from the dark malts, which is unfortunately not easily calculated and must be measured by a laboratory spectrophotometer. When doing so, this beer will come out closer to 0.8 in its BU:GU ratio.
This beer is fermented with an English derived S-04 yeast. S-04 is a very clean yeast with tart fruit esters that come together nicely in a beer this big. In every mash, there will be some portion of sugars produced that will not be fermentable by saccharomyces cerevisiae, or standard brewers yeast. The more grain we mash, the more of these non-fermentable sugars end up in your beer. Couple that with yeast becoming less efficient as the alcohol increases, and the end result is more sugar left over with higher gravity beers. This is expected in all high gravity styles and is the case here as well. This left over sugar provides a great body and mouth feel to counteract some of the boozy notes that inevitably happen with 10%+ ABV beers.
All this flavor and ABV development takes time to achieve. Your BEERMKR will perfectly maintain the fermentation temperature of the beer and prevent any off flavors from developing. The primary fermentation and rest will wrap up in 11 days, and we recommend cold conditioning this monster for another week before pouring a glass. After 3 weeks in the tap, the layered complexity of this beer will become apparent. If ever there were a BEERMKR beer to bottle and cellar for a year or two, this would be it!
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In honor of Kveik and the deep winters of the north, we are excited to release 8 different stouts, all based on Kveik, all sharing the same grain bill, and all sharing the same hops (except one, more on that later), but adding one stand-out ingredient that dramatically changes the composition of the beer. The result is 8 new beers that are all somewhat similar, but markedly different where it counts.
The Chocolate Stout uses toasted cacao nibs from Ghana to add a rich, authentically chocolate, flavor profile to the beer.
When To Add: You’ll get a notification to add the cacao nibs after fermentation ends. Grab your SqueezeBar and install it in the outermost position (the same one used for dry hops) and toss your cacao nibs into the BrewTub.
The Coconut Stout uses coconut flakes to add a distinct coconut flavor to your beer. You can toast these in your oven for a few minutes to add a bit more complexity to the flavor, or simply add them raw.
When To Add: You’ll get a notification to add the coconut after fermentation ends. Grab your SqueezeBar and install it in the outermost position (the same one used for dry hops) and toss your coconut flakes into the BrewTub.
The Oak Stout uses oak cubes to add a barrel aged flavor profile to your beer. It is surprising how much the oak brings to the table from a flavor standpoint, with distinct wood and vanilla, flavors associated with wine and whisky. Want to step it up a notch? Soak your oak cubes in whisky, wine, or any other spirit for a few days to impart that flavor profile as well. The oak impact will continue to grow over time if you keep the oak cubes in the BeerBag.
When To Add: Add your oak cubes directly to the BeerBag when setting up your brew.
The Valentines Stout uses both cacao nibs and cherry juice to bring a chocolate truffle vibe to the stout.
When To Add: Add the cherry juice to your water upon brew setup and you’ll get a notification to add the cacao nibs after fermentation ends. Grab your SqueezeBar and install it in the outermost position (the same one used for dry hops) and toss your cacao nibs into the BrewTub.
The Milk Stout is the only stout with a modified hop profile. We’ve removed the 60-minute CTZ addition entirely to drop the IBUs down from 70 to 30. This rebalancing is imperative for the smooth lactose to come through and give you that creamy sweet taste we’re all looking for in a Milk Stout.
When To Add: mix the lactose in with the grain at initial brew setup.
The Coffee Stout is a challenging beer to make. Coffee and beer are at odds with each other: coffee needs to be brewed and consumed immediately, where beer is often better if aged a month or two. So how do we marry these two vices together in a perfect marriage? A super fast fermenting Kveik yeast is the answer!
When To Add: Prep a cold brew coffee concentrate in a french press with 100g of coffee and 12oz of water. Let it sit for 18-24 hours at room them and pour it into your BEERMKR’s BrewTub when you get the notification. No french press? A mason jar works just as well.
Want to justify a beer for breakfast? Throw milk, oatmeal, coffee, and maple syrup in there!
When To Add: The lactose and oats get added with the grains, maple syrup gets added with the first water addition. Coffee gets added at the end: Prep a cold brew coffee concentrate in a french press with 100g of coffee and 12oz of water. Let it sit for 18-24 hours at room them and pour it into your BEERMKR’s BrewTub when you get the notification. No french press? A mason jar works just as well.
Do you like IPAs? Do you like Stouts? If you answered yes to both of these questions, you've got to try the FIVEDAY Dry Hopped Stout. It starts out with the same FIVEDAY base stout, but then we dry hop the bejusus out of it with piny, dank, hops that are more likely to be found in a west coast IPA than a Stout. It's incredible and we are dumbfounded as to why more brewers don't do this.
When To Add: Simcoe, Centennial, and CTZ hops are added during the normal dry hop stage. Once you get a notification to add dry hops, grab your SqueezeBar and install it in the outermost position and toss your hops into the BrewTub.
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When talking to homebrewers doing it the old fashioned way, we usually get the question: “why use a BEERMKR instead of using [enter your favorite piece of traditional brewing equipment here]?”. The answer is easy: because no other piece of brewing equipment combines every aspect of brewing like BEERMKR does.
In this article, we’re going to unpack that question and that answer and see how much equipment you really would need to do everything BEERMKR does for you and your brews. We’re going to look at all phases of the brewing process and lay out what pieces of traditional brewing equipment you will need to accomplish each vs simply using a BEERMKR.
To summarize what BEERMKR does:
All in all, you'll be spending 10 to 15 minutes of your time on each brew. 5 to set it up, another 5 at yeast pitch, and another 5 while transferring to the BEERTAP. Cleanup is a snap - just toss your brewtub in the dishwasher and recycle the plastic brewbag.
Now let's see what it will take to replace this process with traditional brewing equipment!
Mashing is the process of converting the starches of your grain into fermentable sugars. There are also various enzymes which can be activated along the way to do different things, like break down beta glucans and proteins producing a higher quality, more fermentable wort. Achieving the right temperature also dictates whether you’re be producing a mash with an alpha-amylase bias, responsible for complex unfermentable sugar production, or a beta-amylase bias, responsible for simple fermentable sugar production. Temperature control during the mash is key to producing a healthy, fermentable wort. Some methods, like brew in a bag, are near impossible to control the temperature to any degree of reliability. Others like insulated cooler mash tuns provide the temperature stability, but lack controllability in changing the temperature. RIMs and HERMs systems use pumps, temperature controllers, and multiple heating vessels to control the temperature of the mash and are far better than just cooler mash tuns or stove top brew in a bag setups. Finally there are the integrated mash and boil devices such as Mash & Boil and Grainfather. These are all in one RIMs systems that make temperature control easy, but come with a hefty price tag.
Brew In A Bag |
Brew Kettle: $89 Brew Bag: $10 Total: $99 Predictability: Low Automation: Low Labor: High |
Mash Tun Cooler |
Mash Tun Cooler: $200 Brew Kettle: $89 Total: $289 Predictability: Moderate |
RIMS System |
Heat Exchange Coil: $89 Temperature Controller: $50 High Temperature, Beverage Grade Pump: $120 Brew Kettle: $89 Total: $478 |
All In One Mash and Boil |
Automated Mash and Boil System: $299-$999 |
A Note On Extracts
You can use extract to skip this step, but extracts usually leave a certain “extract taste” that you’ll never find in commercially produced beer, so for the purpose of this article we’re going to ignore extract because the results just aren’t as good as all grain mashes.
Boiling
This part of the process is relatively straight forward. In the case of the Brew In A Bag and the All In One methods of mashing, you'll simply remove your grain and crank up the heat to get it to a boil. This is the major benefits of these systems since you won't be transferring your wort to a boil kettle because you'll just boil in the same vessel. Both the RIMs and the cooler mash tun will need a pump or gravity to move the wort into a boil kettle.
Wort Chilling
After your boil is complete, you'll need to remove the heat somehow. Some brewers will transfer to their fermenter while the wort is still hot. This isn't great to do because it introduces oxygen to the hot wort, potentially oxidizing compounds in the wort which can produce off flavors in the glass. Therefore brewers use a wort chiller to cool the wort down in temperature. Wort chillers are large coils or plates that wort and cold water pass through to exchange the heat out of the wort. They are often plugged into a garden hose.
Coil Wort Chiller |
Coil Wort Chiller: $75 Predictability: High Automation: Low Labor: High |
Fermentation
Fermentation is where beer is made. The old adage goes "brewers make wort, yeast make beer". And that is largely true. However the job of the brewer is by no means done when fermentation begins. Temperature control and yeast management is critical to the beer coming as the style you set out to make that is free from off flavors.
Fermenters
Fermenters range from flat bottomed buckets all the way up to temperature controlled conicals. Buckets do work well, however the lack of cone on the bottom makes yeast removal difficult. Conicals are wonderful because the yeast gathers in a tight cone on the bottom of the vessel, allowing them to be easily separated from your finished beer.
Flat Bottomed Buckets |
Flat Bottomed Bucket: $14 Spigot: $3 Total: $20 |
Conicals These include inexpensive plastic conicals all the way up to multi-thousand dollar stainless steel conicals. |
Conical: $99-$999 |
Fermentation Temperature Control
Without temperature control, you're leaving your finished beer entirely up to chance. Fermenting a few degrees above or below the ideal temperature range for a yeast can render off-flavors that will make your beer taste like bad homebrew instead of pro-quality beer you find at the store. Most ale yeast require a temperature between 65º and 68º to make off-flavor-free beer. Lager yeast need to be fermented between 50º and 54º. Saison yeast need to be at 78º-84º. Kveik needs to be at 100º. Stray just a few degrees above or below these ranges and you'll get noticeable off flavors.
Here are the options to control temperature:
Second refrigerator and temperature controller |
Refrigerator: $100-$500 Heater: $50 Temperature Controller: $50 - $100 Extra space in your house to hold a second refrigerator: YMMV Predictability: High |
Insulated Bag Place your fermenter into this bag, then add a few frozen 2-liter bottles. The frozen 2-liters will absorb heat inside the airspace of the bag and keep your fermenting beer 5º to 10º below the ambient temperature of your room. This is very hard to control the actual temperature of your fermenting beer, which allows off flavors to still be produced, and you'll have to swap frozen bottles once every day or two. |
Insulated Bag: $69 |
Glycol Cooler These glycol chillers are miniature versions of their commercial counterparts that circulate cold glycol through a coil inside your fermenter (costs extra) or a special jacket wrapped around your fermenter (also costs extra). They are extremely accurate and produce high quality fermentations. |
Glycol Chiller: $699-$1999 |
Fermentation Progress Monitoring
To properly manage your yeast temperatures, you must know what stage of fermentation they are in. Unless your fermenter is a clear carboy, you won't be able to tell by looking at it. Commercial breweries have fancy real time gravity and alcohol sensors in their tanks they can use to understand how fermentation is progressing, or they can take a sample and measure it manually. For homebrewers, taking a manual sample can be an option, but there are also tools available to help make that process automatic and safe by use of wireless communication.
Manual Sample Sanitize the spigot and pull a sample into a glass and measure the gravity with a hydrometer. You can then use this information to change the temperature of your fermenting yeast. |
Hydrometer: $20 |
Floating Hydrometer This floats inside your fermenting beer and it measures the buoyancy of the device. The more buoyant, the more sugar is present. The less buoyant, the less sugar is present. It then connects to your smart phone via bluetooth to give your real time readings. The real problem with these is they are information only and it's up to you to use the information to make changes to your fermentation. |
Floating Hydrometer: $149 |
Serving
There are many options to serve your finished beer, ranging from bottles all the way up to your own kegerator system. Bottling is very labor intensive but the portability of bottles is undeniable. Kegs are extremely convenient, but are bulky and expensive. There are smaller portable options, but they only hold 1 gallon at a time.
Bottling Beer Bottling requires bottles, caps, a capper, a bottling line, priming sugar, and a bottling bucket. The beer needs to be transferred to the bottling bucket to be mixed with the priming sugar which will allow the remaining yeast to ferment in the bottle producing carbonation. The challenge with this method is you do it in the presence of oxygen which can cause infections and oxidation in your bottles |
Bottles: $20 Bottling Wand: $12 Bottling Bucket: $18 Bottle Caps: $5 |
1-Gallon Portable Kegs |
1-Gallon Portable Keg: $150 Bottling Wand: $12 Predictability: High |
Kegerator, Kegs, and CO2 By far the most luxurious beer serving setup, it's your own bar in your basement. Or garage. Or living room. Or wherever you can find place to stash it. Plug in the keg, set your pressure, and wait for it to carbonate. Pull just a little bit at a time to taste or pull a series of pints for friends. |
Kegerator: $500 CO2 Regulator: $70 Corny Keg: $100 Predictability: High |
Cleaning
Cleanup is the drag on every brew day. Every piece of equipment you see on this page needs to be cleaned somehow. These are also large items so you'll need to use specialized cleaners such as PBW which dissolve beer gunk and will have you running hoses or putting all this stuff in your bathtub to get hot water. It's not uncommon for brewers to spend over an hour cleaning their equipment, and there are even automated systems you can buy to make the process a bit easier.
What's The Cost?
Lowest Price Without Temperature Control: $353
Choosing all of the least expensive options above will get you a Brew In A Bag mash setup, a wort chiller, a brew bucket, an insulated fermentation bag, a hydrometer, and bottles. This method will be 100% up to your skill as a brewer to manage all of the temperatures, cleaning, and sanitation to produce off-flavor free beer. While it's certainly possible to do, chances are high you will run into bumps in the process that can generate off flavors.
Lowest Price with Temperature Control: $674
Choosing the equipment that will give you the ability to control the temperature on the hot side and on the cold side will add a decent about of cost, but it will allow you to produce defect free beer if you can also manage to keep the beer from oxidizing and getting infected during transfer. This also requires 6-8 hour brew days and manual monitoring of the whole process. This includes a mash tun cooler, brew kettle, fermentation buckets, a refrigerator with temperature control, a hydrometer, and bottles. Swapping out the mashtun cooler for a low priced all in one mash and boil unit is advised as they're not too much more expensive and you get some automation on the mash side.
Adding a draft system: $766 - $1,364
Just swapping out bottles and adding a Kegerator to above will drive the price north substantially. It's arguable that a kegerator will be a nice accessory for your home, which is undeniable, if you have the space for one. The portable 1-gallon draft system is a great middle ground between bottling and true kegging, but it will only handle 1 gallon and most of this equipment specializes in 5 gallons.
Adding a conical: $846 - $2,363
Conicals give you freedom to manage the yeast like the pros. Add yeast to the bottom or harvest yeast easily. These vessels go a long way to giving you the tools to make great beer.
With BEERMKR, all of these things are built into one convenient countertop device that costs just $649. It takes 5 minutes to set up a brew, it monitors temperatures and CO2 production, and manages the yeast automatically through CO2 monitoring. The end result is pro-quality beer that you didn't need to spend hours of labor and countless pieces of equipment to produce.
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The Scottish Wee Heavy MKRKIT is a dark amber strong ale crafted in the style of historic Wee Heavies from Scotland like McEwan's and Traquair House Ale. The toasted grain bill develops complex flavors that finish slightly sweet. That sweetness is balanced by a high alcohol content and classic Goldings and Fuggle hops.
This Wee Heavy is made up of Maris Otter, Munich, Melanoidin, Special B, Carafa 2 Special, Carafoam, and a touch of dextrose. The Maris Otter brings a nutty base, and the Munich rounds off the base malts with a toasted biscuit flavor. Melanoidin malt brings a kettle caramelization sweetness and complexity to the flavor profile, and Special B adds a dark raison finishing sweetness. Carafa 2 Special is a dehusked dark grain that provides a touch of color without the resulting bitterness that roasted husks produce in the beer. The Carafoam provides head retention, and the dextrose is a clean and simple sugar to dry out the body just a touch.
Goldings 60-minute and 10 minute are both used to get both bitterness and aromatics, and Fuggle 20 minute provides a nice flavor presence with a few IBUs of bitterness. These hops are of UK origin and provide the hop profile you'd expect out of a Wee Heavy.
This brew uses US-05 yeast. While it may seem odd to produce a Scottish ale with an American yeast strain, the flavor profile it produces (clean with a touch of ripe fruit) is a perfect match for the style. In fact, a large number of Scottish ales have placed medals at the NHC that were fermented with US-05.
We recommend brewing this beer with the Edinburgh water profile.
Oak Cubes, 15g. Add to the BeerBag at initial brew setup. Traquair House Ale is aged on oak, and adding 15g of oak to the BeerBag will closely match that beer's profile. If you would like more oak flavor than Traquair House, a full 30g bag can be added.
"I love the illustration that we're using for the Wee Heavy, it's very near to my heart. The summer before my 19th birthday I traveled across Scotland on a 250cc motor scooter, experiencing vast landscapes, fuzzy cows, breath taking sea cliffs, whales, and seals. I was introduced to single malt scotch whisky, Scottish ales, and of course, the Wee Heavy. As an 18 year old, this became foundational in my love for the craft." - Aaron Walls, Co-Founder of BEERMKR.
]]>The Festivus Ale is a ruby red strong ale brewed with honey, cherries, sweet orange peel, and cinnamon. The heavy carmel malts provide a semi-sweet body and the Belgian yeast strain adds a clove like character to the beer. A truly festive beer!
When designing this beer, we pulled inspiration from our favorite holiday beers in craft beer today: Troegs Mad Elf, Great Lakes Christmas Ale, and Bells Old Fashioned Ale. These beers all feature amber to mahogony bodies, big ABVs, low to moderate fruit additions, and a touch of spice. Both the Mad Elf and the Old Fashioned feature cherries as a defining characteristic, and utilizing that flavor component really makes a big impact on the final beer.
We start off the beer with a solid sweet brown ale base featuring 2-Row and the dark caramel malts of Caramunich III and Special B. This provide a complex and slightly sweet body with heavy caramel notes and dark dried fruit. We add sweet orange peel for orange aromatics, cherry juice concentrate for a deep ruby color and prominent cherry flavor, wildflower honey to push ABV and produce a smooth floral aroma, and a dash of cinnamon for a festive undercurrent.
We ferment this cool with a Belgian T-58 yeast strain. At cool temperatures this yeast is fairly neutral with a hint of clove. This clove characteristic works phenomenally well with the holiday nature of this beer and compliments the cinnamon.
We have one hop addition, a Sterling Steam Hop at 60 minutes. This adds little to no hop flavor with just enough bitterness to balance out all those complex malts.
Happy Festivus from the rest of us!
]]>5.5% ABV | 28 IBU | 16 SRM
One of the premier joys of brewing is designing beer to be something. And that something is entirely up to you, the brewer. You can aim for a west coast IPA with big pine and resin, or a an oak aged stout with a huge ABV. We can be purposeful about the ingredients we use and create something special. That is what we did with this Dunkelweizen. We used BEERMKR's uncanny ability produce pro-grade beer and we made a kick ass Dunkelweizen that tastes like it was transported to us from Bavaria. This time, we chose to be intentional with the terroir.
Terroir means "from the soil". You hear about terrior a lot in wine because the growing region is the most important factor for wine. In beer, and especially American craft beer we have styles that we adhere to, but we often ignore terroir, which can really make the difference between a beer that actually tastes like it came from Munich Germany vs a beer that just tries to check the boxes of the style.
In this Dunkelweizen, 100% of the ingredients are from Germany. The malts are all from Weyermann out of Bamburg Germany, and include their Dark Wheat, Munich, Vienna, and Carafe II Special malts. The hops feature Northern Brewer and Perle, both from Germany, and the yeast is Lallemand's Munich Classic, the only authentic dry hefeweizen strain from Germany. When brewed with the Munich water profile with the BEERMKR Water Chemistry Kit, this beer will taste like a fall day in Bavaria.
This Dunkelweizen is deep amber in color and soft in body. The dark wheat adds malt complexity, creamy mouthfeel, and some color. The munich malt adds more toasty bread body and the vienna adds a touch of biscuit. The carafa special type 2 is a dehusked dark malt that produces a lot of dark flavor and color but without any of the dark bitterness you would normally expect out of a dark malt.
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Hard Cider is a relatively simple beverage to create. Unlike beer, nature has already done the hard part in creating a complex juice with all the flavors, vitamins, and minerals required for a successful fermentation. To create Hard Cider in your BEERMKR, it’s as simple as pouring in fresh pressed, natural, or organic juice, and starting the machine.
Now don’t get me wrong, you can make your Hard Apple Cider as complex as you’d like. You can add cinnamon, honey, mulling spices, or Steam Hops, or even dry hops! BEERMKR gives you the easy flexibility to create a beverage that is entirely your own. We’ll go over the basic steps to making Hard Cider in your BEERMKR and highlight the steps at which you can add other ingredients.
One of the benefits of BEERMKR is that it pasteurizes, but doesn’t boil. This means the temperatures get hot enough to kill bacteria and make a safe drinkable product, but not high enough to destroy the delicate flavors in the apple juice. Without BEERMKR the process involves using chemicals such as potassium metabisulfite to sterilize your juice. With BEERMKR, we can skip the chemicals and just toss in the juice and hit brew.
Step 1: Collect Your Juices, Apple or Otherwise
Step 2: Collect your recipe ingredients, if any
Now is the time to figure out what else, if anything, you’re going to put in your Hard Cider. This can be anything you’d like. Hops, berries, honey, brown sugar, spices, different fruit juices, etc. Most things you can just add to your GrainBasket in your BrewTub. If you are adding hops, we’d recommend waiting until fermentation to add those. See the table below for the recommended amounts of each ingredient type.
Step 3: Pour your apple juice into your BEERMKR
Measure out 5200ml of juice. Install your BeerBag, WasteBag, and SqueezeBar like normal. Add your servomyces yeast nutrient. Then pour your 5200ml of juice into your BEERMKR’s BrewTub.
Step 4: Add any additional ingredients to the BrewBasket (Optional)
Take your additional loose ingredients from Step 2 above and add them to your GrainBasket. This works great with raw fruits, frozen fruits, spices like cinnamon sticks and nutmeg, and even honey and brown sugar. The sugars will dissolve and flow through your cider. Without the grain up there from a normal beer recipe to soak up the special ingredients, you can pretty much add anything to the GrainBasket! See recommended amounts below.
Step 5: Brew
Start a MKRKIT Brew in your machine and select the Hard Cider MKRKIT. The BEERMKR will pasteurize your juice and incorporate all of those delicious ingredients you added. This will take about 12 hours.
Step 6: Pitch Yeast
When you get a notification on your phone, come back to the BEERMKR, remove the SqueezeBar and GrainBasket, and pitch yeast. If you are using SteamHops, now would be the time to add them. The yeast will go through a complete fermentation.
Step 7: Add Dry Hops (Optional)
Making a dry-hopped hard cider? Add your dry hops when fermentation is complete and the cider goes into the rest phase. You’ll get a notification on your phone when the time is right.
Step 7: Back-Sweeten With Sugar (Optional)
Fruit juice is almost entirely fermentable, so all that sweet sugar will be converted into alcohol and you will be left with a dry cider. You can add sugar, honey, or unfermented juice to back sweeten after fermentation is complete and the cider is cold enough to shut down yeast activity. Make a simple syrup on your stove or in the microwave and pour it into your brewtub. If using juice, just pour 12oz into a coffee mug and microwave it until it boils, let it cool a bit, then pour it into your brewtub. Give the bag a few pumps to make sure all of that liquid sugar gets into the bag. Now it’s time to transfer to your BEERTAP! Warning: only back sweeten when using the BEERTAP or another keg-like device that you force carbonate and store cold. This new sugar will be eaten by the remaining yeast if the temperature is allowed to rise above 40º, so always store back-sweetened cider cold in your refrigerator.
Step 7: Transfer and enjoy!
Remove the bag and place it in your BEERTAP. Screw in the included CO2 cartridge and store in your refrigerator for 2 days to carbonate. Enjoy!
Suggested Additions and Amounts
Additions: Below is a list of suggested additions and recommended ranges. These are best added to the BrewTub during initial setup.
Ingredient | Recommended Amount |
Ground Cinnamon | 2g - 4g |
Cinnamon sticks | 1 - 3 |
Allspice | 2g - 4g |
Whole cloves | 1 - 4 |
Vanilla beans | 1 - 2 |
Vanilla extract | 1 tsp - 2 tsp |
Cider mulling spices | 2g - 6g |
Pumpkin Pie Spices | 2g - 4g |
Dried Orange Peel | 15g - 45g |
Dried Grapefruit Peel | 5g - 15g |
Lemongrass | 5g - 15g |
Frozen Fruit | 4oz - 16oz |
Fresh Fruit | 4oz - 16oz |
SteamHops | 10 - 25 IBU |
Dry Hops | 6g - 12g |
Christian Chandler of the Arizona Society of Homebrewers won Gold at the National Homebrewing Competition for his Sable Porter. He beat out 165 other entrants in the American Porter and Stout category, and he brewed it on his BEERMKR. We are extremely excited to release Christian's recipe as a special release Sable Porter MKRKIT.
"A full-bodied drinkable beer, designed to not be filling, thus creating a desire to drink another. Pours a silky, dark mahogany appearance with a mocha, velvety thick head. Caramel and chocolate malt forward, with a slight hint of cocoa that leads to a smooth coffee roast without exhibiting burnt grain harshness. A pleasant touch of bitterness lends to a light, dry bite and creates the proper balance of coffee with lingering bittersweet dark chocolate. The perfect dark beer that can be enjoyed year round." - Christian Chandler.
The best porter Christian has tasted was Founders Robust Porter. He used that flavor profile as the archetype to develop his Sable Porter. Doing this can be challenging as these commercial recipes are usually treated as trade secrets, so Christian had to do a lot research on malts, hops, and water to get to a recipe he was happy with.
Christian developed his own water profile to brew his Sable Porter. This is something Christian does with all of his beers. He lives in Phoenix where his water isn't great for brewing, so he builds up his water profile from scratch using his at-home reverse osmosis water filter. To brew the exact beer that Christian made, we recommend using the BEERMKR Water Chemistry Kit and the Sable Porter water profile.
Maris Otter makes up a majority of the base malt, followed by Chocolate, Munich, Carapils, Crystal 120, and Black Malt.
It's rare that you'll ideate a recipe and get it right the very first time. It most often takes a few tries to get the flavor dialed in exactly as you're envisioning. This is one of the major benefits of BEERMKR, making this recipe tweaking process easy to do.
Nugget, Crystal, and Wilamette provide a woody, slightly resinous, mildly floral and herbaceous hop presence. For the style, this profile perfectly compliments those roasty grains.
US-05 was used for the Sable Porter, and fermented at 63º F for 10 days. As a west coast, "Chico" strain, this yeast produces very clean fermentations with a pleasant but subdued fruitiness. Importantly, Christian only used 1/2 of a pack of yeast. Pitching less yeast will give the beer slightly more yeast profile specific flavor but will increase the fermentation time. This is because more yeast cells will need to grow to finish the fermentation, and lots of the yeast flavors are produced during this growth process.
This beer takes some time to age. All of those robust dark malts need time to meld into the velvety smooth porter that won gold at the NHC. Immediately upon carbonation, this beer will still be green, with some yeast flavor and slightly harsh dark malt flavor. Over the next two weeks the yeast flavor will subside and the dark malts will smooth out. By 2 months, this creamy sweet porter will begin to enter it's gold medal winning prime.
]]>Over 90% of your beer is water, and the mineral composition of your water has a surprisingly large impact on the flavor of your finished beer. Brewing water has been treated by breweries for hundreds of years by doing things like pre-boiling to reduce hardness or digging wells to access water of a different mineral composition.
With the BEERMKR Water Chemistry Kit, we can alter the mineral composition of the brewing water to yield specific flavor results in your beer or match the exact water profile of a famous brewing region like Munich Germany or Burton on Trent England.
The water kit comes with a fine gram scale, a measuring scoop, a few weighing trays, and 6 salts and minerals: Calcium Chloride, Calcium Carbonate, Baking Soda, Canning Salt, Epsom Salt, and Gypsum.
These salts and minerals can be combined to replicate any water profile from any region in the world. Now let's build the water profile from Munich Germany so we can brew an authentic Bavarian Oktoberfest.
We'll first start with reverse osmosis or RO water, distilled water, or deionized water. If you don't have a reverse osmosis water filter at home, you can find any of these water types at your local grocery store. We highly recommend an at-home RO filter.
Open your scale and place a weighing tray on it. The munich water profile calls for 0.31g of Chalk, 0.93g of Calcium Chloride, 0.87g Epson Salt, and 0.07g of Canning Salt.
We weigh them out one at a time and place them into an empty water pitcher. Next we'll add a liter RO water to the pitcher and stir to dissolve the minerals. Now we'll top it off for my first water addition and pour it into the BEERMKR. Don't connect the bag to the brewtub yet. We're going to put the full amount of water into the brewtub so the minerals can mix properly.
There will be some left over minerals on the bottom of the pitcher, so fill up the second water addition and be sure to mix up the remaining minerals.
Now pour this into your BEERMKR and connect your bag. Now we add our grains and brew like normal.
]]>The Märzen style is an amber hued lager with a rich malty body with a hint of toasted and biscuit flavors. It is balanced by moderate hop bitterness and very little hop aromatics or flavor.
Märzens were traditionally brewed in March (hence the name) and consumed throughout the warm summer months. The first Oktoberfest celebration was in 1810 for the marriage of the crown prince of Bavaria. All the Märzen beer still left after the summer was brought out and consumed during the multi-day party. This fall celebration became an annual event and over the years, the Märzen style has also taken the name Oktoberfest. More recently, Oktoberfests have morphed into a slightly higher ABV category of Märzen and land in the festbier category.
The BEERMKR Märzen / Oktoberfest is a classic example of the category and skews more towards Oktoberfest in it's ABV. It comes in at 6% ABV, 32 IBU, and 8.3 SRM resulting in a slightly amber hue. The malts are comprised of Pilsen, Munich, and Vienna and the hops are bittered by Magnum and finished with Tettnang. The beer is lager fermented with the famous Weihenstephan lager strain from Bavaria.
To obtain the authentic Bavarian taste for this beer, you can use the Munich water profile with the BEERMKR Water Chemistry Kit. This will enable you to brew with the same water as the breweries in Munich, achieving a crispness you can't find anywhere else.
]]>Do you love it, or do you LOVE it? Pumpkin Spice season is upon us, so when you finish your morning PSL, you can enjoy this Pumpkin Ale to keep the pumpkin train chugging. This delicious beer is brewed with a whole pound of pumpkin and classic pie spices of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and clove. It comes in at 7.1% ABV and 31 IBU and is the perfect end cap to a fall day.
Grain
The heavy addition of 2-Row malt contributes a majority of the fermentable sugars. Aromatic and Victory malts give a toasty grain complexity. Caramel-40, Caramel 120, and Carapils bring non-fermentable sugars that add a sweet finish with caramelized sugar and dark fruit flavors. The pumpkin specific components are pumpkin, dark brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and clove. These bring the classic pumpkin pie flavor profile.
Hops
Just one addition of Magnum-60 minutes give enough bitterness to balance the beer without adding a significant hop presence. This is a pumpkin beer after all, and we're here for the pumpkin, not the hops!
Yeast
We went with Kveik yeast for this MKRKIT because it does a great job attenuating all those complex malts and playing a back seat to the strong flavors in the malt bill. The Kveik allows this beer to finish with a balanced sweetness.
Tasting Notes
This pumpkin beer is tremendously balanced between complex malts, pumpkin, pie spices, and fermentable and non fermentable sugars. The result is a dark orange glass of beer that finishes without too much sweetness that is easy to have more than one of. We've had a lot of pumpkin beers that finish so sweetly they feel like you're drinking a pie. We didn't want to go that route with this beer. We wanted the beer to be a beer first, with the background flavor profile of pumpkin and the spices we think of when enjoying this time of year.
]]>It’s now early September, and in the northern hemisphere, that means it’s hop harvest season! More and more people are growing hops in their home gardens and with a BEERMKR, you can use these hops in your beer! It’s really easy to do, just follow the following steps:
First is to know when to harvest. It’s best to harvest your hops when you have a beer recipe ready to receive them. Don’t pick them and let them sit out. They should go right into a beer within 24 hours of being cut from the vine. If you don’t have a beer ready for them, it’s okay to dry them out and store them in your freezer. More on that below. Just don’t freeze fresh hops, they’ll turn to mush.
Now find a recipe that will work with your hop varieties and choose how you want to use them – as a brew hop for bittering, a brew hop for aromatics, or as a dry hop. If the hops are going into your BEERMKR, they should be chopped up first. You can do this with a chef’s knife or with a spice grinder. Using a chef’s knife is preferred as the lupulin of the hops can gum up your spice grinder and you’ll lose a lot of hop oil. Using a knife, cut the hops to a fine brunoise cut or finer. This will prevent the valves from getting clogged if any hop matter gets into them.
Fresh hops weigh 6-8 times more than hops that have been dried and/or pelletized since they are still full of water from the growing season. So if you’d normally put in 30g for a hop addition, you’ll want to add around 200g of wet hops to get the same effect.
If you’d like to bitter with your hops, you’ll brew your beer like normal. When it’s time to pitch yeast and add hops, you’ll pull your waste bag first. Empty the waste bag into a small pot on your stove and bring the wort to a boil. Add your hops and boil. You can use whole cones for this, no need to cut them or grind them up. Be sure to top up with fresh water to prevent your liquid from boiling off. You’ll be aiming for 20oz of liquid to be poured back into your BEERMKR. When the hops are done, remove them with a slotted spoon. Head back to your BEERMKR, open the brewtub lid, and pour your hop tea into the brewtub. Give the bag a few pumps to circulate this hot wort, then pitch your yeast.
If you are aiming for flavor or aromatics and not bittering, then you can either add the hops with your yeast, or you can add them as a dry hop. Make sure they are finely diced and toss them in. You don’t need to sanitize your hops by heating them, they are naturally antiseptic, so just toss them in! Adding them with the yeast will produce a deep hop flavor but won’t be very aromatic since the fermentation off gassing will drive out a lot of those aromatics. If you want big aromas, add your fresh hops as a dry hop.
The last option is to add your hops to the waste bag during brewing. This is a “best of both worlds” situation. Putting the hops in the waste bag at the very beginning of the brew, before you add your water, will give the hops plenty of time to steep with your wort. It will also bring the hops up in temperature so their acids isomerize and make your wort bitter. However since BEERMKR doesn’t boil, the wort won’t get hot enough to drive off all of those special low temp oils like myrcene and farnesene, resulting in a robustly flavorful, slightly aromatic, slightly bittered hop profile. It is directly comparable to a whirlpool or hopback addition. If you go this route, remember to finely cut your hops with a knife or spice grinder before adding them to your waste bag. This method adds about the same bitterness as an 8-minute boil addition so if you’re calculating your IBUs on a recipe program, just use 8-minutes.
If you don't have a beer ready to receive your fresh hops and it's time to harvest, then you can do what every other hop farmer does and dry your hops for storage and later use. To dry, use a food dehydrator at temperatures below 140ºF/60ºC. Any higher and some of the oils will volatize, muting the hop aromatics. A convection oven works well if it can go that low in temperature, but a dedicated food dehydrator with low temperature settings is best.
Once dried, it's best to vacuum pack them in a food saver bag. These are special bags that have an oxygen barrier and can have all the air and oxygen vacuumed out of them. Don't use standard zip top bags, these don't have an oxygen barrier and your hops can get overly oxidize which will give them an additional bitterness through oxidized beta acids and could go rancid. So be sure to keep that oxygen out!
]]>Here is the latest Recipe Builder Template, now at v1.4. It includes a few absorption updates, adds a few yeast strains, and most importantly, two new calculators for Double Mashing and Strike Temp Mashes.
Double mashing is great and will allow you to get up to 11% ABV beers using all malt. The efficiency of the mash decreases with the increase in sugar, so be prepared to put up to 3kg of malt in the basket to get those numbers. It's best to start a double mash in the morning or right before bed. The first mash takes 8 hours, then you'll get a notification to pull the spent grain. Dump it, rinse out your grain basket, add more grain and water, then hit the button to start the second mash. You can pull the second mash when it wraps up 4 hours later, then pitch yeast and hops like normal.
Strike temp mashes allow you to target specific sugar profiles for your mash. BEERMKR is extremely convenient in auto mode but it has a bias towards simple sugars since it heats up from room temp and hits beta amylase long before it hits alpha amylase temperatures. Beta amylase is responsible for short chain sugars which ferment out completely and alpha amylase is responsible for long chain sugars which are harder to ferment and can stick around after fermentation leading to higher FG and more mouthfeel.
If you wanted to target complex sugars in your mash, we have a new mode that will allow you to pre-heat your water in the BEERMKR the night before so it will be ready for you to brew when you choose. Just add your malt and the mash will settle out at your desired temp.
The original way we recommended getting more complex sugars in your wort was simply to use more caramel malts in your mash, but that doesn't help if you are developing a recipe to scale to a larger system with specific mash temps. Using a strike temp mash allows you scale 1:1 without subbing ingredients.
We're working on updating our DIY section in the app to include these modes natively, but that is still in development. So if you'd like to try one of these new modes, send an email to support@beermkr.com and we'll get the recipe sent to your machine.
A big thanks to the BEERMKR brewers in the community that helped us develop these new brewing schedules!
To download the latest template, follow the link below:
]]>BEERMKR is an innovative new beer brewing machine that lets anyone, regardless of their experience, brew delicious craft beer right in their own home. This article will walk through the steps in traditional homebrewing, and how BEERMKR has drastically simplified this complex process.
Traditional homebrewing uses either malt extracts or whole grains like barley, wheat, corn, and rice to produce wort, which is just a name for unfermented beer. The most basic beginner kits available to homebrewers rely on extracts because producing wort with grain requires a lot of equipment and expertise. All of the other ingredients, hops, yeast, and adjuncts, are the same between extract and all-grain brewing. Interestingly, both professional craft breweries and home brew shops are supplied by the same malt, hop, and yeast producers so the ingredients are the same across amature and professional fields. That said, craft breweries never produce wort primarily from extract. They utilize all grain mashes to produce their wort as the quality is simply higher than extract, so most homebrewers strive to emulate the best practices of craft breweries with all-grain homebrewing being the goal of most homebrewers.
BEERMKR is an all-grain brewing system that handles the entire process, both hot side and cold side: brewing, fermentation, carbonation, and serving with just two devices, the BEERMKR brewer and the BEERTAP draft system. Beer is produced in the BEERMKR and when finished, the finished bag of completed beer is moved to the BEERTAP where it’s carbonated and served. Having just two things to keep track of is one of the main advantages of BEERMKR vs traditional homebrewing, and is especially helpful if you are brewing in a small space or if you have other stakeholders in your home who would prefer fewer things cluttering up the kitchen.
In traditional homebrewing, you will need many different pieces of equipment:
Hot Side Equipment:
Some homebrewing products combine the mash and boil into one large device that includes the pump and temperature controller for all-grain mashes. These are fantastic systems and are highly recommended if you are going the classic route. Systems like Mash & Boil, Grainfather, and Robobrew are a few examples of this. However you will still need all of the cold side equipment. Extract brewers only really need the brew kettle on the hot side and many starter kits include just some of the cold side equipment.
The first step in making beer is mashing your grains to create wort, which is just unfermented beer. In this step, grains are added to water and heated to about 150º F. This temperature activates enzymes in the grains to convert their starches into fermentable sugars. Extracts contain all of these sugars already so you just need to dilute them with water.
To set up a BEERMKR beer, just add your grains to the grain basket, fill the system with water, the press brew on the app. The system will heat up to mash temps and create wort. It will then cool down to the correct temperature to pitch yeast. BEERMKR does not get up to a boil and it uses Steam Hops to provide isomerization, and these are added at the yeast pitch step. Setting up a brew takes 5 minutes of your time, and BEERMKR handles the rest.
In traditional brewing, you will heat your water up to your mash strike temperature and add your grains. Some mash systems recirculate with a pump while others rely on large insulated coolers with custom manifolds installed to mash. Whichever way you do it, you’ll be heating a large volume of water up to temperature, mashing, then transferring to your boil kettle, which takes around 2-3 hours.
Next is boiling. Once the wort is in the kettle, it’s brought up to a boil and hops are added. This isomerizes the hops to make the beer bitter. After an hour has passed, the heat is cut off and a wort chiller is plugged into a water source like an outdoor hose. Cold water flows through the wort chiller which is submerged in the wort which transfers heat from the wort into the running water. This process takes around 30 minutes and chills your wort down to pitch temperature.
Fermentation is perhaps the most important step in the beer making process: it’s where beer gets much of its unique characteristics like the clove phenolics of Belgian beers, or the banana esters of a German hefeweizens, or the tart fruity notes of an English ale. Yeast are added, or pitched, in the wort, and as they come alive, they digest those fermentable sugars to produce alcohol.
In order to make great beer, this process needs accurate temperature control, and adherence to strict cleaning and sanitizing practices. Most homebrewers use 5 gallon carboys, and either let the season or the area of their home or garage dictate the fermentation temperature, or they use some sort of temperature control system, because without temperature control, your beer will be entirely unpredictable. It could turn out great if you happened to ferment an english ale in a 65º basement, or poorly if you tried to make a german lager in your garage in the dead of summer. Depending on the beer, fermentation can take anywhere between 1 and 4 weeks.
When it’s time to pitch yeast on your BEERMKR, you’ll get a notification on the app. You’ll remove the grains from the wort and pitch your yeast and add your hops. BEERMKR has fermentation temperature control built in, allowing it to produce consistent, excellent, beer of any style. It does this with an electric cooling system and real time temperature and pressure feedback, allowing the environment to change in real time based on the needs of the yeast. BEERMKR will see yeast begin fermenting, hold at the right temperature for primary fermentation, then as they slow down, it will gently ease the yeast up in temperature for their rest. This active yeast management both speeds up the overall fermentation time while maximizing yeast flavor profile development. Or simply put, this means you get consistently great beer, in as little as 5 days, without any of the off flavors that result from poor or no temperature control.
In traditional homebrewing, the most common way to manage fermentation is using a temperature control device such as a BrewJacket Immersion Pro, or a refrigerator with an external temperature controller. You can also find CO2 monitors like the Plaato Airlock or the Tilt Hydrometer which will give you insight into yeast activity, however it will be up to you to actively manage this process and to know what you are asking your yeast to produce from a style perspective.
BEERMKR is a closed system and the first step in the process is to get the entire system up to pasteurization temperatures. This kills any stray bacteria and ensures your batch of beer turns out defect free. The beer never leaves the BeerBag which keeps it safe throughout the entire process. This also means you don’t have to sanitize anything! When your batch is done and the beer is in the BEERTAP, just toss your BrewTub and valves in the dishwasher.
In traditional homebrewing, most of your time will be spent cleaning and sanitizing fermenters, transfer lines, bottles, kegs, kettles, bottle caps, mash tuns, etc. Because your wort/beer gets transferred from vessel to vessel, each receiving vessel needs to be perfectly clean and sanitized to prevent old tastes or bacteria from infecting your batch.
When your BEERMKR beer is done, you will get a notification on the app to unplug the BeerBag and move it to the BEERTAP. Plug in the BEERTAP valves, close the BEERTAP, and screw the included CO2 cartridge. Your beer will carbonate and be ready to drink in the next 24 hours!
If you are brewing the traditional way, getting your beer out of your fermenter and into bottles or kegs requires a number of steps. First is to clean and sanitize your receiving vessels, tubing, bottling wand, bottle caps, etc. If you are refermenting in bottles, you will transfer your beer into a bottling bucket where you’ll mix it with some corn sugar before filling your bottles. This allows the yeast to eat that added sugar and produce CO2 so your beer is fizzy. If you are force carbonating your beer, you will transfer your beer from your fermenter into a cleaned and sanitized keg where you’ll hook up your CO2 tank and regulator and charge it with gas for a few days. This will force the CO2 into the beer, producing a carbonated beer.
Brewing with a BEERMKR will cost $579. This includes the BEERMKR, the BEERTAP, as well as a MKRKIT of your choice. Getting a starter kit for traditional homebrewing will cost around $100, will be for extract only, and will not have any form of fermentation temperature control. All-grain systems start around $200 and go up to many thousands of dollars. Fermentation temperature control systems start around $50 to $100 for a temperature controller and a used refrigerator all the way up to the thousands for a glycol chiller system. Draft systems start at $130 for a 1-gallon UKeg or $500 for an entry level kegerator.
When comparing what you get with a BEERMKR to what it will cost to cobble that equipment together for traditional homebrewing, only to then spend hours cleaning, sanitizing, and running the risk of infections, BEERMKR is the clear winner.
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