If you love the whole home brewing process, is alcohol content one of your considerations? Have you ever wanted a little more kick out of one of your best brews? You can do like many of the craft brewers are doing today and brew a beer with a little more wallop. You will probably want to make a brew your own beer kit for this.
You Can Make “Big Beer” In Your Own Home Brewing Process
Today’s beer drinkers can thank the craft beer movement for bringing a multitude of both traditional and entirely new big beer styles into the marketplace. Anchor Brewing led the charge with the release of Old Foghorn in 1975 and Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot and Rogue’s Old Crustacean followed soon after. The American palate learned to appreciate the bold flavors of a classic English-style barleywine, a malt beer named for its high alcohol levels and not because it uses grapes.
Shortly thereafter a multitude of traditional big beer styles, ranging from the centuries-old doppelbocks and imperial stouts to postmodern examples such as double saisons and imperial pilsners, started popping up across the country. Now, almost all of the craft brewers in the country have at least one big beer in their lineup, if not several.
So how do the craft brewers define a “Big Beer”
So what is a big beer? A big beer is typically any beer that packs more than 8.5 percent alcohol by volume. Known for its alcohol kick, flavor, aroma, and bitterness, big beers are processed like regular beers, but they are fermented for a longer period of time to allow the yeast to metabolize the extra amount of barley, malt and sugars. Instead of the typical two-week turnaround for most ale beers, a big beer can take four weeks or more to fully mature in a fermentation vessel before it can be packaged. It is this extra vessel time, and of course healthy yeast, that is the key to making big beers.
So next time you get an inkling to brew your own beer, think about giving it a little more pizzazz and make it a Big Beer! If you would like to read a little more about this topic you can go here by clicking right here.
If you don’t already have everything you need to make your own beer, then head on over to our brew your own beer store where you can find homemade beer kits, beer brewing equipment, recipes, beer making books, cleaning supplies and much more. Beer Brewing Store
Photo DRINKING BEER by Eminozkan