Want to stop saying you're the coolest and actually BE the coolest? Well, this mug can help. Just imagine how much better your award-winning double IPA homebrew would taste! Um, okay maybe not.

This is the $250 OPMOD Battle Mug, a 24-ounce beer receptacle milled out of a solid 13.5-lb block of aluminum that comes equipped with military-spec rails so you can attach all kinds of scopes and laser sights. Read More

It's common practice to add hops in the last 10 minutes of the boil to contribute less to bitterness and more to aroma, but many of these oils are boiled off in the process. How can you add more aroma?

Dry hopping is a great way to add fresh hoppy aroma to your beer. The basic idea is to add whole leaf or pellet hops to the fermenter (or keg) after fermentation is complete. These hops soak in the beer for anywhere from a few days to several weeks. [Read More]

If you're new to homebrewing, this seems like a decent kit to get started.  You may outgrow the kettle after a while but most of the other stuff can be used for a long time.  $159.80

Brew your own Strange Brew! Now upgraded with a Fermtec Auto Siphon, make transfers from the fermenter to the bottling bucket a simple task. Each Equipment Kit Includes: True Brew Handbook, 6.5 Gallon Primary Fermenting Bucket, 1 Lid Drilled & Grommetted, 6.5 Gallon Bottling Bucket w/ Spigot, Fermometer Fermentation Thermometer, Fermtech Springless Bottle Filler, Fermtech 3/8in Auto Siphon, 5ft x 5/16in Flex Vinyl Tubing, Hydrometer, Emily Double Lever Capper, Bottle Brush, 3 Piece Airlock, C-Brite Sanitizer 8-Pack. The Strange Brew Best Starter Kit also includes: 5 gallon stainless steel brew kettle with lid, Ingredients for 5 gallons of home-brewed Ale, Zymurgy for the Home-Brewer and Beer Lover Book (available exclusively through Home-Brew) and a Strange Brew Home-Brew Bumper Sticker with Toll-Free Brewing Hotline. Read More

The basic idea of a fermentation chamber is to control the temperature of yeast while they are active. This is not to say that excellent beer can't be brewed without one, but in my case, I was limited to the ambient temperature of the basement, which is quite different in the month of January than it is in August.

So why temperature control?  It offers the ability to produce consistant beer year round while also targeting certain esters when higher temps are required.  There are many different ways you can make one, some being more complicated than others, but I'll outline the basic idea so you can come up with a design that meets your budget and requirements. Read More 

Dave Conz over at Slate wrote a great article on the impact that homebrewing has had on the innovation of craft beer over the 30+ years that it has been legalized. Read More

Alright tough guy, we all know that homebrews dont come with twist off caps, so what do YOU use to open bottles...your teeth?  While this may look cool, it's a dangerous game to play with tooth enamel and will put you on the short road to hillbilly town in no time.

So then what?  Well, word on the street is there's a new opener in town! This beauty is 4 1/2" of brushed stainless steel and will open bottles quicker than you can say, "I should wear it as an earring!"

Seriously though, at $9.99, what is the worst that can happen?  It ends up in a drawer with all of the other junk you don't use. Read More 

Google Docs, what a great find this was. If you have a Google account, then you have access to Documents for free. All of your beer data is stored in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere. Read More

Stumbled upon this great post by the BeerStreetJournal guys where Sam Calagione responds to a beeradvocate thread discussing over-rated breweries. 

It’s pretty depressing to frequently visit this site and see the most negative threads among the most popular. This didn’t happen much ten years ago when craft beer had something like a 3 percent market share. Flash forward to today, and true indie craft beer now has a still-tiny but growing marketshare of just over 5 percent. Yet so many folks that post here still spend their time knocking down breweries that dare to grow. It’s like that old joke: “Nobody eats at that restaurant anymore, it’s too crowded.” Except the “restaurants” that people shit on here aren’t exactly juggernauts. In fact, aside from Boston Beer, none of them have anything even close to half of one percent marketshare. The more that retailers, distributors, and large industrial brewers consolidate the more fragile the current growth momentum of the craft segment becomes. The more often the Beer Advocate community becomes a soap box for outing breweries for daring to grow beyond its insider ranks the more it will be marginalized in the movement to support, promote, and protect independent ,American craft breweries. 

It’s interesting how many posts that refer to Dogfish being over-rated include a caveat like “except for Palo…except for Immort…etc.” We all have different palettes which is why it’s a great thing that there are so many different beers. At Dogfish we’ve been focused on making “weird” beers since we opened and have taken our lumps for being stylistically indifferent since day one. I bet a lot of folks agree that beers like Punkin Ale (since 1995) , Immort Ale (wood aged smoked beer) since 1995, Chicory Stout (coffee stout) since 1995 , Raison D’être (Belgian brown) since 1996, , Indian Brown Ale (dark IPA) since 1997, and 90 Minute (DIPA) since 2000 don’t seem very weird anymore. That’s in large part because so many people who have been part of this community over the years championed them and helped us put them on the map.These beers, and all of our more recent releases like Palo Santo, Burton Baton, Bitches Brew continue to grow every year. We could have taken the easy way out and just sold the bejeezus out of 60 Minute to grow but we like to experiment and create and follow our own muse. Obviously there is an audience that appreciates this as we continue to grow. We put no more “hype” or “expert marketing” behind our best selling beers than we do our occasionals. We only advertise in a few beer magazines and my wife Mariah oversees all of our twitter/Facebook/dogfish.com stuff. We have mostly grown by just sharing our beer with people who are into it (at our pub, great beer bars, beer dinners, and fests) and let them decide for themselves if they like it. If they do we hope they tell their friends about. We hope a bunch of you that are going to EBF will stop by our booth and try some of the very unique new beers we are proudly bringing to market like Tweason’ale (a champagne-esque, gluten-free beer fermented with buckwheat honey and strawberries) and Noble Rot (a sort of saison brewed with Botrytis-infected Viognier Grape must). One of these beers is on the sweeter side and one is more sour. Knowing each of your palettes is unique you will probably prefer one over the other. That doesn’t mean the one you didn’t prefer sucked. And the breweries you don’t prefer but are growing don’t suck either. Respect Beer. The below was my favorite post thus far. 

This thread is hilarious. Seriously, Bells, Founders, FFF, Surly, RR, DFH, Bruery, Avery, Cigar City, Mikkeller are all overrated?  Since I’m from Ohio, I’ll pile on and add Great Lakes, Hoppin Frog, and Brew Kettle to the list. Your welcome. 

Hopefully soon we will have every craft brewery in the US on the list.

Editors Note: I love being from Delaware.  That’s how we roll.

The right amount of yeast should always be pitched for beer to ferment properly. The best way we have found to do this is by making a yeast "starter" which allows the yeast to multiply before pitching.

We like to make one 24 hours before brewing so the yeast are pitched when they are most active. You can do this on the stovetop by combining 80 grams of light dry malt extract with water, then cool to 70 degrees before adding the yeast. Another great option is to make many starters in advance to keep it nice and simple.  Read More