All about beer

All about beer: understanding it, getting it right, tasting it

Brewing ends in the glass, and that is where everything is judged. These articles cover what surrounds beer: understanding a fault and fixing it on the next batch, mastering a technique, knowing your ingredients, placing a style in the BJCP guide, then serving and tasting.

Updated on 23 October 2026

Faults and diagnosis

Off-flavoursButter, green apple, cardboard, cooked corn, solvent: the table of the 12 faults of homebrew, the step responsible and what corrects them.Flat or gushing beerBottles with no gas after three weeks, or a geyser on opening: the causes of a failed carbonation, the diagnosis in five questions, what can be saved.Oxidation: cardboard tasteTaste of cardboard, paper or sherry, an IPA that loses its hops in three weeks: where oxygen gets into homebrew, and how to avoid it.Hazy beerChill haze, yeast in suspension, starch, hops: why a homebrew stays hazy, the test that tells which, and clarifying without a filter.Infected beerA film on the surface, sour beer, bottles that keep gassing: recognise a contamination, what to drink or throw away, and clean so it does not come back.

Techniques

Getting your dry hop rightHow much hops for a 20-litre dry hop, how many days, at what temperature, during or after fermentation: guidelines by style, mistakes to avoid.Brewhouse efficiencyMash or brewhouse efficiency, calculation from the measured gravity, causes of a low efficiency, and why stability beats a high figure.Creating your own recipeStart from a style, choose the malts, calculate the gravity, dose the hops, choose the yeast: compose your recipe, with a 20 L pale ale as the example.Brewing waterRead your water report, understand calcium, sulphate, chloride and alkalinity, remove chlorine, aim for the mash pH: what matters, in what order.Brewing a lagerBottom fermentation at 10-13 °C, double dose of yeast, diacetyl rest, cold conditioning: what changes between ale and lager, methods without a cellar, the timetable.Final gravity too highThe gravity is stuck at 1.020: a stalled fermentation or a beer that finished high? The test that settles it, the restarts that work, when not to bottle.Brewing with a kveikKveik yeasts ferment at 30-40 °C in two or three days, with no temperature control: origin, strains (Voss, Hornindal, Lutra…), doses, reuse.Fermenting under pressureFermenting under 0.8 to 1 bar: a lager at 18 °C in three weeks, carbonation in the fermenter, oxygen-free transfer, safety and limits.

Ingredients

YeastsAle, lager, Belgian, wheat, kveik, Brettanomyces: what each family gives, reading a sachet (attenuation, flocculation, temperature), the dose, reusing it.HopsBittering or aroma, alpha acids and oils, cones, pellets or cryo, noble, English and American families, storage, replacing a hop that is out of stock.MaltsHow malt is made, base, caramel or roasted malt, the yield and colour of each, the proportions that work, milling and storage.

Beer styles

Beer stylesThe 103 styles of the BJCP 2021 guidelines, family by family: original and final gravity, bitterness in IBU, colour in EBC and alcohol.Christmas beerWhen to brew, which malts and spices, what gravity: the profile of a homemade Christmas beer and a worked example for 20 litres.

Tasting and serving

Tasting a beerThe steps of a tasting, the vocabulary of aroma and bitterness, common off-flavours and their causes, a sheet to score.Serving beerAt what temperature to serve each style, which glass, how to pour a bottle-conditioned beer without its sediment, get two fingers of head and set up a keg.

Understand before you fix

A homebrewer drinks their own beer with indulgence. A careful tasting, criterion by criterion, shows what the recipe and the fermentation really produced: a harsher bitterness than planned, a buttery aroma that betrays a fermentation cut short, a head that does not last. Each fault has a likely cause, and most can be fixed on the next brew.

Numbers, not opinions

The reference values given here (gravities, IBU, colours, doses, temperatures) come from the formulas of the site's calculators and from the bounds of the 2021 BJCP guidelines. Each article links to the tools that let you redo the calculation with your own values, and to what Krausi does with that data in the app.

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