Grow your own hops/grain and malt your own grain. It’s not difficult but it is work and it does take time. Those who say you can’t do those things as well as commercial operations have never tried or are too lazy.
I have a few brews on the schedule. I have several old unopened sacks. I’m going to brew a couple side by side Kolsch brews to see what fresh vs old actually is like. It may give some feedback as this question is asked frequently.
And for the record, I’m not saying that being able to brew with Weyermann or Best pils and Mittelfrueh hops is suddenly a bad thing - it’s great. Just saying that when trying to isolate something as elusive as an ‘it’ factor, there’s gotta be a slight difference between very good ingredients and the absolute cream of the crop ingredients.
I’m sure my wife would love me turning our back yard into a barley field :o
Yeah, mine is pretty tolerant and supportive of my brewing, but that might be a deal breaker. ;D
Have you tried this? Making malt isn’t too hard. Growing and making good malt is very hard.
I buy the same malt in the same lots as a major local brewery. There’s no difference between what they use and what I use. It’s not the “leftovers”. And I can tel you that when a wholesaler buys malt to distribute to breweries and homebrew shops, it’s the same malt from the same lots. The idea that homebrewers are getting the leftovers just doesn’t hold true.
While Gordon is a very good brewer, you need to remember that he back-doored his way into the Ninkasi, in my opinion. Each one of his Ninkasi’s was pushed by Mead wins. While that is still a crap-load better than my results, I believe that JZ won his Nindasi’s with beer only. In a way, that may place more cred on Jamil’s expertise.
I’m not saying we get leftovers. Just what I said before-would love hot off the press ingredients just to see if there’s something there is all.
Making good malt takes practice but I wouldn’t term it “very hard”. Making a lager/pilsner/pale malt is relatively easy. Making a Vienna or Munich malt is a little more complex but nothing to lose sleep over.
The temperature profiles and times for steeping, drying and curing are all contained in “The Textbook of Brewing” Volume 1 and “Malts and Malting”. Not cheap books but well worth the investment.
Growing barley is very easy, but growing up on a farm, I did these things as a kid so perhaps I just have a green thumb. (I’m not suggesting you try to grow it in your back yard, but it is fun and something the whole family can participate in!)
You’ll need some equipment like buckets, a kitchen stove, a dehydrator and also a grain moisture meter (again, not cheap!) but well worth investment. It will tell you when your done steeping and when to go from drying stage to curing and when to raise the temperature, etc…
I could talk for hours about this stuff but order yourself a bag of unhulled barley from these guys and try it yourself (they normally carry the Conlon variety):
Caveat, they really know their stuff and most of us gained from their sharing.
However, when you know your stuff AND most of your entries are custom blended to meet style guidelines and trending desired qualities AND you enter 40-60 different beers… thats a completely different thing than a current Ninkasi. I’m just as impressed by an unblended single gold medal winner under recent NHC rules, as I am by a repeat Ninkasi winning from 60 blended entries under the old rules.
Agreed! I place no credence on anyone’s medal in a competition. That just means your beer was better than the others. In some competitions, that is not saying much. The only thing that counts to me is the score of a highly ranked BJCP judge or a pro-brewer that is known for producing outstanding beers.
This is not to say that un-ranked or lesser ranked judges can’t be good…it may just mean that they haven’t had the opportunity to advance their rank…yet! However, I am loath to give any credence to a pro-brewer as a beer judge. As most of you know, there is a huge amount of poor ‘craft’ beer out there. Its piss-poor brewers that decided that they want to brew for a living, that drag down the craft industry. Learning to recognize beer faults and knowing how to correct them, is a critical factor in a brewer’s skill set. Being able to add hot water to grain and get paid for it, does not make you capable of judging beer effectively.
With over 15 years of judging, I too am pretty hard on judging my beers before competition. Having had to taste so many poor beers in competition, I wish more brewers had the skills to decipher their beer’s faults prior to entering. But I do have to remind myself that this is also how brewers learn to recognize their beer’s faults and add that data point to their skill set. Hopefully, my liver sacrifice goes to someone else’s benefit.
Here is to those of you that enter and those that judge…just make sure that you take your results with a grain of salt…in some cases!
And what I’m saying is that’s basically what you get from a good LHBS.
so you’ve done it?
let me say it a different way- just harvested,processed, kilned, cooled and into my grain bin for brewing right away…that’s what I mean I would like to try Denny. just my curiosity.
Got it.
Maybe I’m wrong on that, Denny. I’ve read a ton of references over the years (many on here) to bigger/more established breweries getting first crack at hops and malts, with the rest going to LHBS. I can always be wrong. ;D
Edit - Maybe at one time I was right, but with homebrewing so popular things have changed ?
I would argue that the “it” factor has more to do with a specific brewerys equipment and process and to a lesser extent the actual ingredients. But I’m on the clock this afternoon so I don’t really have time to argue! 
Many times. I’ve stopped counting.
I think if you are chasing an “it” factor, step 1 is to quantity what is “it” you are chasing. This probably means taste panels. Maybe a group of highly rated BJCP judges could all do commercial calibrations on the same commercial beers. Then an analysis of the score sheets my help quantify “it”.
After you quantify “it”, I think the group will have better ideas on how to reproduce “it” on the homebrew scale.
Until you know what “it” is you are making stabs in the dark and nailing “it” will happen only by luck.
Just my 2 cents.
We stayed Bräuerie Eck, which has won several Eurostar awards and a Bronze at WBC for their Dunkel. The Brewing system is all Manual controls, from 1971. I am convinced process is key, and good yeast management.