May 22, 2026
Homebrew!
In the past I’ve done a lot of home brewing, so I’ve been looking forward to brewing Season Six’s Good Brew.
In the show Alton understandably takes a bare-bones, limited equipment approach to brewing, which is certainly the best way to make it approachable to someone who’s never brewed before. I have a lot more equipment and experience, so rather than trying to replicate his exact process I set out to brew his recipe using my own brewing approach that I have honed over a few dozen batches.
Recipe
So, here’s what I used to recreate Alton’s Good Brew recipe:
- 1/2 pound 60L crystal malt
- 5.75 pounds Light DME
- Wyeast 1098 (British Ale Yeast)
- 1.75oz East Kent Goldings hops
- 1oz Cascade hops
Note that I used dry malt extract instead of the liquid extract that he used in the show. This is just a preference – one I’ve developed over time. To go from a LME to a DME measurement, you can use any number of converters online.
Now let’s get into the brew!
Yeast Starter
Prep started about 24 hours before brew day. I began by creating a yeast starter with the yeast pack.
He didn’t do this in the show, but again I have the equipment and I’ve found that starting the yeast before the pitch makes for more vigorous fermentation (less “lag” period) which helps protect against things like infection.
Brew Day
The following afternoon was brew day. I cut out of work a little early and started brewing at about 3:30pm. First I pulled out all my equipment and inspected, cleaned, and sanitized it.
In the show, AB steeps his specialty grains in the brew kettle itself. I’ve found that doing this in a smaller pot with a grain bag helps with temperature control and reduces mess.
After the grains steeped for 30m at 150 degrees (I needed to kick on the heat two or three times to keep the water temp up), I sparged the grains in a colander over the brew kettle, using 1/2 gallon of 150 degree water.
I then topped off the kettle to 3 gallons and kicked on the heat. While the kettle was heating, I added all of the remaining dry malt extract (DME). It was a touch more than the 5.75lb, but I had that little extra so I figured I’d use it. It took about 35m, but then I had a nice rolling boil.
At the boil, I added 1oz of cascade hops, and 0.75oz of the UK Kent Goldings. Here’s another departure from the show – Alton only boils for 10 or 15 minutes, which is sort of out of the ordinary. Common wisdom is that a longer boil results in better hop utilization. So, I did the “normal” thing here, and boiled for 45m.
Meanwhile, I mixed up some sanitizer (rather than water plus bleach like they do in the show) and got to work sanitizing everything: the fermenter, its lid, the airlock, thermowell, strainer – everything that could come into contact with the wort after it comes off the stove.
After 45 minutes, I added some whirlfloc. In the show, he uses Irish Moss, which is similar. I let the boil go for another 15m, then added the remaining 1oz of Kent Goldings and killed the heat. (Side note: in the show he calls this dry hopping, which isn’t correct – this is just flameout hopping.) I then let the hops steep for 10m (called a “hop stand”) before getting started with the cooling process.
In the show, Alton dumps the wort into the ice-filled fermenter at this point. In my case, I wanted to use my wort chiller and pump setup. So I brought the kettle over to my sink, dumped a cold gallon of water into it, and started the pump.
It took about 30m and two 7 pound bags of ice in addition to all the ice in my freezer (I should have gotten a third bag of ice) but I got the wort down to about 70 degrees. Once it was cool I could then strain it into the sanitized fermenter.
From there, I tossed in my sanitized Tilt hydrometer. This is another departure from the show, where he didn’t bother to do a gravity reading (or tell you the final ABV %). But I have the device, and at the very least it’s helpful for knowing exactly when fermentation is complete. It also monitors temperature, which is huge – good homebrew is all about temperature control. My original gravity (OG) was 1.044.
Fermentation
After straining, tossing in the hydrometer, and pitching the yeast, I was ready to close it up and put it into my fermentation chamber. The chamber is just a chest freezer with the addition of a temperature controller.
The temperature controller is hooked to the freezer on the cold side, and a little space heater on the hot side. I put the probe into the thermowell and set the target temperature to 66 degrees – the controller will then keep the wort between 64 and 68, which is a great range for this yeast strain. I then sat back and waited for fermentation to begin. The next morning I saw some great activity on the airlock:
Fermentation was in full force. Over the next couple days I monitored the temperature and the specific gravity using the Tilt. By Monday morning, approximately 65 hours after pitching the yeast, the airlock activity was very slight (maybe one bubble every 45-60s) and the gravity reading from the Tilt had been constant for 12 hours or so. The next move was to kick the beer temperature up to 71 degrees for a diacetyl rest to help clean up any off flavors.
I set the new temp on Monday afternoon, and let it go for a few days at 71 degrees. By Friday afternoon, the diacetyl rest was done, so I moved it back to about 68 degrees. There the beer sat for another seven days to condition. My planned bottling date was Monday April 27th, so on Saturday April 25th, I started to bring the beer’s temperature down to 40 degrees for a cold crash. By Sunday morning it was at 40 so I didn’t touch the temperature again.
Bottling
Monday was bottling day (well, bottling night). Before work I set about making sure all of my bottles were clean. I first went to the garage and grabbed my tub of bottles.
In previous brews, I would meticulously rinse out every bottle after pouring it, so I wasn’t too worried about caked-on crud. I grabbed 16 22oz bottles, and 24 12oz bottles, mixed up some PBW, and then sent each through the bottle rinser just to make extra sure there’s no gunk in them. After that, I loaded all the bottles up into the dishwasher and sent them through the “sanitize” cycle. This does a few things: rinses out any leftover detergent, gets the bottles hot enough to kill off any lingering nasties, and (since they sit upside down all day) dries them out inside.
In the evening, it was time to bottle. The first thing I did was take the bottles out of the dish washer, where they’d been sitting all day to dry/cool, and run them through the rinser one more time, this time with Star San, and put them on the bottle tree. I then used a priming sugar calculator to figure out that I wanted to boil 4.5oz of dextrose (corn sugar) in 2 cups of water in order to prime the beer for carbonation.
Once the sugar was boiled and the bottling bucket was sanitized, I dumped the primer into the bottling bucket, and then transferred the beer from the fermenter into it.
It was then time to bottle! One great thing about bottling day is that you get to taste your “finished” beer for the first time. Before I started in on filling bottles, I grabbed a sample and tried it – it was delicious. Crisp, dry, clear, nicely malty without being too hoppy, just like an English Pub Ale should be. It’s going to get even better in the next couple weeks while it bottle conditions and carbonates, too.
The other thing you do on bottling day is take your final gravity (FG) reading, which you can use to compare with the original gravity (OG) reading in order to find your total alcohol by volume (ABV) using an online calculator. My FG was 1.006, and plugging that in gives me a final ABV of 4.99%, a nice target for this style of beer.
Bottling was then just a matter of using my filling wand over the open dishwasher, filling the bottles, and capping them. This didn’t take too long, and soon I had 34 bottles full. Between the fermenter and the bottling bucket, there was about a 6-pack left behind, but getting at it would have required tipping the buckets, which would have pulled sediment along with the beer, so I didn’t mind leaving it behind.
Conditioning
After filling the bottles, I put them all into a tub in a closet that stays about 68-72 degrees to bottle condition for the next two weeks. Two Mondays later, on the 11th of May, I put one of the 12oz bottles in the fridge and tried it in the evening.
The flavor of the beer was great, but the carbonation wasn’t enough. It was bubbly but it flattened out really fast, with little to no head. This is OK though, sometimes bottle conditioning takes more than two weeks, especially after cold crashing and taking a bunch of yeast out of suspension. So, I went bottle by bottle and carefully tipped each one over and then back to get any settled yeast back into suspension and wake them up. This is called “rousing” the yeast.
Final Tasting
I gave it about another two weeks and then on the morning of May 22nd, I put another couple of bottles into the fridge. In the evening, I popped one open and saw/heard what I wanted – that tiny pop of the bottle opening, and the little vapor cloud you see due to the drop in pressure that comes with opening the bottle. Both of those signs told me that these were carbonated and ready to drink. So I poured a glass.
The beer is, in a word, delicious. It’s crisp and light, with a mouth feel on the thin side. There is a pop of bitterness at the beginning and it goes down smooth on the finish. The hops are present but not overwhelming. And at just under 5% ABV it’s completely crushable. In my opinion it’s a mighty fine example of an English bitter, or a pub ale as some may call it, kind of on the same page as a Fuller’s.
Home brewing is really fun, and I’d encourage anyone to give it a try. There are plenty of rabbit holes one can go down in this hobby, which keeps it always interesting. I hadn’t brewed for a really long time before this, and I was reminded how fun I find it. Hopefully this will motivate me to get a couple more brews done this year.
Cheers!
Good Brew
- Crowd: 5/5
- Ease: 1/5
- This makes a wonderful English style bitter (pub ale)
- Used Alton's recipe, but also used my homebrew equipment and techniques