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Yes, you should, but it's not completely necessary if you're trying to keep your first brew day simple. With an extract kit, as long as your volume measurements are accurate, your OG will be on target since all you're doing is dissolving a known quantity of sugars in a know quantity of water.
Similar to the arsenic in apple juice craziness that hit the media a while back, beer is now getting its arsenic inspection.
Mehmet Coelhan, a researcher at the Technical University of Munich, reported that nearly 360 beers tested in Germany had some trace amounts of arsenic. And while
arsenic is a natural substance that seems to pop up in water and apple juice, a few of those beers were found to have more than 25 parts per billion of arsenic. The standard for drinking water in the States? Ten parts per billion.
NPR reports that the source of arsenic seems to be the filtering process, which uses diatomaceous earth that contains iron and other metals. "The levels shouldn't be alarming, because it's the kind of thing you see in dust or air," Roger Boulton, a professor at University of California, Davis, told NPR.
The same filtration process, NPR notes, is also used for wine, and while there seems to be no taste appeal for filtering wine or beer, there is definite visual appeal in a clear, cold brew, or a crisp glass of white wine.
There aren't many other options for filtration, NPR notes, as other methods affect the taste of the brews and wines more so than diatomaceous earth. And while this means maybe we should all try some cloudy brews, let's note that the same arsenic scare occured with apple juice, to no avail. While studies found 10 percent of apple juice to contain more arsenic than drinking water standards, the FDA claimed that "a risk to public health does not exist for apple juice. Unlike drinking water, the levels routinely found in apple juice are either not detectable or occur at very low levels."
I remember some scrappy Pilgrims who founded a whole new country with a 5-gallon kettle and a lot of pluck. You can do it too!
Sam Calagione started on a 10-gallon system. Just sayin ;-) obviously not ideal
He's also incredibly good at marketing and self-promotion. Yeah, life is easier if you have a lot of talent. If you don't, you'll need help.
The other thing you have to know is that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.
I'm trying to decide what yeast i want to use for rye ipa.
The standard of US-05, and S-04 are what i normally use and have produced what i'm looking for in my other beers. I have i was thinking that US-56 or T-58 could be interesting. would the t-58 and the rye be too much? I plan on doing an extract with NB rye extract malt, w/specialty grains.
When people taste my beer and say you should open a brewery, I laugh. I know how to make beer. I do not know the first thing about running a brewery for profit.
So is that to say if you had an angel investor and all the startup capital you needed, you wouldn't love to brew for a living?
I wouldn't. In my head I would just walk around saying it's time to brew X beer, thinking up new recipes, brewing whatever I wanted and talking to people about how great the beer is. That's not anywhere near reality. It's a lot of cleaning, it's a lot of brewing the same thing over and over, it's people b****ing because you make too much "bland" beer in your normal line up and b****ing you don't make enough of the "good stuff" and fighting to get shelf space. The bigger you get the more you manage and the less you brew. It's manual labor work in an increasingly competitive market that generally is not that profitable. I've already investing a huge amount of time, work and capital into my current profession. No interest in moving into another field.
Everything I like about homebrewing is generally not present in commercial brewing. I like that I can brew when I want or not brew if I don't feel like it. I can brew whatever I want and I don't have to worry about whether I can sell it off. I don't have to appease other people. I can experiment as much as I like without restriction. Sure, it's getting easier to operate a profitable brewery on a small core line up and make everything else experimental beers because the demand is there but how many breweries like that come and go in a couple years? How many can scale that model up?