Alcohol by weight (ABW) is an alternative measure of alcohol content that expresses alcohol as a percentage of the total weight of the beverage rather than the total volume.
John Brewster
John Brewster
John Brewster is the homebrewer and writer behind BrewMyBeer — over a decade of all-grain brewing, 80+ BIAB batches, and 1,000+ guides on fermentation science, water chemistry, hops, yeast, and homebrewing equipment. Every guide is written from genuine hands-on experience.
- Brewer’s Toolbox
Mastering Wort Dilution with Dilution & Gravity Calculator
by John Brewster 3 minutes readWort dilution is a practical technique every all-grain homebrewer uses at some point — you hit a higher-than-expected original gravity and need to add water to bring it into the target range, or you end up with less pre-boil volume …
- Brewer’s Toolbox
Beer Carbonation: Mastering CO₂ Volumes for Perfect Homebrew
by John Brewster 3 minutes readCarbonation is one of the defining sensory characteristics of beer — the level of dissolved CO₂ determines mouthfeel, how the aroma is carried to your nose, and how the beer finishes.
Water chemistry is the most advanced variable in homebrewing and also one of the most impactful once you understand it.
Beer color is measured in Standard Reference Method (SRM) units — a scale from 1 (straw-pale) to 40+ (opaque black).
Pitching rate — how many yeast cells you add to a given volume of wort at a given gravity — is one of the most underappreciated variables in homebrewing.
Mash water volume is one of those numbers homebrewers often eyeball early on and then regret when the mash is too thick to stir or too thin to hold temperature.
- Brewer’s Toolbox
Strike Water Temperature Calculator and Best Practices
by John Brewster 3 minutes readStrike water temperature is the temperature your mashing water needs to be before you add it to the grain, so that the mixture (mash) stabilizes at your target mash temperature.
Bottle carbonation is one of the most satisfying parts of homebrewing — cracking open a bottle weeks after packaging to find perfect carbonation, fine bubbles, and a head that holds — but getting there requires accurate priming sugar calculation.
International Bitterness Units (IBU) is the standard measure of hop bitterness in beer, quantifying the concentration of iso-alpha acids extracted from hops during the boil.