Process walkthroughs, technique, and a glossary, the club's shared brewing know-how.

New to all-grain? Start with the Getting started with the Valley Brewer app →

Using the app 8

• Getting started with the Valley Brewer app What the app is for, signing in, finding your way around the five tabs, and where Guides, Tools and Settings live.
• Building a recipe in the app Start a recipe from scratch, from BeerXML or from a club brew; add ingredients; and how the app's suggested numbers work alongside your own.
• Brewing with Brew Day Run a brew in the app: the phases, timers and alerts, recording measurements as you go, and the fermentation log afterwards.
• Your brews: measurements and Apply to recipe Recipe versus batch: recording a brew, what you measured, comparing it with the recipe, and making the brew day your recipe.
• Sharing with the club Submitting a recipe, how review works, variations of club brews, and sharing a brew's measured numbers with the club.
• Stock and shopping list Keeping track of the malt, hops and yeast you have, running-low alerts, and a shopping list that follows you to the website.
• Tools and calculators The brewing calculators in the app, including the water calculator and its New Zealand source water.
• Settings, equipment and backup Your equipment profile, brewing defaults, notifications, RAPT Pill, and keeping your data safe: cloud backup, exporting all your data, and stock as a spreadsheet.

Process 7

• All-Grain Brew Day — End-to-End Walkthrough A start-to-finish walkthrough of a full all-grain brew day, written for whichever setup you are on — all-in-one, three-vessel or BIAB. Prep, mash, sparge, boil, whirlpool, chill, pitch, ferment and package, plus what to expect at your first club brew day.
• Cleaning & Sanitation Clean then sanitise — the discipline that decides whether a batch turns out clean or infected. Chemicals, contact times, the 80 °C rule, and the shared-kit and group-brew-day rules that only matter in a club.
• Brewing Water Basics What the minerals in your water do, the one ratio that matters most, and how to hit mash pH — worked for the Waiwhetu aquifer water most of the valley brews on, including the Petone and Dowse artesian taps.
• Kegging, Carbonation & Competition Bottles Force carbonation, serving pressure and low-oxygen transfer — plus how to fill competition entry bottles off a keg without oxidising them, which is the step that costs members points every year.
• Yeast Handling — Pitch, Share, Repitch How much dry yeast to pitch and why liquid calculators mislead, when to rehydrate, how to store packs — and how to split a pack or hand a slurry to another member without passing on a problem with it.
• Pressure Fermentation — Is It For You? What fermenting under pressure actually buys you, what it costs in gear, when it is the wrong tool, and the safety rules that are not optional. A decision guide rather than a workflow.
• Wild, Sour & Barrel-Aged Beer Two ways into sour brewing — the kettle sour you can do this weekend on your normal gear, and the club barrel solera that has been running for years. Cultures, the sick phase, oak, and the oxygen management a barrel needs.

Measurement 1

• Reading Gravity, ABV & Efficiency Taking readings that are actually comparable, turning OG and FG into ABV and attenuation, and working out your own brewhouse efficiency — which is the number that decides whether someone else's recipe hits its target on your kit.

Hops 1

• Dry Hopping & Whirlpool Getting hop aroma into the glass — whirlpool technique, dry-hop rates and timing, biotransformation, and how to add hops without oxygen whether you ferment in a bucket or under pressure. Plus timing a hoppy beer for a competition.

Troubleshooting 2

• Diacetyl — The Rest, the Test, and Hop Creep Butterscotch is the fault most often found after packaging rather than before it. How to run a forced diacetyl test on any kit, what the warmth of a rest is actually doing, and how dry hopping restarts the clock.
• Bandaid, TCP & Clove — Telling Phenolic Faults Apart Three different compounds all get called phenolic, and they need three different fixes. A diagnosis order for a beer that tastes of sticking plaster, plus the shared-mill and shared-kit routes that matter most in a club.

Reference 1

• Glossary of Brewing Terms A plain-language reference for the terms that show up in club recipes and on brew days, cross-linked to the club's own hop, malt, yeast and style pages so you can go straight from a definition to the ingredient.