How to Use This Website
Determine which guide youâre following
- The personal size guide is to help you make one or two vials for you and maybe a very close friend.
- The medium size guide is for around 20 or so vials. I find this methodology absolutely maxes out at around 60 vials without some teks.
- The large size guide is to help you make many, many vials. This methodology maxes out at around 200 vials because youâre a human, not a machine.
Read about sterilization theory
This page describes how sterilization works in the guides I write, and can also help you understand why other guides fail to properly sterilize. Iâd label this as required reading, especially if youâve brewed before with other methodology.
Read your guide in full
You need to have an understanding of your guide as a whole unit. You by no means need to memorize it, but you should be able to see the full picture of what the guide is instructing you to do before you do it.
Build your knowledge
As youâre getting all your supplies and materials in order, spend some time reading through the side bar, especially the knowledge base section. You donât need to ready every single thing in full, but you should familiarize yourself with what information is available on this website. If a question comes up in the brew process, you should be relatively confident that you can get on this website and answer the question for yourself.
People who do this work professionally donât just come off the street and start working. They have a very serious amount of study and training that they have to do before theyâre allowed anywhere near stuff like HRT, which is considered a âhigh riskâ preparation, and of the most difficult to compound correctly (even in a proper lab setting). Donât discard how the professionals work, consider them role models for how we should approach our home lab projects.
If you want to do this correctly, especially for the medium and very especially for the large guides, youâre going to need to work very hard, study hard, and strengthen your mindset. Brewing in volume is not a weekend project.
Build your Mindset
Very Important Step!
What youâre trying to do, compound HRT at home, is not a fully understood task. Actual step-by-step guides from state of the art pharmaceutical labs have not leaked to the public, and even if they had we wouldnât have the equipment to replicate them. So not only is this difficult to do correctly, but we donât have a 100% understanding of what âcorrectâ even is.
Your mindset, then, becomes your most invaluable ally.
You should always be asking questions, striving to understand better. If you disagree with me, or you disagree with someone else giving advice, can you find hard data backing what is true? And can you think critically enough to determine if the data is actually relevant or not? Always dig deeper, always expand your knowledge, always ask questions. Never assume you know anything for certain.
If youâve brewed beforeâŠ
Itâs worth comparing all the differences between what you did last time and what youâll do this time. Building up an understanding for why things are done one way, and not another, can help you to perform better when youâre working in your home lab.
Check out the Homebrew Methods Critiques menu in the sidebar to see if youâve used any of the guides listed there in the past.
Familiarize yourself with the available teks
Tek: a technique for completing a DIY, science based task. A popular term in the home mycology community.
Also in the sidebar are some teks that can make your life way easier. Theyâre designed to plug into the guides that youâre following (medium and large only).