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• Today’s topic: All the easy ways you can tweak a homebrew recipe
• The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer.
• Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School

With your first batch of homebrew still waiting to be bottled and a now-empty fermentation bucket staring you down, perhaps you’re contemplating … doing another homebrew? I fully support this plan! If you’re also feeling like stretching your creative wings with this next batch, I have a few suggestions for easy ways to start playing around with flavors in your homebrews.

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The HDX Twin Window Fan from Home Depot, $32

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A few months ago I wrote a post about how to ventilate a kitchen when you don’t have a range hood or vent. A number of Kitchn readers recommended installing a reversible window fan which, when put on the exhaust setting, can effectively draw smells, steam, and smoke out of your kitchen.

I don’t have a hood in my rental kitchen, and for a long time I just ran the ceiling fans in other rooms when I cooked something particularly smelly or smoky. It worked okay, but wasn’t ideal. So I decided to put a window fan in one of my kitchen windows, and now I’m so glad I did.

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This frosty almond butter and banana shake is the perfect sweet treat to refuel your body. Filled with nutty flavor and sweet bananas, this dairy-free snack tastes like dessert! And it does it with a rather surprising secret ingredient.

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• Today’s topic: How to figure out what went wrong with your beer
• The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer.
• Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School

Even the most experienced, gifted, and diligent homebrewer still occasionally gets a bum bottle. It happens. And when it does, it’s useful to take a few minutes to try and figure out what went wrong — and how to avoid it next time. Let’s take a look at some of the most common problems with finished beer.

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The words dentist and knives together in the same sentence don’t sound very pleasant, do they? Don’t worry, they have nothing to do with any painful dental work, but instead are a good way to think about knife honing and sharpening!

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Trader Joe’s is great for regular pantry items and kitchen staples, but one area where they really excel is snacks. And, judging by some of your favorite buys at Trader Joe’s, it sounds like you agree.

They carry everything from everyday basic munchies and dinner party-worthy nibbles to healthy snacks and indulgent sweets. There are more than a few snacks that have won my heart since I started shopping at Trader Joe’s years ago. But it’s these 10 that would cause the most heartbreak should they ever stop appearing on the shelves.

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