When you get to the fermentation stage of brewing, you might think it’s smooth sailing from then on. Unfortunately, a lot of brewers make this mistake and don’t take fermentation as seriously as they should. There are plenty of reasons your beer can fail during its fermentation, and we want you to be able to avoid them. These are a few common mistakes made in beer fermentation that you don’t want to fall into.

Potatoes, cereals, and wild plant base materials are all pressure-cooked to gelatinize the starch into a liquid state, but still cannot be directly decomposed by yeast, and must be fermented to produce alcohol. After the gelatinized mash is prepared, specific saccharification representatives should be added before fermentation, so that the starch in the liquefied state can finally become sugar that can be fermented by yeast. This process of converting starch directly into sugar is called saccharification.