Home brew better beer

I have taken a year and a quarter off from blogging about making beer. During that time, I  have "obsessed", as my wife, with exaggerated flourishes, would describe, on actually making beer. There are things I have tried that have worked brilliantly, and there have been failures. Here are some of the things I have learned. . . 

1. Take notes. Today I brewed the second version of a successful AleSmith IPA clone from last fall. As I read my notes, I thought to myself, "I don't remember doing that step. Did I really let the hops steep an additional 15 minutes after flameout?" Your notes will guide you as you refine your recipes.
2. Get a good brewing software if you have a computer. I use BeerSmith - mainly because it runs on MacOS, and has a light version for IPhone. But there are plenty of others. I have also gotten some good, reliable recipes from Northern Brewer on the IBrewmaster app for IPhone.
3. Learn from the masters. Jamil is pretty much a first name kind of celebrity in home brewing circles, and for good reason. His book, Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff - co-written with John Palmer, has detailed and insightful instructions for pretty much every beer style out there today. And the Brewing Network also has the Jamil Show podcasts archived for download, where Jamil and John Plise go into even more detail about technique. These are great for listening to during your daily commute.
4. Experiment so you can learn from your mistakes. I went through a period where I thought it would be a good idea to reduce down the third runnings from my mash for better efficiency. Most of the results were unpalatable batches of beer with over-the-top caramel flavors from the resulting Maillard reactions due to excessive boiling. In small doses, this technique can work for a Scottish 70/-, but it is the wrong thing to do with just about every other kind of beer.
5. Exercise proper sanitization techniques, but understand when going overboard accomplishes nothing. Bacteria, wild yeasts, and just plain dirt are in the air all around us. But they tend to fall down of their own accord. A healthy pitch of yeast in a clean environment will go to battle against anything that attempts to take hold in their habitat.
6. Control temperatures carefully from the mash through fermentation to bottling or kegging. As the truism goes, "Brewers make wort. Yeast makes beer."