HomeBrewing

So, how many homebrewers or winemakers do we have out there ? What is your favorite fermentation ?

Mine would be a wheat ale brewed with maple syrup. Has quite a kick and has been known to blow the lid off of the fermenter. [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

Ed King

I tried homebrewing beer once about 10 years ago, but with no luck...it was all bad when I drank it. Probably contaiminated during the bottling phase...anyway, this winter I plan on trying wine this time...actually, have been planning it for quite some time (I have about 20 cases of empty wine bottles saved up!), but looks like I'll finally have some time this year to give it a try.

Any recommendations for a no-fail, quick to drink wine as a first test? [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

""Any recommendations for a no-fail, quick to drink wine as a first test?""

To meet those conditions it's best to visit your local spirit's dispenser and make the purchase of your choice.

Home brewing requires patience and more patience. Beer is the fastest from primary fermentor to final dispension stage.

Egon

<font color="blue"> </font color> Any recommendations for a no-fail, quick to drink wine as a first test?
<font color="black"> </font color>
I would recomend finding a homebrewing/winemaking store in your area, and asking for advise/assistance there.

Ed King

Ed, I haven't brewed anything yet, but will be finishing my brewery up during welding class during the next couple weeks.

A friend of mine teaches the night welding class and is a home brewer. He is pretty good friends with some of the guys that run area micro breweries.

I am building a three tier system with 15 gal kegs. Another guy in class may have a salavged stainless cylinder with a conical bottom that I am going to try to turn into a fermentor. If I can't I will just use carboys.

I will be doing a practice batch at Bryans in a couple weeks, then I'm going to do the same batch on mine so I hopefully can do it right.

Give me some ideas on your recipe and maybe a picture of how you brew.

Gotta go students are here.

I got into homebrewing about 12 years ago, with the malt extract kits, moved into all-grain brewing a couple years after that. It's a great hobby. I haven't done that much in the last couple of years (too many other projects). One thing I can recommend is if you are remotely serious about it, move quickly into kegging your brews. Washing, sterilizing and filling (and capping) all those bottles gets old pretty quick. There are several kegging systems on the market now, but I started with (and still use) regular 5-gallon soda kegs. Easy and cheap to find, quick to clean and fill, and there's nothing like coming in after work and drawing off a tall draft of your own brew (good to take to parties, excuse me I mean "tastings" too).

If you get into this, keep an eye out for a used refrigerator. The CFO may not be nuts about several 5-gallon kegs taking up space in the kitchen frig. Also, unless your climate is very cooperative, you need fairly strict temperature control to make lagers successfully. I keep my spare frig in the shop, which is handy, but does require a certain amount of self-control when working on projects with power tools [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

Darel

DarelS,

I'm intrigued. I used to homebrew quite a bit, but haven't done so recently, mainly because of all the work involved with bottling, just too much time. How do these keg systems work particularly your soda kegs? I assume some sort of tap is needed. Where do you find your soda kegs, surplus from the bottling plant? A keg system sounds very attractive, and I've been looking for an excuse for an extra fridge in the shop [img]/forums/images/icons/smirk.gif[/img]

The kegs are plain old soda kegs. They have a removable lid, which facilitates cleaning. They have a simple gas in connection, and liquid out connection. The liquid out conection hooks to a tap just like any other delivery system. No modification of the "corny keg" or corneilius(sp!) is needed.

There are two types, a pin-lock, and a ball-lock. One is Pepsi products, one is Coca Cola products. I don't remember which is which [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] I have all ball-lock style. Most brew stores have them available. They are available over the web too. Sometimes you can get them from soda suppliers...

A short apartment fridge can hold one or two of these, depending on the fridge. That's a popular way to do it. Otherwise, a regular fridge can hold a bunch of them.

I brew form time to time, on a 10g three tier gravity feed system. My favorite beer was actually an extract; a full blown Rasberry Imperial Stout. It was awesome! I also have a "stock" recipe, that is simply modified to make a fruit beer(I use fruit extract for it), or a light ale. I have made a lot of different styles over the years though. In fact, I was one of the first 100 or so people on the original Homebrew Digest.

I have a 3-tier system. My boiler, and lauter warming containers are 15g kegs. My mashtun is a 48qt cooler with an upper sprinkler manifold, and a lower collection manifold. I made mine out of expanded steel.

When you cut the kegs, go to Wal Mart or K-mart and get a lid that will fit inside the handle rail on the top of the keg. Kut just the top of the keg around the tap area. The lid works to keep things covered and clean.

If you leave the "handrail" on the keg, it is a lot easier to handle. I see folks that cut the whole top of the keg off, and then have to add handles later. That's a pain.

Also, With material still reamining inside the Handrail area, it is curved(towards where the tap used to be). This really helps contorl boil-over too.

Sorry for slow reply, been a bit busy at work lately.

RobertN laid it out pretty well. They are regular soda kegs, can sometimes be creatively scrounged, bought pretty cheap from homebrew suppliers, or you can actually buy really nice new ones from places like Williams Brewing. You will need a CO2 tank and regulator; many homebrew suppliers can supply the regulator, the tank can usually be leased really cheap from welding suppliers or anyplace that fills fire extinguishers. A 20-lb CO2 tank will last a long time. You can also get manifolds to split the gas supply into several lines, handy for maintaining pressure on several tanks. The taps are similar to the "picnic taps" used on regular beer kegs, although you can get all fancy and get real bar-type taps to mount on the door of your fridge (I haven't done this).

One really nice think about using kegs is that you can force-carbonate the beer rather than priming. You put the finished beer in the keg, chill it, then put extra gas pressure on the keg for a certain length of time (I don't have the figures in front of me, but I can get them if you're interested). This forces the CO2 into the beer for carbonation, instead of using a priming method to carbonate after fermentation. It's easy and relatively quick, and there is VERY little sludge (dead yeast) in the keg. I strongly recommend kegging, it's really not that expensive, and it beats the heck out of dealing with all those bottles.

There is a lot of homebrewing info on the web. Anyone that is at all serious about it should join the American Homebrewers Association and get their quarterly Zymurgy. American Homebrewers Association

Darel

Thanks, that's really interesting information. I'm definitely going to investigate further.

Lack of sludge is another factor. It never really bothered me, but for some [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

EJB,

<font color="red">Any recommendations for a no-fail, quick to drink wine as a first test? </font color>

Do you like hard apple cider? This is the time of year to get decent prices on good cider, and it's fairly easy to make hard cider. Most of the commercial hard ciders are too sweet for my taste, and if you make your own you get to choose how sweet or dry to make it. However, if you like it sweet, and also want it carbonated, it can get interesting unless you keg carbonate. I use Grolsch style bottles for my brews, and for my last cider I wanted it slightly sweet and carbonated. I used a sweet mead yeast and let it go in the secondary fermentor until completely dry. I then racked it to my bottling bucket and sweetened it with frozen concentrate before bottling. After a few days (5?) I checked a bottle and was happy with the carbonation and residual sweetness, so I refrigerated the whole batch to stop further fermentation. It didn't last long.

I've got an experiment percolating now. I've developed a taste for port as I've aged myself. A nice glass of port before the fire is great on a cold evening. I tend to prefer the ruby ports, which are pretty sweet and fruity, and I started wondering what an apple wine of port strength would be like. I had a couple gallons of a really nice cider I got locally which was squeezed from 100% Jonagold apples. It has a good acid balance for my taste, but two gallons didn't seem like enough to bother with, so I added another gallon of a store-bought cider (Pasteurized, and no preservatives). Champagne yeast will ferment to as high as 18% alcohol by volume. That calculates to a starting specific gravity of about 1.14. After adding three cans of frozen concentrate and 2.5 popunds of sugar, my cider was at a SG 0f 1.10. I've got it burping away now and plan to feed it more sugar, gradually, until the yeast gives up. That should take about three more pounds of sugar if the yeast goes to 18%, but it likely won't. When it's finished, I'll sweeten to taste, and if it seems light on buzz, I may fortify it with brandy. Applejack is taken, so I have to come up with a new moniker for this stuff which might be entirely undrinkable. Applechuck comes to mind. That kinda sounds like upchuck, which may be appropriate, but I can always use it to start fires or something.

Chuck

I got the Williams Brewing catalog. Has some good info and some neat stuff. Things have greatly improved in the last few years when it comes to brewing equipment.

My daughter especially liked the concept of carbonating her own sodapop using a kegging system. [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img]

So any of you guys have any tips for a wannabe homebrewer? Any good starter kits? How much money will it cost to start? I was thinking of putting a homebrewing kit on my Christmas list. Is there any good, affordable starter kits? Thanks.

The most important thing to remember is clean-clean-clean. It is very important to sterilize all of the surfaces that will come into contact with your mash, wort, and beer and to minimize exposure of the contents to air. Free-living organisms can make a good brew-recipe go bad fast.

As to starter-kits, any of your brewing supply stores should have the basic starter components. If you have one near you, I'd recommend talking to somebody there. There is a lot of good stuff available online now too, but when you are just getting started, the guy in the shop can help you pick out the stuff you need. There are a lot of different types of yeasts, hops, extracts, etc..., that can be a little overwhelming to a novice.

I'd probably recommend a very SIMPLE recipe for your first go, before you start experimenting too much. Get down the basics first. WATCH CLOSELY when heating your mash, IT CAN BOIL OVER IN SECONDS if you turn your back... it is a REAL MESS to clean up.

If you mind the instructions and thoroughly STERILIZE everything, you can hardly go wrong.

Good luck and have fun!!! [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
Larry

Thanks for your help. Swung by one at lunch today.[I found one about 300feet from work. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] never knew it was there] I talked to the guy, and they have a starter kit that comes with all the stuff I need. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Think that will be the way to go for now.

I'm glad you found the advice useful. It is a great hobby and an opportunity to create some of the best beer that you can get. I just picked up the ingredients for my next batch. I'm making a Cranberry Amber Ale. This is the second time for the Cranberries, the first one was pretty good but a little tart. It made for a refreshing summer drink though. I'm planning to make this one a little sweeter for a nice hearty winter drink.

Cheers!! [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

Well, I got my homebrew kit for Christmas. If it ever stops snowing, and I can stop clearing the drive, I am going to start my first batch. Any good web sites for the begener homebrewer?

Started a jalapeno brew last night. I have lots of jalapenos in the garden thanks to a mild fall, and since I have no tomatoes left, I can't make more salsa, so.....what to use them for. How about a pepper beer! I made a relatively light brew, with a partial mash of two pounds of pale ale malt and one half pound of wheat flakes, for body. To that, I added five pounds of DME, one ounce of Northern Brewer and one half ounce of Cascade hops, and fifteen japanenos. The peppers were a mix of small red and long green jalapenos, all from the same plant....I think the small red ones started during a hot dry spell. I sliced the peppers and left the seeds in. Came to about nine ounces of pepper slices. I did a short boil of only about 40 minutes. After cooling the wort, I pitched a nice big slug of Red Hook Hefeweisen yeast saved from my last brew. I didn't check the OG, but I did taste test for the pepper bite, and it wasn't really all that hot. The peppers are in the primary, and I'll check the heat when I rack to the secondary and add more peppers if needed. Should make a nice match to the pots of chili and mexican cornbread we'll be cooking up this fall and winter. I plan to add enough bottling DME to get a good fizz, though the pepper oils will probably prevent good head formation. Anyone else attempted a pepper beer?

Chuck

Chuck52, Please let us know about the pepper beer. I've had pepper everything else. I got two jars of pepper jelly as a late birthday gift a couple days ago. Should go great on pepper cornbread along with a slice of pepper cheese.

By the way... I had to realign my expectations. I was predisposed to think of home brewing as scratch building electronic projects and such. I don't get out much...

Pat

Pat,

I racked it to the secondary yesterday afternoon. I was prepared to add more peppers if it didn't have as much bite as I wanted, but it seemed about right to me. It is also much lighter colored than my usual brews, which is something I was trying for, and with a nice fresh pepper aroma. I think the shorter boil I used helped there, and not using any of the crystal malts I normally add. Even the lighter crystal malts add some color. A couple days ago I had the green chili beer at the local brew pub. It was pretty good, and went perfectly with the cajun-style pasta dish I had. My brew will have a bit more pepper bite than theirs, and more than Cave Creek, but should be about right to my taste.....and it is my taste I brew for! [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img] I'm thinking of pots of chili, Mexican cornbread and my jalapeno beer as a perfect cold weather antidote.

Chuck

By the way, for those who are interested in costs, I figure my pepper brew ingredients set me back about $15. The DME was the major expense, and I got it from St. Pats at a decent $2/lb. So, about $10 for the DME, maybe $2 for the grains, and a buck's worth of hops. The peppers came out of my garden and I originally cultured the yeast from a six-pack of Red Hook Hefeweisen a few years ago, so the total was about $13 for 5 gallons. That makes it about $0.35 a pint....the chili beer at the brewpub cost $2.50, and I think that was the Happy Hour price. Cave Creek, the only bottled chili beer I can get around here, is about $6 a six-pack of 12oz. Now, if I could just bring myself to take the all-grain plunge, I could probably get the price down to $0.20 a pint, or so! Not that money is of any real significance when we're talking about beer! [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

Chuck


Chuck

Sounds great Chuck! Maybe I'll try an experiment one of these years. I hope to make a lot of pear cider next year from our abundant but underutilized crop. I wonder how hard pear cider with a hot pepper note would be? Served cold with the flavor and sweetness blooming on the palet as it warms in the mouth and throat THEN POW, hey this stuff is tangy, man!

Pass the pepper cheese and I'll have another of those jalapeno biscuits please...

Pat

Wow! A pepper perry! Unlike my had-it-before pepper beer, I do believe a pepper perry would be a first. Are you thinking, sweet, sparkling and zippy? The sweet and sparkling part can get difficult if you are using natural bottle fermentation to carbonate. Ciders and perrys are usually about 5% alcohol, I think, and so getting one sweet and sparkling using bottle fermentation either means you have to catch the bottles at just the right stage and then refrigerate all of them until drinking, or you use some non-fermentable sweetener like lactose. Sparkling dry is easier, but with pepper too, you'd end up with interesting champagne....talk about Brute! Now if you kegged, you could filter out the yeast when you liked the sweetness, and then force carbonate in the keg. One of my buddies kegs, and I envy him his almost immediate access to the fruits of his brewing labors. My pepper beer will have to sit in the bottle for at least two weeks to carbonate, and will probably really only get properly drinkable after a month.

For sure let us know how you make out with the perry. I plan to put in several apple and pear trees this year and next, and part of my plans include cider. My kegging buddy also keeps bees, and we will collarorate on various honey-fruit combinations.

Chuck

Chuck, I try to be open minded but when it comes to LACTOSE I, like Jerry Seinfeld, just will not tollerate it. Yeah, I too am one of the many lactose intollerant people at large in our polulation. I tried counselling and midnight draughts of spunk water but to no avail... I remain lactose intollerant.

I can take medication for it when consuming something with lactose content but...

Pat

Oooh, too bad Pat. I really never liked the idea of using lactose or any other non-fermenatable sweetener to make a sweet and sparkling anything. However, it does get interesting if you want to do the natural carbonation and still have sweetness. Sweet and flat, or dry and sparkling are no problemo. I made a nice cider once that was both sweet and sparkling, but if I hadn't consumed it in time, it would have decorated my basement with glass shards.

Chuck

Chuck, Decades ago I used to brew rootbeer. I used the larger reusable (deposit required) pop bottles and still have the capper and some caps. In-brewed carbonation was the name of the game and of course you wanted a sweet product. I preferred to increase the proportion of root extract for stouter flavor than commercial product and slightly reduce the sugar so as to not be quite as sweet as the commercial stuff.

I would always bottle a few small bottles, like in 6 oz coke bottles. These were used as samples. Try one every so often and when it had sufficient carbonation the rest was ready to be refrigerated. One of the favorite spots for sitting a bunch of bottles was on the living room mantle. I had made the mantle from a 4x16 fir construction timber, burning and scraping and burning and brushing, beating with chains and various tools to distress it then preserving it with a few coats of Deft a clear wood topcoat. It was a tough board, fire hardened and multi-coated with sealer.

We went away for a few days, there was a warm spell, and when we returned there were glass shards embedded in the wall, glass shards embedded in the mantle, glass shards lying on the floor in the mostly dried residue of rootbeer.

As you know, excess air in the bottle is NOT GOOD as it can lead to spoiling. Over filling is also NOT GOOD as you need headspace to accomodate expansion with any increase in temperature. In theory there is a happy medium.

I will never know for sure what happened but I guess one of the bottles was over stressed (overfilled?) and ruptured. Why it couldn't just have the decency to pop its top I'll never know. Anyway, I suppose, one of the group burst which started a chain reaction that went critical and the whole assembly of bottles (lying on their sides in a pyramid pile between book ends) blew up.

IT took a while to extract the glass from the wall and mantle. the mantle just got washed and a top cote of Deft. The wall needed drywall repair and paint.

In-brewed carbonation is a wonderful thing and those little yeast dudes really loved their invert sugar.

If nothing else comes to mind, I'll just artificially carbonate the pear cider. Ever note the price of sparkling apple juice (non-alcoholic)? WOW! I am thinking of using sweet cider and a seltzer bottle.

Pat

Pat,

There are some neat devices available for carbonating beer or pop using plastic bottles and CO2 cartridges. Look at homwbrew sites, like St. Pats of Texas. They tend to be kid of expensive and I have decided in the past that if I ever wanted to go the kegging route, I'd just save up for a soda keg system.

The thing about bottle conditioning, or carbonating, is that the yeast will continue to convert the available sugars, at least those it's enzymes can handle, until it uses it all up (dry brew), or gets to an alcohol content that stops the fermentation. Even the wimpiest beer yeasts will go to at least 8% alcohol, and probably more. Wine yeasts are good to 12-18%, depending on the strain. So, though air space is important, unless you leave the bottle half empty, it's gonna blow if there's still sugar to ferment and the yeast is alive and kicking. Soda is usually brewed with bakers yeast, isn't it? Less alcohol produced, but it will still keep kicking out the CO2 until it blows or you chill it to stop fermentation.

If you decide to force carbonate in some manner, you may have to let the perry/cider go dry and wait for the yeast to settle out. Then rack it off the yeast, hoping you leave it all behind if you don't filter. You could then sweeten to taste, bottle and force carbonate. However, if you don't do something to kill or filter out any residual yeast, and it doesn't take many cells, or chill the whole batch, fermentation will eventually start up and you'll get "interesting" results!

Chuck

Chuck, Yes, we used baking yeast and it should top out at a very low alcohol content. I don't recall if I knew, and I sure don't recall, why we used invert sugar instead of plain granulated sugar. I don't know how cold you'd have to chill baking yeast to stop it (dare I say) cold. Before our "interesting" results we had some pretty tasty rootbeer. If I recall, we used Hires brand extract. Really nasty looking stuff, not at all what you'd expect you'd be drinking.

A bud and I made a "poor man's" hookah rig that employed a stainless steel soda syrup pressure vessel as a "bail out bottle" in case of compressor malfunction or loss of power. Would something like that be good for carbonating beverages? The guy who was my neighbor, lived three slips down from me when I was living on a sailboat, now lives 80 miles from me here in Oklahoma (we were on boats in San Diego.) He may have some more of those syrup vessels.

Pat

Pat,

If those syrup tanks are soda kegs, you would have half a kegging system. You need a tank or two, a CO2 tank and a regulator. The tanks are about half the cost of a whole system.

Yeast has to take an extra step when fermenting table sugar, sucrose, which is a disaccharide....two simple sugars bonded together. "Invert" sugar is probably sucrose treated with the enzyme invertase, which breaks down sucrose to glucose and fructose, which the yeast can then ferment rapidly.

Did you ever make ginger ale? I had a curiously strong ginger ale on the North Carolina outer banks a couple of summers ago. It was to normal ginger ale as Red Hook IPA is to Busch Natural Light. Now there's a soda I could imagine trying to make.

Chuck

Just a few hints from my memories.

1 - an automatic dish washer makes a great bottle sterilizer as long as you have never ever, EVER put that evil liquid drying agent in it. Jet Dry and equivalent will ruin your beer.

2 - the simplest way to make a batch foolproof is to boil the entire batch. This does require an 8-10 gallon pot to make a 5 gallon batch. If you can't justify the big pot, get the biggest pot you can find and boil the extract and as much water as you can fit.

3 - A ten gallon pot full of boiling wort will cool pretty quick in a bathtub full of cold water, especially if you change the water a couple of times. Wort coolers are nice but the beginner can get away with hefting the pot in to the tub. The most critical time in your beers life is when it is cooling from boiling to pitching. That is when it is most susceptable to baddies getting in.

4 - never add sugar to boost specific gravity. You will end up with a brew that tastes terrible and gives you a hangover. This is probably THE most common mistake and has given homebrew a bad name.

5 - kegging sure makes the hobby easier but does add considerably to the cost. There is nothing wrong with fermenting in a plastic bucket with a spiggot (put a plastic bag over the spiggot and seal with a rubber band after you assemble the sanitized parts you ran through the dishwasher). Bottling is simple after fermentation completes. Just lift a bottle to the spiggot, turn the knob and fill the bottle.

6 - always prime the batch, not the bottle, if you are going to use natural bottle carbonation. The old books said to put a teaspoon of table sugar in each bottle. I sure had my share of poppers doing it that way.

7 - two stage fermentation sure helps reduce the amount of yeast in the bottle but can be skipped if you don't mind a little extra sludge.

Finally - my favorite foolproof brew?

Get yourself a gallon of unfiltered apple cider from the box store in a glass jar. Toss in a packet of champagne yeast and give it a shake. Stick a fermenation lock in a rubber cork on the top. Put it in a 5 gallon plastic bucket and leave it be for a month or two changing the water in the fermentation lock as needed the first few days. It WILL foam over and make a heck of a mess which is why it is in the plastic bucket and why you have to add water to the lock every so often. Wait for it to stop bubbling, then wait another week or so for it to clarify, then gently pour it into a clean jug. Put it in the fridge and enjoy.

I made mead once. It was ok but not my favorite. I made a few wheat beers and they are great during the summer. My favorite has got to be a nice mild brown. I find that most american homebrewers go for that over hopped microbrewery taste. Never understood the american fascination with preservatives. Hops were traditionally added to a beer as a preservative. IPA's are strongly hopped to survive the trip around the cape. I personally like a nice brown beer I can taste the malt and not have it overwhelmed by the hops.