Home Brewing
Anybody here do it? I just boiled my first batch last night (something called Irish Hills Red... supposed to be like Killians) and am waiting on it to ferment... seems like pretty easy stuff with way better prices than most other beer.
Anybody got any advice for beginning brewers such as myself?
Is this something you would leave off of the "interests" section in your resume? lol
I don't brew currently but am interested. How did you get started?
I just decided this past week, after a long long time of thinking about doing it and trying to convince my dad to buy a kit, to go up to my local home brewing store (there should be one near you) and see how much the stuff costs... ended up buying everything I needed. The store should have everything you need and the people there were really helpful and could explain everything I needed to do.
If you're interested, you should just do it. You can make beer for way cheap and it's really not that hard or time consuming... just ~2/3 hours to boil the initial ingredients, wait for it to cool down, then put the yeast in, then wait ~1 week for it all to ferment, put the sugar and fermented beer in another container, bottle, and wait another 7-10 days minimum. Only cost me $147 to get all of the equipment, including the ingredients for my first batch (~$20/25 for enough to make 48 beers).
My old man did it in college as a way to make extra money.
It's a fantastic hobby, but it won't stay cheap for long. I'm guessing you started with a pre-packaged can of malt, which is the way to go when you're just starting out. But after a while if you really enjoy it you're going to start malting your own grains and coming up with your own recipes, etc... and you'll find that brewing a batch takes most of the weekend!
Then you'll graduate from bottling to kegging (which is really the way to go because it's much easier than washing out all those bottles), and then you'll invest in a CO2 system and a kegerator.
You've gone down a dangerous road, my friend, from which there is seldom any hope of return. Godspeed.
Hmmm... I can see why it could get pretty expensive but, as you said, it's a hobby. Though it seems like there are still ways to keep it cheap if you're really looking for saving some money while not being able to make top top of the line stuff.
As EB said, closer to an obsession. Wonderful and tasty hobby, but quite time demanding, specially if you go all grain and bottle... Be sure to watch that belly to...
I'll be going to kegs soon enough... I can't really see myself bottling all of that stuff individually over and over.
I've already got a lil belly goin though :(
So I'm guessing you brew Edmundo... what kind of setup do you guys have?
Actually, I didn't bring my rig to Paris with me, so I've been missing it. I started out like you - a beer lover who thought he could make his own cheaper. And it is possible, but I was never one for patience and a bottled batch takes three weeks to ferment.
So it became a somewhat expensive passion of mine. I just love the way the house smells when you're malting. I love the chemistry and experimentation aspects of the hobby. Of course, I love the beer (despite a respectable number of utterly wretched batches I've turned out over the years). If there is one tiny bit of advice I can give you, it's this: go to kegging sooner rather than later. It makes your life so much easier and enables you to be fermenting several batches at once so you never run out.
I'll share one story with you in the hopes it might prevent the same thing from happening to you. After I'd been brewing for awhile, I decided to experiment with a fruit beer. I'm not a big fan of fruit beers (exception: Abita Purple Haze), it was more just something I wanted to try. So I bought a can of raspberry beer malt and brewed it according to instructions.
Before sealing the keg for secondary fermentation, however, I dropped in a mesh bag with a few pounds of frozen raspberries tied up in it. I didn't realize that the malt already had all the sugar necessary for fermenting already in it. So a few days later I come home from work and there's an ungodly smell in the house. It takes me a while to figure out where it's coming from and then it hits me: the beer.
I go to the closet where I did my secondary fermenting and I open the door. The first thing to hit me was the smell: sickly sweet, and somehow sour at the same time. Then I look down and the dispensing hose I have hooked up to the tap is literally swinging around like a snake spraying beer everywhere. It was awful.
Long story short: the natural sugars in the frozen raspberries combined with the sugars already in the malt caused the carbonation in the beer to go through the roof. It actually burst the seal on the keg, and thankfully I had the hose hooked up to it so there was at least a somewhat orderly way for the pressure to bleed off. If I had bottled that batch, it would have been a closet full of glass grenades exploding.
One tip I have for scoring free-ish bottles is I went to the liquor store and they sold me the bottles for 5 cents each, same as their redemption value. I ended up with a lot of amstel bottles for some reason, those were plentiful of the non-twistoff cap kind. We just marked the Caps with letters to tell us which beer was which.
If you can score a mother load of grolsch bottles then the bottling is way easier since they have the flip top.
For my fermenting rig, I am a cheap ass...I scrounged for a 5 gallon plastic bucket and got the seal-able top from a wendy's -- from the pickles. Then i drilled a hole in it and shoved the air vent thing in their. My uncle had the rest of the kit pieces, so it was a nice low cost solution. Also, my cousins got 2 water jugs each (2.5 gallons each) and bought stoppers at the home brew store that had the hole for the air vent. a little more cumbersome, but their beer came out excellent.
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