I made 10 gallons of hoppy American Pale Ale the other day. First time in six months. It’s sitting here, bubbling contentedly. Any other homebrewers out there? All-grain or extract? Do you bottle or keg?
Last batch I made was a honey-chocolate stout (honey instead of sugar, plenty of extra chocolate malt). Its been a while since I’ve zymurgized so we’ll see how it turns out.
I bottle because its cheaper and easier to lug small quantities around. I use extract because I’m lazy.
Just made a brown ale and tossed in some spruce extract as an afterthought (homage to Anchor’s Xmas ale which I love), which I’m beginning to think was a mistake (it’s still priming in bottle, but from what I tasted of it during bottling I think the spruce was wrong for the rest of the subtle taste of this beer and might come off tasting a bit moldy or something-- a bit of an odd side-taste). Oh well.
Got a 5 gallon fermenter full of cascade hopped pilsner almost ready to rack right behind me. I brew one every 2 months or so since I began nearly 8 years ago. Making my own has put me right off the store brands though.
Wow. You guys are cool !
I tried it once, but I failed miserably.
BTW, don’t we all have a mental list of people who are bound to turn up in this thread sooner or later ?
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
- Neil Peart, Rush (1993)
Yeah, I’m here.
Tried it once, a few years ago.
I don’t want to talk about it.
Stop telling God what to do.
I know what **ren-man **(as we affectionately call him in the Tidewater area) is bringing to the next Doper meeting…
I personally don’t brew, but my SO does. The first time it was horrible! But then he tried Cider and it wasn’t bad. Otis as he is called here has “Basement Beer Diaries” on his web page under The Beer Garden, check it out. http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/2613/beer.htm
“Let me fall out of the window with confetti in my hair…”
Tom Waits
I can’t seem to brew a beer so stout that my Guiness-loving friends will admit it’s too damn stout. They gobble the stuff up. Personally, I like a sweet, nutty beverage such as I can’t really buy anywhere.
Coldfire & Wally:
I don’t know how long it’s been since you tried, but the methods and materials have improved immeasurably in the past few years. Plus it helps to brew with someone who knows more than you. I brewed a half-dozen times with guys who made great beer before going it all on my own.
Call your local homebrew supply shop and ask if there’s a brewing club in your area. Their meetings are a great place to meet other brewers, taste a lot of homebrew and get into the craft.
And Chief? I knew you’d show up! I’ll bring some to 2nd Street, but it’ll be a little green(as in apples).
Ive been brewing about 3 years now…just switched to All Grain on Thanksgiving.
In the bottle: a dry hopped porter
In the secondary: ESB
looking to get into kegging…I hate bottling…
Dave
Obviously the c in rap
is silent
Dwyer-Land
I can’t drink beer (allergic to something in it… guessing hops) but I love berwing, so I tend to stick to hard alcohol… I have recipies for some cordials that are pretty much guaranteed to make you the most popular person at a party (given that the party has people who appreciate being able to taste their drinks… not for the budweiser crowd). Recently I made a batch of a friend’s recipe called Firelight Spice. It is mostly honey and citrus with cinnamon, clove, and other assorted spices. I guess it to be 50-70 proof depending on the vodka used (someday I’ll make an everclear batch) but you couldn’t tell by tasting it. Goes down as smooth as silk on teflon.
I came up with a coconut one as well, but it doesn’t keep. That, or I wasn’t careful enough with my last batch…
I’m planning on getting some equipment and making hard cider, but I’m not sure if it will be worth it… will be hard to track down the cider appples too.
http://www.madpoet.com
Computers have let mankind make mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns.
Not quite the brewing you’re talking about, but I brewed wine a couple of times.
The first time was when I was 14 or so. I used a wine making kit that my parents got as a gift sometime, but ignored. It came with the yeast to use, plus pills to kill the yeast at the proper time, one week. Well, I forgot about the stuff (I put it in the back of my closet so my parents wouldn’t see it) for 3 weeks. When I remembered it, it had fermented quite a bit more than needed. I bottled it, and some friends and I got buzzed on about half of it. (One friend could light the fumes coming out of the bottle, so I figured it was as least as strong as brandy.)
Of the last two bottles, one popped its cork because I hadn’t killed the yeast. The second bottle was stronger still.
I also made a super-cheap wine with baker’s yeast, Kool-Aid, sugar, and water. With this mixture, the yeast dies when the alcohol content reaches about 15%. This recipe was taught to me by my college biology professor. 
Let the Truth of Love be lighted/ Let the Love of Truth shine clear. Sensibility/ Armed with sense and liberty
With the Heart and Mind united in a single/ Perfect/ Sphere. - Rush
I guarantee you the stuff didn’t get as strong as brandy. Brandy’s a distilled liquor.
I bought a couple of carboys off of a cow orker who got them from her sister who made her own wine. We got them cheap, but the catch was that they came full of wine. As it was explained to me, this stuff was referred to, among the SCA/Pagan crowd my cow orker hung with, as `Dragon’s Blood.’
As you may be aware, Pagan/SCA types are the wackiest people. God bless ‘em, as the Christians say. But where I come from, wine made from frozen concentrated Welch’s Grape Juice fortified with corn sugar is referred to as `Sneaky Pete.’
Anyway, it took us a while to get together enough wine bottles to even bottle the stuff, and even now one of those things is still full of wine. It probably tastes like crap, but I’ll bet my brother will drink it. I need the carboy for beer.
I’m just about ready to bottle this year’s batch of ‘Dr. Watson’s Winter Porter’, which came off with an O.G. of 16 this year, so I expect that a good time will be had by all!
I usually use the extract these days, but tend towards porters and dark ales, and the black patent disguises a multitude of shortcuts. This porter is a free-wheeling and nigh-on foolproof recipe (I even use grated ginger and licorice root), and was one of the few brews to stand up to my own fling with spruce essence.
Has anyone else had problems with exploding bottles? It seems that whenever I get the wort over about 12.5 O.G. I end up with a bad case of exploding bottlecap disease.
Dr. Watson
“First the man takes a drink, Then the drink takes a drink, Then the drink takes the man.”
I have ALWAYS wanted to brew beer so 2 christmas’s ago my girlfriend bought me one of those homebrew “kits” tried it and it was nasty… I think it was because I used regular suger instead of malt. Way too sweet and nasty. I like a good dark strong dry beer… but I drank every bit of that nasty shit… wasnt about to let that work go to naught.
I have been wanting to brew again… this time from “scratch” does anyone recommend using the “keg/barrel” fermenter? or should I just go buy a big glass bottle fermenter??
I zymurged in my college time on the fraternity and house equipment. Industrial burners and 6 gallon pots, haven’t done it since I’m been home…nigh on 15 months.
My last and most fulfilling batch was a mead, it came out wonderfully and was imbibed by the lot of lushes I call friends at a pre-graduation “study” session.
The holy grail for me at this point is a deliciously sweet Oatmeal stout on par with Samuel Smith’s. I’d touch it up with a bit of nutmeg and molasses to round out the bitterness, I’m gonna give this a shot when I get back on the horse.
I had a few bad experiences when I was learning, but I credit them to my roomate who was the “expert” I was learning from. I helped him make his batches, and split the ingredient costs. One was a attempt at a maple porter, it came out tasting like burnt baked beans with a pungent aroma of bacon. Another was a actually very delicious strawberry ale, the catch being the he miscalculated the amount of sugar to use considering the sweetness of the fruit. We had 1 and a half 5 gal carboys full of the stuff fermenting, apparently the bubbler couldn’t keep up on the full one and it painted his room with bright red strawberry guts. Serves him right.
I have always done all-grain brews, you extract sissies are a disgrace. I have bottled to date, using 5 gallon glass carboys that I got for $5 from the Hinkley-Schmitt water guy.
I should try a good pils while the weather is cold enough to ferment in in the garage.
B-line,
To begin with all you need is a NEW plastic 5 gallon bucket. Dont use a used one unless you fill it with water and let it sit a couple of months, changing the water daily. Otherwise your beer will tase like whatever was in the bucket to begin with.
Punch a hole in the lid and hot glue in a piece of that plastic tubing used for aquarium pumps. Run the tubing into a beer bottle half filled with water. This is a fine fermenter for a beginner. Ignore those who tell you to invest in expensive equipment at first. Your beer is going to be pretty marginal your first couple of times anyway.
Secure 5 lbs of malt extract, a lb of corn sugar, a packet of hop pellets and some yeast from brew store.
Bring 5 gal of water to a boil, remove from the heat and dump in your malt and your hops.
Cover the pot and let it cool. Meanwhile sterilize your fermenter. Dump your yeast into a large glass of water with a little sugar in it. Cover it with a napkin.
After your pot full of pre beer (wort) is cool pour it through a cheesecloth to strain out the hops and dump in your yeast water.
Put the cover on and make sure your tube is under water in the bottle. Listen to it go “bloop bloop” until it bloops about once every 2 hours. This will take about a month.
Carefully pour off the liquid on the top trying not to stir up the yeast on the botom into another bucket. Add about 3/4 cup of corn sugar and bottle.
This will produce a beer that any experienced brewer will sneer at but will be quite drinkable and will gain you valuable experience for your next run. Remember keep it simple at first and try to aim for consistancy. After you can do that, shoot for quality.
EvilGhandi: Good job, that’s the simplest method I’ve heard described for beginners. Beggin’ your indulgence, I’d like to offer a couple of clarifications.
To sanitize your fermenter, use a tablespoon of Clorox per gallon of water and allow it to sit in contact with all surfaces that will touch beer for at least 20 minutes. This includes all tubing, spoons, funnels and other implements. Rinse with hot tap water just prior to use.
A “packet of hops” means at least 2 ounces and probably not more than 4 ounces.
It might be easier to boil 2 gallons of water with malt and hops and put 3 gallons of refrigerated spring water in your sanitized fermenter. Run your pot of hot wort through cheesecloth (or a sanitized metal strainer) into the fermenter and add your yeast right away. This also minimizes the chance that wild yeast will get a toehold before the good yeast can take off.
And like Charlie Papazian always says: “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew.”
I will bottle Hafeweisen tommarrow. Then, I’ll continue to try to clone SNPA & Anchor Steam, my favorites. 4 years brewing.
Zymurgist