My gf bought me a homebrew kit for my birthday, and after weeks of waiting and sanitizing everything I could see, it was finally time to chill and drink (some of) my first batch of homebrewed beer last night. All I can say is wow. I made a Red Ale using dry unhopped malt extract and it actually tastes like beer. It’s a little more full-bodied (malty?) than I expected, but it still tastes great. This weekend I’m going to try an IPA (steeping grains - whoo hoo!) Can’t wait to get off work and go have some more.
By the way, if anyone wants to give me any advice, pointers, whatever, please feel free. Thanks!
You’ll never look at mass-produced beer again. Welcome!
Just wait until your equipment and such take over the spare bedroom, having outgrown the corner of the garage you started in. THEN see what your girlfriend has to say about the monster she created.
Get yourself a subscription to Zymurgy magazine, and start hanging around the local homebrew supply store. We are a sharing lot, and you can get lots of good advice for free. I’ve been doing this since the Carter Administration, and I still have fun every batch I brew.
Warning: This hobby can get expensive in a hurry. Doesn’t mean it’s not fun, though. You’ll also discover that making good beer is easy. Making good beer consistently is hard.
I second the call for a Zymurgy subscription. Its relatively cheap and after about two years you have probably 90% of what you need to go as far as you want with the hobby.
I’ve been brewing for about 10 years and while it can get expensive, you can do it relatively cheap. I do all-grain brewing using the set up from the “Neew Complete Joy of Home Brewing”. It consists of two five gallon buckets one with lots of holes in the bottom another with a spigot to drain the wort. My brew kettle is a 33 quart ceramic on steel canning pot that I think cost a grand total of about $20. You can make a wort chiller (absolutely necessary) from a couple of feet of hose connected to a coil of copper pipe youcan get at LOWEs or Home Depot.
Have fun and keep things clean. If you do those two things, you’ll make great beer. In fact, my sister-in-law actually likes the mass market stuff. when I tried to make it, i couldn’ make it bad enough!!
Making stuff just like Budweiser or Foster’s is one of the hardest things the average homebrewer can attempt. The major breweries spend a lot of time and money trying to achieve consistent blandness, and even under their high-tech gaze, there can be differences batch to batch.
I’m a reformed homebrewer. I made some NASTY stuff in college. (Sanitizing? In a dorm? :smack: ) I got better when I started pulling down a reasonable income and spending more on the raw ingredients, but STILL had the occasional funky bottle of beer.
Mrs. Blank got me a dual tap kegerator kit for the garage beer fridge. It’s currently got Budweiser(*) and O’dell’s 90 shilling on tap.
= Sue me. I’m a full spectrum beerslut. I love doppelboch on a crisp fall day and a cold Bud on a hot summer’s afternoon wrenching on the car.
The dual part of the setup was so that I could fall back into homebrewing eventually as it’s a LOT easier to keep a 5 gal syrup can sterile than 2.5 cases of bottles.
I also like Brew Your Own magazine. Other recommended references are the How to Brew website, Charlie Papazian’s Complete Joy of Homebrewing, and the Homebrewing for Dummies book. My favorite mailorder places are Northern Brewer in Minneapolis and The Wine and Hop Shop in Madison, WI.
Lazy brewer tip: Buy 16 oz Grolsch swing-top bottles - easy to seal and open, and if you have a problem with overcarbonation at some point, this comes in handy.
Congratulations! I’ve been drinking my #2 for a few days now (a porter) and am going to bottle #3 tomorrow (a brown ale), and rack #4 to secondary on Sunday (an IPA). Assuming I can resist the temptation to brew sooner, I’m brewing #5 (an ESB) next weekend.
So, as you can see: once you get hooked, it can kind of take over! As soon as I tasted #1 (a bitter, brewed last November), I knew there was no turning back. And once I discovered I could buy homebrewing equipment and ingredients up in Lexington, well…
Advice: buy an immersion wort chiller! It made an amazing difference between brew #2 and brew #3. And check out forums dot homebrew dot com (where I call myslef Rhyolite & Beer); they’re pretty helpful.
Since you are interested in doing an IPA, here’s the one I did last weekend that shows a lot of promise:
1# Crystal Malt 20L, crushed and seeped for ~40 minutes @ 153°
7.25# Munton’s Pale Liquid Malt Extract
1# Munton’s Pale Dry Malt Extract
8 oz. Malto-Dextrin (added after the boil began)
1 oz. Chinook pellet hops (60 min)
2 oz. Centennial pellet hops (15 min)
1 oz. Cascade pellet hops (1 min)
Wyeast 1056 American
I’m going to dry-hop it with 1 oz Cascade whole for a week before I bottle.
Consider buying soda kegs sometime. It takes all that pain-in-the-ass bottling AWAY!
Get another fermenter to use as a secondary. It will cut down on the amount of sediment and make your beer look a lot clearer. Penny jars, the giant bottles you can buy from knick knack shops, make excellent secondaries.
Try an experiment: Save your sediment for the next batch. The yeast is still good. Jar it up and keep it in the fridge. Make sure your next batch is similar to this one though, otherwise you’ll get something real funky tasing.
At one point you’ll want to try all-grain brewing. It’s difficult to control the temperatures on a stove top. It’s a challenge, but you might come up with something inventive on the fly. I’ve at one time turned off the heat and covered the wort with a sleeping bag.
A friend of mine named Mulk welded together a three-tiered brewing system. It uses three kegs, temperature guages, and propane burners. The top keg is used for holding the sparging water, which is usually set at 160-170º. The middle keg is the mash, kept at an average of 150º. The bottom keg contains the wort, which is the drainoff from the middle keg.
To cool the wort down while transferring from wort to fermenter, Mulk constructed a cooling system composed of a garden hose containing a smaller plastic tube. It did a great job, but kept coming apart due to the pressures put on the hose from the contrasting temperatures. We use my immersion coils for cooling down most of the time nowadays.
Homebrew posted a crapload of useful homebrewing links some time back. Maybe he’ll do it again.
Congrats on your first batch! That first sip of every new brew is real satifaction.
I like to use Beer, Beer and more Beer to shop at. Although I can actually drive to the store, I hear the mail order service is fast. The customer service is excellent. All the guys brew and have great advice.
It’s a neat hobby you can dabble in(that’s me, I’m brewing from extract kits) or really get into, like all grains.
