August West created a monster. My tour of the Leinie’s brewery last week sparked an interest, which I guess is now a hobby, because last night I dropped a couple hundred bucks on home brewing equipment. I’m going to start out slow with malt extract kits. My first will be this Honey Wheat . I ordered the brewery kit along with the ingredients for the first batch, a brew pot and a few cases of bottles. I figure once I get the process down and feel good about brewing the kit beers, I’ll start experimenting with my own recipes. Eventually I hope to move on to making the mash myself, but since that seems to require some advanced skills, more sterilizing and additional equipment I’m going to stick to extracts for now.
So I welcome any advice and recipe sharing from our experienced home brewers.
Two main tips. Don’t get in a hurry. Take your time and you will be rewarded. Secondly, keep things clean. That can’t be stressed enough. Your equipment doesn’t have to be sterile enough for surgery; but you do want anything that touches the wort to be sanitized. This includes the primary and secondary fermenters, the racking cane and tubes, any spoons, your bottling equipment and bottles and bottle caps.
Look into getting some old 5 gal soda kegs. It is so much easier to keg than to fill a few dozen bottles. Plus nobody can ask for a six pack to take home if all you have is a keg – less sharing means more for you.
Start your next batch before you run low on the current one. It’s a terrible thing to run out.
Welcome to the best hobby in the world. Here are my tips:
Follow temperature guidelines very strictly.
Sanitize, sanitize, sanitize. In brewing, cleanliness of your materials is the number one priority.
Make sure you plan on taking about 8 hours or so on brewing day. This will give you time for sanitizing your equipment, making your wort, cooling your wort, pitching your yeast, and so on. It is a lengthy process.
Have a plan in place for cooling your wort. Most people without a chiller usually make an ice bath in the tub, or a large sink. Change the ice and water out from time to time, as it will rise in temperature very quickly. The faster you cool your wort, the less chance you have for some sort of bacteria to get into your wort.
Be patient. The hardest part is letting the brew ferment in the bottles. Sometimes you have to wait up to 6 months for a beer to reach its peak. The wait is worth it. Your wheat beer shouldn’t take that long, but I reccomend keeping notes on how it tastes at different stages of aging.
Have fun. I love this hobby, and it has gotten me really addicted. I love sharing my brews with friends and family too.
RYBTK, your #1 is actually my biggest concern. The coolest and most stable part of my house is the basement. Temperature down there is like low-60s in winter and low-70s in summer. But since it is a basement, I worry about whether it’s clean enough. Do you brew in the same place you store/ferment your beer? Or do you do the brewing in the kitchen and ferment in a basement/garage?
How much extra effort is it to recycle bottles? Do I need extra equipment to clean and sanitize them, or the iodophur sanitizer enough?
I store my product in a room that contains my hot water heater and water softener. Now I’m really lucky, because this room gets no light, and is very, very small. It has it’s own electrical heat source, so I can control the temp. to within about 3 degrees of what I want.
You will probably want a temperature of 68 to 72 when you ferment, so buy a cheap hanging thermometer and leave it in the basement for awhile to check temperature. This is a tough decision, but your basement will probably be your best bet.
I brew in my kitchen. I’m sure you got a floating thermometer with your kit. If not, get one and use it often during the process to check the temperature of your wort.
After I use a bottle, I rinse it out and scrub it with a bottle scrubber. I then let it dry. Before I use it when bottling, I fill up my dishwasher with the bottles and add the sanitizing powder where the soap normally goes. I run it through my longest cycle. This is a fast and easy way to do it, and it works very well for me.
Let me know how it turns out, or if you have any other questions.
Also, I’ll reccomend that you visit beerpal.com and check out their forums. They have a forum for homebrewing, and you might get more advice there.
I brew outside with a turkey fryer, then cool the wort and transfer to the fermenters in the kitchen, then move the the fermenters with airlocks to their destination. If you follow something like that, the cleanliness of the basement shouldn’t be a factor.
I hardly ever use bottles - kegged my very first batch - but you might consider investing in a bottle washer. Basically though, if you rinse the bottles well immediately after emptying them, iodophor should be sufficient.
Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew.
It’s not as difficult as you might be making it. Reasonable cleanliness, reasonable temperature control, reasonable beer. Over the years, I have cranked out award-winning homebrew in truly abysmal conditions.
Mini-mashes can be your friend. After you get comfortable with extracts, start adding specialty grains and doing partial mashes.
Recipes upon request. Welcome to the Greatest Hobby On Earth.™
Uh oh, I should have warned you that “Beer Fever” is contagious.
There is a very true saying “Give a man a beer and he wastes an hour, teach him to brew and he wastes a lifetime”
I am a proud member of the Brewrats , the only International internet-based homebrew club and our group posseses a great amount of brewing knowledge and experience. We have 24 hour a day “virtual pub” that we call the Rat Chat and sometimes we even talk about brewing, but there is always someone there that is willing to answer questions about beer. Feel free to use it as a resource.
Excellent advice. This is the only way I brew anymore. Specialty grains add protein, and protein adds head, and I never knew a brewer that didn’t appreciate good head.
In addition, try to get all of your color from the specialty grains. My rule is to always use the lightest color extract and darken withe grains. To me, darker extracts have a chalky taste.
First off, welcome! I don’t have much more to add, but . . .
Mind, though, you won’t actually be working on the beer for most of this time, especially when you’re working from extracts. Most of the time will be waiting for the wort to boil, waiting to add the hops, waiting for the wort to cool, etc. Speaking of wort cooling, those fancy counter-flow wort chillers sure look great, but they’re not necessary (again, especially when using extracts). My roommates and I usually pour the hot wort into the primary fermenter, slap on the lid and an airlock, and leave it in a corner to chill overnight.
Also, I’m fond of bottling. It’s cheap (we collected empties from our friends 'till we had enough), easier to take a six-pack to parties, and really not that time-consuming. Once the bottles are sanitized, it takes less than half an hour to fill them up and slap the caps on. Just cover your bottling surface with a layer of paper towels to soak up the inevitable spillage.
I have a lovely pair of socks that are Russian Imperial Stout colored. They used to be white.
And I’d say 8 hours is really overestimating the time involved. 3 is more like it. 4-5 if you start with a messy kitchen and want to end up with a clean one.
My favorite trick was to slap the lip on the wort kettle 5 minutes before my boil was up. Then I’d shut off the heat and let it set overnight. That way the proteins and gunk would settle to the bottom, and I could leave them behind when I poured it into my primary. The heat kept everything inside sterile, and the steam provided a nice seal to the lid overnight. Kept my primary from filling up with stuff.
I second the “always put some of the batch into bottles” idea. It gives you samples to take to brewclub meetings, give to friends, or enter in a contest somewhere (which is a great way of getting feedback on your brewing.)
I wouldn’t reccomend letting your wort sit out as long as some others have said, as this can lead to foreign bacteria getting in your brew. Also, you should not pitch your yeast unless the wort is at the correct temperature.
When I said 8 hours, I wasn’t talking actual work time. It will take about that long from start to finish if you are including time for sanitizing and clean up.
I recently purchased a wort chiller, and I have to say that it is much better than just letting your wort cool in an ice bath. 5-10 minutes of cooling time beats and hour or so any day.
In the end, the way you brew will depend on how seriously you take this and how well you want your product to turn out. I try to do everything the best way possible, because I want the best product. To each his own.
Well, I’ve always hated wort chillers, and have always followed the method I outlined above. At last count, brews produced that way have garnered 250+ ribbons in sanctioned competion, in 13 states. I’d call that pretty damn good at least!
Homer: Oh, who am I kidding? I am slow.
Marge: Oh, Homey, if you feel so bad about yourself, there’s always things you can do to feel better.
Homer: Take another bath in malt liquor?
Marge: There’s that…or you could take an adult education course.
Homer: Oh, and how is “education” supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home wine-making course and I forgot how to drive?
Marge: That’s because you were drunk!
Homer: [remembering fondly] And how.
