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Anyone ever tried homebrewing?

I'm interested and want to try it. I'm poor/in college, and I'd rather get Spaten quality for Keystone price. Any tips/advice/experiences would be useful...
 
No but I want to try making Mead, good luck, and just incase you dont know Mead is honey wine...
 
yeast+water+sugar=alcohol.

If you call adding that to a 4 liter bottle and waiting a week...yes...

use wine yeast. higher alcohol content.
 
usualy you wanna use an organic compound, any thing can be used... im sure dog poop could be used... if you enjoyed that.
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Homebrewing is a wonderful thing. I haven't done it in too long, probably because I have been committing most all my spare time to these amazing plants. When we used to brew, though, the stouts we could make put those off the shelf to shame. Ahhhh! Mmmmmm! Oooooh! Rrrrrrp!
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]yeast+water+sugar=alcohol.

Alas, there's some subscripts to be added.

For instance, without sterilization you get "wild yeast cultures" in the end product which makes everything taste that same... Not good. lol

I've done quite a bit of brewing... I'll see if I can come up with a worthwhile post later. There're some really good and cheap books out there.

Just adding some good yeast to your favorite juice can make for an excellent cider.
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yeah... it's nasty... but it works...

brandy is dandy and homemade yeast sludge is... I was desperate ok?
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yuck! I'm not looking to make prison wine lol. I want to brew at least a semi-high quality beer.

Is homebrewing hard? I'm talking about with a kit and everything, like the huge plastic buckets, glass carboy, etc...
 
  • #10
It's really not hard-- a good book and a good kit: you'll be making good beer within one or two batches! It just gets better from there--
 
  • #11
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Is homebrewing hard? I'm talking about with a kit and everything, like the huge plastic buckets, glass carboy, etc...

No. It's really pretty easy. There's a few simple steps (sounds like you've done some reading) and the golden rule of keeping your stuff clean (a little bit of bleach goes a long way.)

It doesn't take a lot of effort to make something that tastes pretty darn good. Like I said, you can start by making hard ciders out of juices you like. You can control exactly how sweet/alcoholic you want it. You can leave the yeast going just long enough to make it carbonated or until the juice becomes too poisonous (too much alcohol) for them.

Making beer involves a few more steps that you should read up on. You can get a kit with everything you'll need very easily. Ironically, you can buy all of the makings of beer in one place at one time and they don't ask for ID.

You will need access to a stove and it can get a little stinky for a while at a point in the beer making process. lol
 
  • #12
Or you can go all out and make a sweet set up including coils and a fire underneath a ncie sized copper pot... and a dripp system.. and about 6 months of aged liquor in barrels... rotated every few months!

oh wait you wanted beer not whisky... just get some hops and throw them in a thing with some yeast lol (jk go do research)
 
  • #13
[b said:
Quote[/b] ](jk go do research)

Definitly. Neither do I want you drinking crappy beer, nor do I want you killing yourself with moonshine. lol
 
  • #14
Beer = bleh! Now I've got a good dandylion wine recipe. Made a one gallon batch of it the spring/summer of '84. I need to dig it out of the pantry and see if it's still good or if I now have dandylion vinegar
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. Tested it about 3 years ago and it put me on my butt after a small (8oz. honest!) glass full.
 
  • #16
Follow the directions. It's hard to mess up beer, but if you do it comes out really awful. Learn the basics before you decide what shortcuts you can take - my last roommate spent 6 months trying to brew a single batch of passable beer for his organic chemistry class and couldn't get it right because he skipped very basic parts of the instructions.
~Joe
 
  • #17
OH! And unless you're following direct instructions to the word:

Write down what you did!! You never want to make the best batch of beer EVER and not remember how you did it. lol
 
  • #18
A good beginner book is The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Papazian.  I haven't brewed in a couple years now, but it's kind of enjoyable even before drinking the beer.  Sanitation is the key and, unless the beer is still hot, nothing can touch it that hasn't been sanitized in a bleach/water solution.

I don't like the basic beer making kits because I don't like their plastic buckets and cheap cappers.  Those buckets are too easily contaminated and those cheap cappers would have made me quit after the first batch.  Get glass carboys instead and you'll want two to start.  One should be the larger (7 gallon?) size and the second and any additional ones you get later can be the standard 5 gallons.  I have four, which allows me to have up to three batches going at a time.

I also recommend the cappers that you slide a bottle under with one hand and pull on a lever with the other.  Other than for those two things, the kits have all the other important stuff, although I like spring operated bottle fillers and I don't think kits generally include those.  You'll need bottles too and I like the 22 - 24 oz bottles because that's half as many bottles to wash and cap.  If you're in a bottle deposit state you can usually buy empties from stores that sell the microbrews and other beers that come in that size.  You can't use twist-top bottles and the darker the glass the better.  Light is an enemy of beer.

Although I'm not a fan of the basic equipment kits, I do recommend you start with a simple beer kit.  Keep it simple the first time or two and then start buying ingredients for all the recipes you'd like to try.  Start with simple recipes too and gradually let it get complicated.  I never reached all-mash brewing, because of kitchen space and ambition deficiencies, but many reach that level.  If you can get one or two people to brew with you, it'll be a lot easier and can be a real good time.

You can start drinking homebrew within a couple weeks of bottling, but you'll find homebrew generally improves with age.  Assuming you used good sanitation.  I've brewed some porters and stouts that weren't so good at one month and were spectacular after a year.  I still remember an oatmeal stout that I kept one bottle past two years and it was so good I wish I would have kept all of them so long.  Ignore the Budweiser propaganda about fresh beer.  Some English styles are best that way but most beers improve with age.

I'm glad you asked the question because writing all this makes me want to head over to the homebrew store and start another batch or two.
 
  • #19
I saw that alrton brown dude show how to do it step by step. it seemed pretty easy to me.

He even had a bubble counter!
 
  • #20
We used to do all-mash brewing a couple of years ago- I concur with all of what herenorthere said- especially the part about leaving the "product" for as long as you can- the longest I lost a bottle of stout for was roughly 8 months and it nearly made us WEEP when we tasted it, so sweet and smooth

It really is easy, as long as you follow the sterilization protocols mentioned already, as seedjar said if you DO mess it up, it is TRULY awful (and sad, too, since you no doubt could actually drink it without experiencing too much trouble, but the taste of a "spoilt" batch is NASTY and makes you want to dump it straight into the sewer)

If you DO proceed, keep us posted on your results, maybe some of us might be able to help out if you hit any snags (and I volunteer to be the official taster if you like, being Canadian and all ;))
 
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