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Brewing your own beer??

post #1 of 19
5/3/10 at 12:31am
Thread Starter 
I was just wondering if anyone on here makes their own beer?
Me and a few friends just started and I was wondering if anyone on here does, what they make, etc.


Gregor
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post #2 of 19
5/3/10 at 12:43am
I brew off the wall styles and have been doing so for about 5 years. Won a few local competitions and have finished a business proposal for a brewery. Am going to start looking for financial backing shortly.

Styles/flavors include:

- Whiskey and Oak Imperial Stout

- Chocolate Coffee and Vanilla Dry Stout

- Jalapeno and Serrano Amber

- Sage infused Red IPA (IRA )

- Black Pepper/Fenugreek IPA

- Wormwood Pale
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post #3 of 19
5/3/10 at 12:50am
Thread Starter 
Wow haha Sounds delicious. Me and my friends just bought the wort and the yeast and a starter kit (carboy, bucket, racking cane, etc) but if it goes well we might stray from the premixed stuff and make our own . did you start completely from scratch or a kit to begin with?
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post #4 of 19
5/3/10 at 12:59am
They were quite good. The Whiskey/Oak took 2nd place against 74 other entries.

Never have used a kit as I feel they dont allow enough flexibility.

Started w/ unhopped pale extract and steeping grains + hops, then extract + mini mash. Finally moved to all-grain, although I still do extract on occasions when Im short on time.

Keep w/ it. Its a great hobby and can be as creative as you are. Dont be confined to guidelines and take some chances.

Best advice I can offer to a beginner is to be diligent w/ your cleaning/sanitization regimen.
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post #5 of 19
5/3/10 at 1:09am
I went through the phase in college - I enjoyed it, but ultimately stopped... partially it was a financial decision, but here are some other things that impacted my decision. I'm not trying to dissuade you, just hopefully provide some useful advice: 1> You have to be fanatic about cleaning/sanitizing. I am good, but you really need to be anal retentive... you're dealing with live cultures. Things can go horribly awry. This never happened to me, but the amount of work to sanitize was too much for my taste after a while. 2> You have to ease into it... start with "starter kits" , then move to "partially processed ingredients" (e.g. types of malt), then finally onto basic raw materials (making your own mash). I was not patient enough.... I felt like the intermediate learning steps were too much work. 3> I was in college at the time, so cost was a factor. Equipment and ingredients made it as expensive or more than buying similar beer (in the beginning, you are generally following recipes like "XXX Brand YYY Style Clone" .. so I thought "if it's costing me more to try and make something taste like xxx/yyy, why don't I just buy it?" 4> The waiting.... it takes so long to find out how a batch came out (and there will be some so/so batches in the beginning), I was extremely discouraged/disappointed when I made a bad one.
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post #6 of 19
5/3/10 at 1:25am
My pops brews his own beer. New 5 gallon or 3 gallon batch every Saturday. He's pretty good, gives a lot of it away to friends, trades other beer heads for theirs. I helped him a few times but I'm not a fan of beer so I lost interest. He is really into it though. Grows several different varieties of hops in their yard, etc.
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post #7 of 19
5/3/10 at 11:14am
Like most things, it's not too hard to get acceptable results, but very hard to get great results. Our beers are, at best, almost as good as good microbrews, and, at worst, not so good but still drinkable.

Stick to ales and don't even try lagering (except in the winter, if you have a cold attic or basement). Stick to mini-mash for a while.

It is a fun activity to do with friends, but I don't enjoy it enough to do it on my own.
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post #8 of 19
5/3/10 at 11:22am
Used to do this years ago. Here's something I came up with for a wort chiller. Just go get some 3/8's, or there abouts, copper tubing. It comes in a spiral and leave it roughly in that spiral, as it fits nicely inside the standard big white food grade bucket. Thread a garden hose size female on each end and then use garden hose to attach the top end to your sink faucet and the bottom end to run hose back up to your sink or a floor drain. Place the copper tubing in hot wort and run cold tap water through it.
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post #9 of 19
5/3/10 at 11:36am
I'm a relative newbie at this, but I found www.benshomebrew.com to have good pricing on kits. They also have 1 gallon kits which are good if you're short on space.
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post #10 of 19
5/3/10 at 11:46am
If you are going to give it a shot, both of these are basically required reading: http://www.amazon.com/New-Complete-J...2897913&sr=1-2 http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Handb...2897913&sr=1-1
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post #11 of 19
5/3/10 at 1:31pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by kaxixi View Post
Like most things, it's not too hard to get acceptable results, but very hard to get great results. Our beers are, at best, almost as good as good microbrews, and, at worst, not so good but still drinkable.

Stick to ales and don't even try lagering (except in the winter, if you have a cold attic or basement). Stick to mini-mash for a while.

It is a fun activity to do with friends, but I don't enjoy it enough to do it on my own.

I brewed for a while and would advise the same. As odd as it seems, the hardest brews to copy are the traditional, rather bland American lagers, although I'm not sure why anyone would want to copy them. I had much more success with ales, especially brown ales. My experience was that the darker and more full-flavored the brew, the easier it was to copy.
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post #12 of 19
5/3/10 at 1:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Piobaire View Post
Used to do this years ago. Here's something I came up with for a wort chiller. Just go get some 3/8's, or there abouts, copper tubing. It comes in a spiral and leave it roughly in that spiral, as it fits nicely inside the standard big white food grade bucket. Thread a garden hose size female on each end and then use garden hose to attach the top end to your sink faucet and the bottom end to run hose back up to your sink or a floor drain. Place the copper tubing in hot wort and run cold tap water through it.

I might have to try this. It almost seems that copper cooling kits cannot be skipped. Initially it was a pita cooling down the batch without copper.

OP: A good friend and I have just started brewing our own beer. I recommend using a glass carboy over plastic. We are trying to find a brew we like to serve in my wife's restaurant when it opens.

Good luck!
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post #13 of 19
5/3/10 at 2:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xiaogou View Post
I might have to try this. It almost seems that copper cooling kits cannot be skipped. Initially it was a pita cooling down the batch without copper. OP: A good friend and I have just started brewing our own beer. I recommend using a glass carboy over plastic. We are trying to find a brew we like to serve in my wife's restaurant when it opens. Good luck!
+1 on glass - way easier to sanitize X - if the brew fails, you can always try serving cheese made from her breast milk... (I hope you read that threak, or you might think I'm being way inappropriate)
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post #14 of 19
5/3/10 at 2:43pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChicagoRon View Post
+1 on glass - way easier to sanitize

X - if the brew fails, you can always try serving cheese made from her breast milk...

(I hope you read that threak, or you might think I'm being way inappropriate)



Just avoid the cheese course!
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post #15 of 19
5/3/10 at 4:24pm
I used to do the first few days in the big white buckets. They are larger than the 5 gallon glass carboys and the first few days are very active. The extra room in the white plastic gives you some head room where the wort won't go up and out of your airlock. After a few days, I'd rack into a carboy, leaving some of the lees behind.
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