Edp25

I have been ding wine at home for about a decade and we now have more than 200 vines. it is great fun and it never really seems like work. I always recommend people start slowly with a few kits and the most basic and inexpensive starter equipment as beginner mistakes are inevitable. Patience is the most difficult part at the beginning but there are plenty of beer options that are great for early drinking. Enjoy!

BoardWalk

Homebrewing is an addiction. First it starts with a free kit someone gives you, next thing you know your buying specialty grains, hops and malt and hiding in your kitchen creating the next great thing. From there it progresses into all grain batches in your garage using a gravity fed system, then you invest into pumps and join a club, and then...........

linvillegorge

Do extract with specialty grain first. All of the equipment will carry over when making the jump to full grain, pretty much all you'll need is a mash tun (can be made out of a cooler for relatively cheap - google it) and a bigger brew kettle.

Extract just simplifies and shortens the process giving you less chances to fuck it up. Either way, sanitization is the biggest key. Sanitize the hell out of anything and everything that will touch the wort after the boil. Just keep a sink full of sanitizer on hand when brewing and if in doubt, dunk it.

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BoardWalk

poutanen

For what its worth, this is one of the things I remembered from making wine. So yesterday I had a sink full of sanitizer solution that I used for the majority of the brewing process. It helps if you forgot whether you laid that spoon down in an unsanitary location...

Update: My little 1 Gal carboy is in my spare bedroom closet fermenting away! It's got a good bubble going right now, about a bubble every second or two. Some decent foam on top, and about an inch and a half of sediment on the bottom at the moment. It seems VERY dark at the moment but we'll see if that turns more golden as it's racked.

Do you hopebrewers rack or filter to clarify the beer? With wine we just racked a few times and that did it...

BoardWalk

If it's a high alcohol beer that's going to be fermenting for more than thirty days I'll rack once. I keg my beer so normally everything will drop out while it sits in the cooler. The first glass will be slop but the rest are usually pretty clear.

BoardWalk

I'll also rack after a couple weeks if I plan on washing and reusing the yeast. Then I will use the yeast out of the secondary so I don't have to rinse it as much.

tigre

Hooray for homebrew! It's the natural progression for anyone who loves beer and likes to do things for themselves. I have at least 50 different kinds of beer in my house right now, but my favorites are some of the ones I've brewed myself.

Kind of a big brew day here today. I kegged my first hard apple cider, transferred a macadamia brown ale to secondary, and am brewing a passionfruit wheat right now. I've been brewing a couple of years now (after a long hiatus due to lack of time), and am looking at going all-grain soon. Between that, washing yeast, and buying a lot of my hops in bulk, I'll be getting my cost per glass down to a reasonable level, and will have more control over my beer as well. I have a pretty rudimentary kegerator with four kegs, which is an amazing improvement over bottling everything. Oh, one other thing that I don't think has been mentioned is, take notes! I'm always looking back at my recipe book to see what I did in previous brews.

So Poutanen, how'd your beer turn out?

poutanen

Actually really good!!! Not sure if I mentioned earlier in the thread, but the mix was called "everyday IPA" it's intended to be an IPA for people that like craft brews, but not the in your face hoppy IPAs which are so prevalent today. I changed the recipe a bit, adding the bitter hops later in the wort making process to hopefully tone down the hops even more.

I'm actually really impressed with how it turned out!

I need to take your advice and make notes. Not sure if I would do anything differently if I made this mix again, overall it seemed just about right for my tastes, but I would like to get more into stuff like you're doing (ciders, fruit beers, my own mixes, etc.) where notes will be key I think.

I gotta look up this kegorator thing. Keg fridge is it? I suppose bottling into a keg is just as easy as bottling into bottles? Mix the fermented beer with some sugar source, transfer to a sterile keg, and screw the top on?!?

Yay for beer! lol

MccBeth

what beginner kit would be recommended? about a year and a half ago, i had to go gluten free (suuuuuuuuucks), so beer options have been extremely limited for me... and since then i've always thought about trying to brew my own. i love cooking/baking/bbq'ing, so.... naturally, i feel like i should just move into brewing my own beers. to bbq with.

how long does a beginner/tester beer take to brew? well.... just any kind of beer.. i'd have to mess around with ingredients/timing anyway, so... how long the average brew takes, and well.... just anything a new brewer should know?