The Home Brew Thread

I recently had a PM asking about advice on how to make your own beer.

I don't home brew, personally, so I have no idea.

Thought it might make a good thread, though.


FOCUS: Discuss home brewing. Do you? What's your setup? Recipes to share?

ALT-FOCUS: Get your questions about home brewing answered here.

 

Honestly, just do a google search for "<type of beer> recipe" and start poking through results. Or, you can do a search for "<specific beer> clone recipe" if you have a specific beer that you like and want to try to make.

I recently brewed this and found it to be fantastic:
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/janets-brown-ale-partial-grain-93993/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/janets- ... ain-93993/</a>

It is a 6-gallon recipe but I didn't realize that until I had already brewed it for my 5-gallon setup, and I don't think I would change a thing. It turned out stellar, and is only getting better as it gets older. Little higher alcohol because it's 6 gallons of grains in a 5-gallon container, but really - I'd make it again in a second.

Both the all-grain and partial-grain versions are in that thread. I'm still doing partial-grain beers because I don't have the room or equipment for all-grain right now. Frankly, some of the beers I've made have been so good that I'm not in a hurry to switch.

Some tips:

- Buy Star-San sanitizer. Holy crap, is no-rinse sanitizer awesome. Make a bunch in a squirt bottle, go nuts with it, and then all you have to do is empty out the excess - no rinsing or worrying.

- Pantyhose make fantastic filters for when you're transferring the beer out of the primary fermenter into the bottling bucket. Cheap, strong as hell, and widely available. The cashier looks at you funny but you can just give her a wink and say it makes you feel pretty.

- Buy a scale. Just go ahead and do it up front. It's easier than guessing.

- Don't guess about your gravity either. Buy a hydrometer. The hydrometer knows all. It will tell you if your beer is on track with the recipe, it will tell you if your beer is fermenting, and it will tell you when your beer is done fermenting. Learn to love your hydrometer. There is no other reliable way to tell if your beer is fermenting, or finished.

- Work clean. It's not hard, just think about what you're doing. Up until the boil, it's not critical, but everything after the wort has been boiled has to be clean. With a squirt bottle of Star San, it's a cinch - just hose down everything. No smell, doesn't hurt anything, I just leave my surfaces wet with Star San.

- Yeast starters are under-utilized by new brewers. They're so easy and virtually guarantee success. That's the biggest thing people worry about - did my yeast work? Why isn't it bubbling? Is it infected? Is there a problem? Did the yeast all die? Was it no good to start with? A starter gives you confidence that your yeast is alive to start with, and it gives you sufficient yeast to out-compete everything else in the beer.

- Oh, yeah, and on that subject: stop worrying. No, really. Stop it. Your beer is fine. Be patient, the beer will be done when it's done. It's okay if it takes a day or two to get started. It's okay if it looks like it's still fermenting after a week. It's okay if you didn't have time to bottle it and it spends an extra week, or two weeks, or three weeks, in the fermenter. It's okay.

RDWHAHB - Relax, Don't Worry, Have A Home Brew.

Questions? Post 'em up.

 

PSA:

Secondary fermenter is really a misnomer. Your beer should be done fermenting before you transfer it to another container. Secondary should be used for dry hopping, flavoring with fruit/oils/whatever, or for letting the beer clarify.

Yeast are pretty efficient little guys. When you initially dump them into the wort, they happily reproduce and ferment as long as there is oxygen left (aerobic process), and stick to fermentation when there is no oxygen left (which can be an anaerobic process). When they are done fermenting all of the sugars in the beer, they start feeding on the byproducts that they produced during fermentation, thus cleaning up those byproducts out of your beer.

The problem is that people are impatient, and they worry about yeast autolysis which is when unhealthy yeast cells die and start breaking down rather than doing what happy and healthy yeast do, which is go dormant until there is a new food source. So people tend to transfer beer to a secondary after just a few days or a week. This problem is exacerbated by rules-of-thumb like "1-2-3" which is one week in primary, two weeks in secondary, three weeks bottle conditioning. Or the frequent advice from brew shops to transfer after a week because they want you making more beer.

Autolysis is virtually non-existent in homebrewing now that homebrewers have access to all of this great, healthy yeast - plus, you made a starter, right? What leaving the beer on the yeast cake does, is allow all of those byproducts of fermentation to be cleaned up, and it also allows more yeast and more sediment to settle out and compact itself on the bottom.

So, let your beer finish and then give it a few days to clean up at the very least. The hydrometer will tell you when it's done - if the beer spends 3 days at the same gravity, it's done. I have stopped using a secondary entirely, I leave my beer for 3-4 weeks in primary and then bottle it. I find clarity is far more impacted by the actual boil/cooling process than by transferring to a secondary fermenter, and I only transfer to secondary when I want to get my primary open for another beer.

 

You'll need a thermometer for the brewing - I went ahead and sprang for a fairly expensive thermocouple digital thermometer with a replaceable probe. Ran me about $75 but I was sick of blowing through cheap kitchen thermometers. But in any event, you'll need some kind of thermometer.

The auto-siphon is useful but they tend to be a little weak and sometimes break. I don't use an auto-siphon... but go ahead and use it until it breaks, then decide if the utility is worth it for you.

Frankly, I'd see if I could snag a kit that has a 6gal glass carboy like that one, but instead of a fermenting bucket, it has a bottling bucket. That kit is expecting you to bottle out of the secondary fermenter which isn't as easy. you can ferment in the glass carboy, then transfer to the bottling bucket. The only difference between the bottling bucket and the fermenting bucket, is the bottling bucket has a hole drilled in it and a dispensing nozzle fitted - so you could do it yourself if you want.

You'll need a bottle capper and caps (and bottles, obviously).

You'll need a 4+ gallon pot to cook in.

Buy a bottle of Star San instead of the powdered cleaner/sanitizer they package it with.

 

For bottling, you just need empties, caps, and a capper. All cheap.

Sterilize them yourself - clean them, then hit 'em with some Star San.

For kegging, your best bet is to find a local homebrew store because a lot of homebrew stores sell used 5 gallon soda kegs.

Kegging is far less labor intensive than bottling (filling, capping, and wiping down 50 bottles, then cleaning up the area, for a 5 gallon batch is a bit of a pain). However, I give away a lot of my brews and frequently drink the beers slower than I brew them, so I don't keg. Bottling lets me give away lots of bottles and stash some away if I don't drink them right off.

 

Can anyone go into more detail about the homemade hard cider thing? Netdaddy mentioned using a glass carboy in the other thread, so that's one thing I'll need to get. Apparently making hard cider is one of the easiest alcoholic beverages to create, so I'd like to try that out first.

 

<a class="postlink" href="http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brew+hard+cider" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brew+hard+cider</a>

 

If you want to be thorough, buy some Star San (how many times am I going to pimp this product? I don't know, but I used to use bleach to sanitize and fuck me if that wasn't fucking miserable to rinse, AND it smells bad AND it's bad to get on your hands), and use the appropriate mixture to fill the entire keg up, let it sit for a day. There are a lot of food-grade sanitizing products, pick one and use it. Bleach will work but it stinks and you have a lot of work to rinse it all out.

Seriously, kegs are kegs. Don't spend money on them if you already have some.

Also, kegs are not the place to stress about sterilization. By the time your beer gets to the keg, the yeast don't have any more work to do (since you'll carbonate via pressurized CO2) and there's lots of alcohol in there to suppress growing things. You really just need the keg clean not necessarily sanitized.