Homebrewing

[Colonel Thunder]

So some friends and I tried homebrewing recently and it was pretty fun. We tried to make a light ale, but instead we made a disaster. We bottled the beer and called it "Barley Drinkable". It's uh, better than most super cheap light beers, anyways just...really flat and a little, um, burnt.

Anyways, we're excited to try some more brewing.

You guys ever try homebrewing?

 

[Easy]

A bunch. Big fan. Did you wait at least a week after bottling to drink it, ideally two?

Double IPA's are my poison of choice, personally. Say what you will about Americans, but they make some pretty good beer- Hah! Hah!

...seriously though, the microbrew scene here is actually really good, albeit goddamn expensive. So yeah, homebrewing derivatives of their recipes is the bomb.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

My two buddies and I drink a bunch of IPAs as well, and one of them has a borderline obsession with hops.

Oh man Easy, the microbrew industry is strong here in Oregon. A ton of interesting beer history here, too.

We did wait about a week and half before bottling but um, we screwed up bad. When we were making the wort we had all the grain in this mesh brew bag, and apparently we weren't paying attention because a hole was burnt in the side of the bag, and almost half of our grain fell out into the wort. We did our best to strain the wort before we put it in the fermenter, but we still only managed to salvage two gallons out of a five gallon recipe. A decent amount of grains got into the fermentation bucket as well.

We bottled it a little over a week ago, but it's not very good so far. We had to strain the product thoroughly before bottling, so we heavily oxidized the beer. I also screwed up with the priming sugar. In order to get it carbonated, I thought you put the corn sugar in (by itself, not mixed in water) the fermenter and let it sit overnight before bottling. I now realize you're supposed to dissolve the priming sugar in water first, and add it right before you start bottling.

We figured that we'd screw up our first batch pretty bad, so we weren't that disappointed in the end. The beer's barely drinkable, but it's still much better than we thought it was going to be.

We'll probably do another five gallon recipe in a week or two, most likely an IPA this time around.

 

[Easy]

Be careful to keep your grain-n'-hops bag tied up to where it's well suspended above the bottom of the pot, mind you, cause yeah that'll happen otherwise. Mind you also, the pot's only supposed to be boiling some three gallons of wort, and then watered down to five once those extractions are all done and you've got it in the bucket. The oxidation you got from straining definitely wasn't your problem, though - a little initial oxidization actually just helps with fermentation. More probably it was the longer-term extra exposure resulting from having only a couple of gallons fermenting in a five-gallon bucket.

Besides all the things you listed, the most common beginner's mistake is probably adding in the yeast too soon. If you didn't before, keep in mind to be very sure that your wort's down to the 72-73 F range before pitching it, even if that ends up taking hours. Keeping a few kilos of ice sitting around for when the boiling's done can be very helpful here. Also, make sure you don't overdo the priming sugar, because if you do then all of your bottles will explode. (Unless they're plastic soda bottles; those won't explode, though they do have other drawbacks of style and convenience.)

 

[Colonel Thunder]

Awesome, thank you Easy! That's some helpful advice. What have you made thus far homebrewing? What kinds of beer? Anything other than beer? Oh, and has drinking become cheaper for you in the long run as a result of homebrewing?

 

[Danny]

*sigh* that moment when you realize how much of a loser you are by misunderstanding the use of the word "homebrew"..

 

[Easy]

Awesome, thank you Easy! That's some helpful advice. What have you made thus far homebrewing? What kinds of beer? Anything other than beer? Oh, and has drinking become cheaper for you in the long run as a result of homebrewing?

I've mostly gone for IPA's, of which I consider my magnum opus to be what I call "the Hussar" (<-- extremely useful site, by the way.) I've also run a couple of Czech pilsners, and a bunch of mead, but the truth is that I haven't done much experimentation since developing the Hussar. It's a solid choice, that one. I'll generally just scale that recipe down if I feel like making a weaker brew, and sometimes switch out the Warrior for Saaz and call it a pilsner.

If you count the cost of homebrew by the bottle, then go for some really strong IPA-type brew, it can seem discouragingly expensive at first. If you adjust for cost-by-alcohol-content, and also for the extra markups on a good, hoppy store brew, which frequently runs at or over $1.50 a bottle, you can run down the cost of a good homebrew to around half of the store price, and have paid off your equipment costs after just a couple of batches. (Except for the kettle; that one will likely need a couple batches of its own.) Mead, by the way, has what I consider to be an exceptional mixture of cost-efficiency (by ABV; because at first glance, honey is an expensive brewing material) and style, though with the downside that it takes months of fermentation to have done properly. In short, yes, you can save a lot of money in the long run by homebrewing. Of course, the temptation or convenience of simply having 60 bottles of quality brew sitting in a cabinet in the next room at any given time can also lead to an increase of consumption in general, so one does have to be careful with that if one is prone to mind-wandering and fits of boredom.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

I'm looking into doing meads before long as well for those same reasons, and to my understanding the variables are easier to control (ABV, how sweet it tastes). The months of storage is definitely a negative though. If they have to be refrigerated during storage that might be a dealbreaker unless we come across a free fridge on craigslist or something.

Hm...I really should keep an eye out for a fridge on craigslist. I have the feeling my roommates are a little peeved at half of the fridge being taken up by questionable brew.

Ah, another question. Do you typically go with all-grain recipes or malt extract recipes? I've heard a lot of different opinions on it, but the gist of what I've heard is that malt extract is easier to work with, but typically not as good as all-grain. What's your experience?

 

[Easy]

Partial mash - so, about three pounds of different grains that mostly just add the flavor, with liquid malt extract being the actual primary fermentable ingredient. The cheapest way to do it is technically to buy unmalted barley and germinate it yourself, I'm led to understand, but it all sounded like a huge hassle. As for mead, you don't have to (and shouldn't) refrigerate it during storage. Just keep it in stored in some relatively cool, dark corner of your residence.

Also, why is so much of your fridge taken up by your brew? The only time you should really chill it is just before drinking, and even that's just a matter of taste.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

Forgot to update for our second brew, which we finished like a month ago.

We did a double IPA with a ton of citrus hops, using the flowers as opposed to the pellets. It's turned out much better than our last brew, but there's still room for improvement. We had to substitute the priming sugar with just normal cane sugar, so there's only about 75% of the desired carbonation. We also need to make our sanitation process a bit more thorough, as about 30% of the beers have a funky smell to them, but taste just fine. Because it varies from bottle to bottle we're hoping it's just the bottles that need to be better sanitized.

We forgot to take hydrometer readings while we were brewing it, so I don't know if there's a good method for us to measure the ABV of the brew, but it seems to be somewhere around 6% to 8%.

The citrus hops worked out great, we'll definitely come back to using those in the future. No idea what we're going to brew next. I was thinking maybe a porter or a stout or something. I was also looking into brewing cider, mead, and wine, but I think that'll mean buying more equipment.

I kind of want to get a glass carboy for storage, but I don't know where we'd put it, and I'm trying not to spend too much more on homebrewing right now.

 

[Requiem]

How did I know you'd become that funky old guy who brews his own beer in his garage? Are you gonna hunt down your brother in law now while he makes blue meth?

 

[Colonel Thunder]

I could see that happening in like ten years.

 

[Easy]

We did a double IPA with a ton of citrus hops, using the flowers as opposed to the pellets. It's turned out much better than our last brew, but there's still room for improvement. We had to substitute the priming sugar with just normal cane sugar, so there's only about 75% of the desired carbonation. We also need to make our sanitation process a bit more thorough, as about 30% of the beers have a funky smell to them, but taste just fine. Because it varies from bottle to bottle we're hoping it's just the bottles that need to be better sanitized.

Fun! The citrus hops, that is. Interesting flavors out of that sort of thing. With sanitizing the bottles: funnily enough, they're actually the one receptacle you least have to be careful with sanitizing, since the fermented brew you put into them should already have a high enough alcohol content, a high enough active yeast cell content, a low enough nutritional content, and a low enough oxygen content to be fairly hostile to most infectious agents. All I do with the bottles myself is wash them out three times with warm water immediately after emptying them, let them dry upside-down in a rack, and literally just store them until reuse, sometimes for months. I've had batch infections before, mind, but never from the bottles. Absolutely do recommend double-sanitizing your fermentation bucket and siphoning tubes immediately before use, though. I've certainly paid the price for being lazy with those before.

The citrus hops worked out great, we'll definitely come back to using those in the future. No idea what we're going to brew next. I was thinking maybe a porter or a stout or something. I was also looking into brewing cider, mead, and wine, but I think that'll mean buying more equipment.

I kind of want to get a glass carboy for storage, but I don't know where we'd put it, and I'm trying not to spend too much more on homebrewing right now.

As to the porters or stouts, I definitely enjoy a good lager, (possibly even prefer it to ale on the whole,) but the whole thing with refrigerating it for 4-6 weeks while it goes through fermentation is more of a pain than I like to deal with when I'm homebrewing. (Though I've recently done a pilsner batch while going through a helluva busy workload for classes, knowing it would be a few weeks after pitching before I could get around to bottling it anyway).

In any case: generally speaking, if I'm gonna go through that kind of wait time again, I'd definitely rather just go the extra step and make another batch of mead. It would take a bit longer, mind, but it would also be simpler to make and wouldn't need to take up all that fridge space. In both cases, it's still the kind of thing you'd want a glass carboy for. You don't need a glass carboy for long fermentations, of course - everything that needs doing really could be done just fine in plastic. But the higher O2 penetration can really add up over long periods of time, so you're significantly, (if perhaps only slightly,) upping your chances of off-flavor or infection. The price of ingredients for a sufficiently ruined batch could potentially come out to the same amount of money that the glass carboy to hold them would cost, so I'd say it's worth the one-time payment if you can afford it, and if you're also confident that you'll be using it at least a few times in the forseeable future.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

Ah, I didn't realize we'd have to refrigerate porters or stouts for fermentation. We definitely don't have room for that unless we buy a mini-fridge or something. So far everything we've done has been fermented at room temperature in the closet.

In regard to glass carboys, do they really make that much of a difference in regard to O2 penetration? If so we'll probably get one in the near future.

Ach, now I really want to do mead too. Darn it Easy.

 

[Easy]

I'd definitely recommend mead-brewing. I simply can't overstate how much advantage it has over most other brewing projects in terms of simplicity, or strength (if you like), or versatility (with how broadly you can mess with the recipe and still come out with different types of delicious, or strength - basically, as much as you like, up to 19%). Since honey's also a fairly effective natural antibiotic, it's even got an edge in resisting infection. The truth is that you don't even need to let it ferment for such a long time either, if you feel like doing a sparkling mead. I just prefer it still, myself, but it's just a matter of taste.

With the glass carboy thing: I've got enough biochem-type lab experience to confirm that the tiny bit of difference in O2 penetration that this type of slightly less effective seal leads to is definitely the sort of thing that really can make a difference in the final chemical composition of a solution going through various types of biochemical processes. It's also considered sort of as general knowledge among brewers that you'll tend to get worse results from long-term fermentation in plastic receptacles, particularly wide-rimmed ones.

That said? Just because it's definitely true that various types of reactions can be seriously affected by such a marginal increase in oxygen flow, and that the seal on a plastic bucket does marginally allow more oxygen flow than a stoppered carboy, doesn't mean that the fermentation process for a given yeast in a given solution is necessarily so sensitive - what's true of some reactions isn't necessarily true of all reactions, so my lab experience doesn't really support the idea so much as it simply fails to refute. I've only done a couple of multi-week runs in plastic buckets myself, and while they were less than perfect in the outcome (nothing seriously wrong, really just slightly impressive than what I've done in glass for that time), it's been nothing of such a magnitude I'm really confident calling it real evidence that the bucket itself made any detectable impact. In fact, I'd definitely say that from what I've seen, most of the people that absolutely swear by going all-glass are seriously overestimating how much difference it really makes. I certainly wouldn't say a glass carboy is absolutely required for long-term fermentation - it's just my take that, since the ingredient cost of a single spoiled batch (at high enough ABV's) can well outweigh the cost of said carboy, I think springing the extra money to boost your chances as well as you can is a pretty solid investment, money-wise.

 

[Requiem]

You're all so fascinating and I mean that in a genuine, great way. Seriously, love you guys. This thread is awesome.

 

[Easy]

You're all so fascinating and I mean that in a genuine, great way. Seriously, love you guys. This thread is awesome.

I'll take it.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

Just looked up the price of carboys on Amazon. Waaaay cheaper than our local brewstore, I think we'll get one.

 

[Easy]

For the record, I recommend looking up online prices for pretty much all of your brewing supplies that don't need to be refrigerated. In my experience, it's pretty rare for something to actually be cheaper in the store, even after shipping. (Though you may have to expand your search beyond Amazon for this to hold true).

 

[Colonel Thunder]

We're starting our third brew shortly. The Unearthly Imperial IPA.

I'll let you know how it turns out.