Homebrew Beer Howto

oblivious

newkie wrote:

Whew, just finished for the day and having a well deserved pint of bitter! I now have a Belgian Christmas ale in the primary and bottled a Firkin Dogbolter kit. Today I had the opportunity to try out my Hop & Grape immession chiller. I don't have a proper pot, just 5l for a concetrated boil. Still, waiting 45 minutes and baby-sitting the sink is no fun. It worked great, got to pitching temp in 15 minutes and the water isn't even all that cold yet. I also got a bench capper so another 15 minutes of cursing saved... so long red baron.

I think my next brew will be a stout because I need to get rid of some dark LME. I was thinking:
3.2Kg John Bull Dark LME
.45Kg Crystal Malt
.15kg roasted malt
.15kh chocolate malt
1oz Goldings 60min
.5oz Fuggles 10min
Safeale S-33


Hi newkie

Looks good, but I would drop the dark extract (you don’t really know what grain have gone into it) in favour of light malt extract, increase the speciality grains to add colour, flavour and mouth feel. I would increases the roasted barely and chocolate malt to some were between 250-500g, maybe the lower end if this is your first time brewing this.

Hendrixcat

I'm inclined to agree with oblivious. Speciality grains are the way to go to greatly improve the flavour and mouthfeel. I added 500g roasted barley to me last stout and it improved the bitterness and roasted aspect a great deal.

I bought a picnic cooler form hop and grape, and to answer big ears question, the guy there suggested I increase the strike temp to 75C and not to worry about forming too may dextrins as late starting enzymes should take care of them. He suggested I dilute out the iodine solution I was using for assessing starch end point because the neat solution just stains the grains black which makes it look like there is strach still present. When I did this it turned out I had almost 100% conversion and as I said before, my kettle wasn't big enough to take all the wort.

bigears

A bit of chocolate works wonders in a stout as far as I'm concerned. I put around 450g in mine and loved the result.

It's good to see the tips on using the mash tun before getting started. I'm starting to think about getting one of these now..

oblivious

A supposable great trick to increase the chocolate flavour with chocolate malt is do a late addition at around 5 minutes left in the mash conversion with between 200g-300g). This should increase the chocolate flavour/colour with out too much of the bitterness associated with such dark malts. This is presuming that you have initially added 250-500 grams of chocolate malt to your mash.

bigears

Can't remember what site I got this on but it details a couple of techniques for Mini Mashing without the extra equipment.

(I've attached a text file to this message so hopefully it will work)

I've tried the first method a couple of times - I should add I didn't place a towel on the pot, so I guess I didn't insulate very well. I think it worked reasonably well but my efficiency was quite poor so the original gravity was lower than expected. I may up the grain bill next time to compensate for this. I intend to use one of these methods until I get a picnic cooler/mash tun.

So the question for the "mashers" out there is this: do you see any major drawbacks to this approach?

oblivious

Hi bigears,

You can help stabilise you partial mashing temp but placing your pot with the gain in your oven, set the oven to the pilot or the lowest temp possible. Add your hot water as usual to the grain and then place in the oven for 60 minutes. Another way is to buy a picnic cooler (30liter) this will help to keep your mashing temp if you want to use a bigger grain bill than will fit in your pot/oven.

Here is a lit to BYO what explains it all http://byo.com/feature/986.html

bigears

Good old BYO!

oconn, speaking of BYO here's a good reference for using sugars in your beer if you're going down that road::

http://www.byo.com/referenceguide/grains/grains5.html

theboytaylor

Ok total newb to this so any help/advice is most welcome

So I thought a beginners kit might be the place to start??? As in get all the hardware in one go.

I did a bit of searching and I'm thinking on getting this

http://www.grapengraindublin.com/Cat_beerkits.php

It's ~E90, is it worth it or would I be better off trying to get the pieces seperately/trying to assemble the apparatus myself?

Thanks a million guys

Hendrixcat

It's ~E90, is it worth it or would I be better off trying to get the pieces seperately/trying to assemble the apparatus myself?

Don't opt for that kit. It won't be much use in the long run. I got my first stuff from Grape 'n' grain and they have all the essentials.

To start off get:

25 litre fermenter with lid
Couple of Kgs of brewing sugar
Accumulate about 40 500ml brown bottles and buy some caps
A bottle capper
Hydrometer
Sanitising powder (or clear thin bleach will do)
Siphoning tubes.

It seems like a lot but once the initial outlay is made you only have to buy the kits, and the equipment will last ages.

The one advantage that starter brew kit has is that there is no bottling involved which can be a pain and tricky to get into a comfortable method.

If you don't already have a home brew book to help you starting off the homebrewers on this thread can probably help you out though I always found it handy to have a book open in front of me during my first attempts.

oblivious

Personally I am not a great fan of the all in one kits. The main advantage with that kit is you don’t have to bottle your brew, which can be pain some times. The major disadvantage is that you can’t do a secondary fermentation (clears up the beer and matures the taste). Also such kits are not really compatible if you want to towards extract/ all grain brewing, you will still have to go out and buy a 5 gallon plastic fermenter and a glass carboy.

If you are new to the hobby if would go for a 5 gallon plastic fermenter , a beer kit for Cooper, Muntons or one of the big name, there usually good. I would go for a dark beer for two reasons 1) dark beer will hide any flaws in your brewing technique and 2) it not cold enough yet to brew a proper larger. Furthermore I would purchases 1 can of light malt extract; this will give a better beer the using sugar alone and remember cheep ingredients equals cheep beer

theboytaylor

Cool thanks for the replies, think I'll skip the all-in-one package now and jsut collect the bits myself, thanks.

This is gonna be class!

noby

On the other hand, with that kit you're getting a quality 3Kg kit worth €30, a king keg top tap worth over €50 and some other odds and sods (I'm not sure exactly what else, I didn't check). Buy a fermenting bin with that for less than €15, and a siphon, and you're good to go. It is an option.

In saying that I would agree with Hendrix: collect some empty 500ml bottles, and buy a capper and caps for less than half the price of a king keg.
There are a lot of improvements/modifications you can make to a kit, but as a rule you get what you pay for, and if you do buy a 3Kg kit, it may be twice the price as others, but there's nothing to be added to make a good pint.

Hendrixcat

The quality of the kits can vary greatly so be choosy and get the good ones by Munton's etc. I switched to LME, DME and my own hop editions fairly early on in my home brew endeavours so don't know a whole lot about the kits. I agree completely with Oblivious regarding the dark beers. They are so forgiving to the home brewer with regard to flavour. A great deal of bad practice can be hidden in the depths of a bitter, black stout. I have never tried brewing a lager because I think any lager kit would proabaly be awful and temperature regulation is so critical. There is nowhere to hide any of the less desirable yeast by-products in a golden pilsner.

I sampled my most recent stout yesterday. I always try them a little early because I just can't resist and also the White Lab yeasts I've been using are so active that they seem to condition the beer in no time at all. It was pleasantly smooth, plenty bitter with a decent brownish head. It was more towards the Wrasslers 4X end of the stout scale rather than Guinness which is fine with me. I used 200g black malt and 500g roasted barley along with some Target hops with a huge alpha acid of 11.5%. The half grain in the wort seems to have given it some decent character. There is still a slight twang that could be coming from the light LME. I'd love to get rid of this twang but it could be coming from the fermentation, which would make it more difficult eradicate.

oblivious

I think paying 30 euro for a full 3kg kit is way over priced, there is no scope to add a personal touch to your beer and most importantly you only learn from your brewing mistakes i.e. astringency from over mashing/steeping grain, boiling LME vs. late extract addition.

oblivious

Hi all

Just wondering what stage of brewing are you at extract/ partial mash or all grain? Me I am doing partial mash

Hendrixcat

I'm a bit confused with the terminology used by various homebrew books. I use a picnic cooler to mash half the total wort and make up the rest with LME. While this is a 'partial mash', in American brewing books a partial mash seems to refer to the steeping method practised by a few on the brewers on this forum. I hope to move onto full grain soon - it should be simple enough having done a mini-mash - but the logistics of boiling 25 odd litres on my hop is a little daunting. I might try a 10 litre all grain barley wine brew, which will require far less water and could be done on the hob. Will have to get a hold of some nip bottles, though.....

Partial grain brewing is the best way at the moment because it gives you huge scope for customising your beer and you can learn a great deal about the finer aspects of brewing.

oblivious

I got a Bruheat Electrim Mashing Bin from grape and grain; it will boil around 25litre no problems. Also it allows you to brew out side and prevents your kitchen from smelling to bad and problems with the better half!

noby

oblivious wrote:

I think paying 30 euro for a full 3kg kit is way over priced, there is no scope to add a personal touch to your beer and most importantly you only learn from your brewing mistakes i.e. astringency from over mashing/steeping grain, boiling LME vs. late extract addition.

But for the beginner, or for convenience, you are getting a tried and trusted beer kit, which couldn't be easier to brew. Obviously you're skipping the personal touch of your own recipe, but for a complete novice to brew a good beer without having to source various ingredients I think it counts as good value for money.

guildofevil

I use an Bruheat Boiler similar to this one (although mine is an older model): http://www.hopshopuk.com/cgi-bin/browse-no-frames.cgi?view=item&item=eq098&session=82733670 Grape n Grain used to do them too, but I don't see them listed on the website. I would imagine they could get you one though.

It is basically a plastic bucket with a kettle element in it. I use it for mashing, by strapping a large sheet of muslin to it with a bungee cord, thus forming a large grain bag. (Muslin is very cheap when bought from a sewing shop, by the meter, so I throw it out and get new stuff when it gets a bit tatty.)

I heat the sparge water in a large pot, on the cooker.

I collect the wort in a plastic fermentation bucket, remove the muslin full of grain, and syphon the wort back into the Bruheat Boiler for a full boil.

It actually works very well, whether you batch sparge or fly sparge, because the wet muslin sticks to the plastic sides of the Bin, preventing channelling down the sides.

I can even split the brew day in two by storing the collected wort in a sealed, sanitized, plastic bucket, over night and doing the boil the next evening.

I want to switch to an insulated mash tun because, using a 10 (US) Gallon cooler, because it would give me more elbow room in the mash tun, allowing me to mash more grain, for bigger beers (I am very fond of strong Belgian Ales).

I would still use my Bruheat as a boiler.

The disadvantages of the Bruheat Boiler and methods I use to compensate are as follows:

The electric element gets covered in limescale and other crud very easily and if you don't clean it off properly, it causes the element to keep cutting out. This is a serous PITA when you are trying to do a full boil.

I eventually replaced the, hard to clean, spiral shaped, kettle element, with a more powerful and better shaped one from an electrical suppliers on Parnell Square, which helped a lot. I also found, (thanks to a suggestion on another forum: http://www.realbeer.com/discussions/) that cleaning it with vinegar gets the metal of the element clean and bright with ease.

The thermostat is hard to use and is in an awkward place on the bucket.

The thermostat does not use any kind of temperature scale, but is marked from one to ten. There does not appear to be any real consistency as to the temperature maintained if you set it to any given number. I deal with this by using it as a switch, rather than a Thermostat. Turned up to 10, it simply leaves the element on and turned to 0 it shuts it off, so I manually control the temperature, monitoring it with a hand held digital Thermometer and adding heat as I deem it necessary. There is a bit if a knack to this method, but you get used to it.

The Thermostat dial is attached to the opposite side of the mash tun to the spigot. Naturally, I want the spigot on the front of the bin, sticking over the edge of the table, so I can vorlauf, sparge and lauter. This means that I have to reach around the back of a hot bucket in order to use the control dial. I quickly discovered that the thermostat dial is actually attached to the power chord not to the heating element, so you can remove it from the boiler and place it on the table beside the bucket, where you can see it and reach it with ease.

Séan

bigears

ust wondering what stage of brewing are you at extract/ partial mash or all grain? Me I am doing partial mash

I'm between extract/steeping and mini mash/partial mash at the moment but i haven't bought or made the mash equipment so my efficiency is still not great. It will tide me over until I can make the investment (primarily in time) to move on. Whether I move to all grain or not will again depend on how much time I can set aside.

But for the beginner, or for convenience, you are getting a tried and trusted beer kit, which couldn't be easier to brew. Obviously you're skipping the personal touch of your own recipe, but for a complete novice to brew a good beer without having to source various ingredients I think it counts as good value for money.

Having only been brewing for nine months I'm glad I started off with a kit. There is so much terminology involved which makes the whole process sound very confusing to the beginner. As you progress from your first couple of kits and ease yourself in it all starts to make more sense, especially with the help of others on forums like this. You can then decide how much further you want to bring things along.

To theboytaylor I would say stick with the kits for your first couple of brews - read the tips from ken & noby at the start of this thread and it will ease you in. Then you can start learning a bit more.

noby

AS for the stage of brewing, I got as far as mini-mashing this time last year. While I was planning (day-dreaming) about going all-grain, I've actually (for a variety of reasons; time being the main one) only brewed a couple of kits earlier this year.
To get some brews on the go quickly, I plan to get a couple of good kits in the next couple of weeks, then start stocking up on ingredients again. Hence my defending the 3Kg kits earlier. I just don't have the time at the moment to give over half my saturday to brewing, much as I would like to.

oblivious

Finding the time can be hard, to add to the problem I boil using a Bruheat boiler. They are electric and I brew out side, so I have to keep an eye on the weather so I don’t end up destroying the boiler or worse electrocuting myself! Did my first mild last might and the rain yesterday afternoon made me very anxious.

guildofevil

I brew outside too and when it looks like it might rain I wrap the thermostat dial, power strip and heating element socket in plastic bin liner, held in place with tape. Keeps the electrical bits dry and I can still use the dial through the plastic.

By the way, a little tip for using the Bruheat Boiler, especially outside: Insulation.

I rest the boiler on concrete slabs when I'm using it and I find that if I place a piece of styrofoam under the base, it helps to maintain the mashing temperature, without having to add heat as often.

I'm looking at the best way to insulate the sides of the bucket too. Might use tinfoil and an old blanket. Haven't decided yet.

oblivious

Hi guildofevil


Thanks for the bruheat boiler tip, I use a 30 litre picnic cooler to mash as, I was afraid that the element on the boiler may scorch the grain. How do you find mashing with it?

bigears

oblivious wrote:

Hi guildofevil


Thanks for the bruheat boiler tip, I use a 30 litre picnic cooler to mash as, I was afraid that the element on the boiler may scorch the grain. How do you find mashing with it?

I'd be interested to find this out too. I saw your message earlier about using the muslin etc. - any chance of a step by step account? I've been given two 'Swan' boilers (stainless steel water boilers). One is ~10 litres and one is ~25 litres. I presume I can use these as an alternative to the Bruheat boilers and would be hopeful that they'll act as a mash tun if I can get the basics right.

bigears

Any thoughts on whether this thread should be split into two? I think it's pretty intimidating for a complete beginner to see stuff about all grain, mash tuns, lautering etc. etc. One thread could deal with Kits/Beginners and another for Intermediate/Advanced. I know I'd still read both threads but it might make it easier for new brewers to concentrate on the basics...

noby

Perhaps the original 'How to' thread, and any other useful info, should be kept on this thread, and general homebrew discussion be split onto another thread.

guildofevil

I agree about the intimidation factor of an all grain discussion.

Even if it is easier than it sounds to do all grain, the terminology makes it sound like black magic.

I have posted my Bruheat Boiler howto here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=52076408#post52076408

oblivious

I also agree with the intimidation factor, home brewers in Ireland seem to be a small group and any way we can increase the numbers would be beneficial to all i.e. home brewer shops may start to stock a more diverse array of products.

Not sure if the site should split, the Americas sites can be very snobbish about any one not doing all grain and I would hate that to happen here. But the general how to brew thread will greatly differ from some doing a kit verse partial mash or all grain.

bigears

Does anyone know where I might be able to get a large picnic cooler, in Dublin?

Ideally I would like a 10 US Gallon (8 UK Gallon, 38 litre) rubbermaid water cooler, like this one:
http://pivo.northernbrewer.com/nbsto...7542&x=16&y=13

I want to use a Bazooka T to convert it to an insulated mash tun.

Séan

Didn't find anything in Dublin but this is a UK site so postage may not be as steep as ordering from the States.

http://www.recarda.co.uk/erol.html

Go to Igloo->Beverage Coolers and you'll see the 5 gallon/10 gallon coolers etc.