Brewing beer courses.

gr8 m8

Hello.

I was wondering how people get into micro brewing, is there a course run in Ireland that stands out as being better than others?

I'm looking to learn brewing but from the raw ingredients like apples, barley and hops that I can grow on my own land.

Any help is appreciated.

BeerNut

There aren't many courses, but you don't need one. A lot of people buy a starter set of equipment and a beer kit. You don't get very good beer, but you learn the basics of hygiene and temperature control. From there you just need a few more bits of gear to brew from extract where you're designing your own recipes, and a few more to brew all-grain where you have complete control over the finished beer. After that, if you want, you can hone your set-up into whatever suits the amount of space you have and the effort you want to put in. There are no limits on how simple or complex your set-up can be.

The absolute best thing you can do is talk to other home brewers, ask lots of questions, and work out what you want to do before you start buying equipment.

Bogwoppit

What Beernut says..... just jump in.

gr8 m8

Hello again.

Thank you for the replies. So does anyone know where I would gather information on the likes of growing my own hops?

I suppose a horticultural course or something along those lines?

BeerNut

Hops are fairly foolproof. Lots of sun, lots of water, something to grow up, maybe a bit of tomato feed.

You've missed the start of this year's Social Hops project, but the next meet-up is 8th June at the Bernard Shaw and it's well worth going along to it or any of the scheduled events to talk hops and brewing with people.

gr8 m8

I'll look into that, thanks for the info!

BeerNut

If you're thinking of something more involved than normal homebrew scale (20L batches) it could be worth talking to some of the commercial brewers who grow their own ingredients, Ballykilcavan and 12 Acres.

sharingan

As beer nut says if you want to grow your own beer ingredients its a little bit more complex.

But the information is readily available, and many homebrewers will grow their own hops, and some will grow and malt their own barley - they do it for the experience, but getting your own malt from first principles is not easy. Malting is a very sophisticated process; 12 Acres send their barley away to Minch in Athy to get malted. I am going to guess that Ballykilcavan do the same.