Easiest Fastest and Best Value way to Brew Beer?

hatrickpatrick

Adding my two cents here as someone who's only been brewing for a year or so: The 1.6 / 1.7kg kits which cost around €12 and are just mixed with a kilo of sugar are secretly delicious - If, and this is the hard part for some people, you're willing to put them in a crate somewhere cold and dark and leave them for a good five or six months.

I brewed several of these when I started out and while most of them basically had no real flavour and I found them very boring to drink (although great for learning the ropes as to the basics of home brewing), one or two of them got left on a shelf in the cellar I use for cold conditioning and forgotten about. When I tried them four or five months after bottling, they were ridiculously tasty - they'd developed that "draughty" taste, for want of a better expression, which you only get from beers served on tap in pubs. Not even commercially brewed bottled beer develops this taste from my experience but these homebrews did, and I repeated this as an intentional experiment on a subsequent batch and found the same thing. To this day I have no idea of the process or mechanism behind this monumental change in taste over time, but suffice it to say, if you want to brew a very cheap but extraordinarily nice beer, the key ingredient seems to be patience.

If you want to go down that road, once you pay for your start-up equipment (which costs around €50 and comes with the ingredients you need for one kit brew to start you off), each of those simple kits only costs around €12 each, and you can pick up sugar for €1 / kg in Tesco or Dunnes.

If anyone has an explanation for why the beer seems to develop such an incredible taste after extensive cold storage I'd be fascinated to know. I asked a professional brewer at a craft beer festival a few months back and he said something to the effect that the chemical process which occurs in long term cold storage is so complicated that you'd need a full afternoon's lecture to get to grips with it, but that it is in fact well known in the brewing business that this is a "thing". What it does mean from this thread's point of view is that the cheapest and most "boring" beer kits can produce an incredible result if you can resist tucking in to your product straight away and leave it alone for a good while

fryup

is cooper's canadian blonde the best & easiest for a beginner?

BeerNut

Haven't tried it, but I would avoid pale beers until you get the hang of things. The basic Coopers stout gives great results and is all but foolproof. If you're not a stout person, the Coopers IPA is consistently good, IMO.

I’d second this, I’m not long started but into double digits and still can’t do a good pale ale. All stouts that I’ve bottled have turned out drinkable so I’d go with them.

hatrickpatrick

ReginaldSmythV wrote: »

I’d second this, I’m not long started but into double digits and still can’t do a good pale ale. All stouts that I’ve bottled have turned out drinkable so I’d go with them.

What exactly is wrong with the results you've had on the pale ales you've tried making? And @BeerNut, why do you advise darker beers for beginners?

hatrickpatrick

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

What exactly is wrong with the results you've had on the pale ales you've tried making? And @BeerNut, why do you advise darker beers for beginners?

No hop flavour mainly. Maybe the flavour is prominent in a stout so it’s easier get a result, not sure.

s8n

good post

BeerNut

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

why do you advise darker beers for beginners?

In a pale beer there's nowhere for off-flavours to hide; if something has gone wrong you will taste it, front and centre. The blander the beer style the more this is true, with the blonde ales that kit manufacturers pass off as "lager" being the most susceptible. With dark beers the intentional flavours are strong enough to mask mistakes so you're more likely to get a drinkable beer at the end, even if your hygiene or temperature management hasn't been quite right.

hatrickpatrick

ReginaldSmythV wrote: »

No hop flavour mainly. Maybe the flavour is prominent in a stout so it’s easier get a result, not sure.

Two questions here - how many days before bottling you did you add your dry hops, and did you boil them beforehand?

It sounds counter productive, but I used to have the same problem as you until I started waiting until literally 24-26 hours before bottling to add the hops, and since I started doing that I've had some of the hoppiest beers I've ever tasted from my own brews. It seems that a lot of the hop flavour is actually down to aroma rather than taste, and the chemicals which create hop aroma are volatile enough to evaporate through your airlock if you put them into the fermenter any earlier. So if you want the absolute maximum flavour from your hops, add them the day before bottling or close to it - I tend to add mine at midnight or two nights before a midday bottling, so in other words if you're going to bottle at midday on Saturday, add your hops at midnight on Thursday and see how you get on.

On boiling, don't. Hops themselves have anti-bacterial properties to ward off infection so they're extremely unlikely to add contaminants to your beer, but because of the aforementioned volatility, when you dunk them in boiling water before a dry addition you're basically removing all of the chemicals which produce the aroma. If your hops come in a muslin bag and instruct you to boil, or instruct you to use a muslin bag for dry hopping, ignore both pieces of advice (cut a hole in the muslin bag if they've supplied you with one) and just gently empty the hops directly into the fermenter and let them float in it (some will sink, some will float, it doesn't matter either way).

Try this with a brew and let us know if it worked, if it's the epic blast of hops one gets from the likes of O'Haras, Lagunita's, or Sierra Nevada, I reckon you'll get a lot closer to it with this. Obviously it also depends on the quantity and species of hops, but in general this will give you a far greater final flavour than adding them several days before bottling and/or boiling them before adding.

hatrickpatrick

BeerNut wrote: »

In a pale beer there's nowhere for off-flavours to hide; if something has gone wrong you will taste it, front and centre. The blander the beer style the more this is true, with the blonde ales that kit manufacturers pass off as "lager" being the most susceptible. With dark beers the intentional flavours are strong enough to mask mistakes so you're more likely to get a drinkable beer at the end, even if your hygiene or temperature management hasn't been quite right.

Ahhh, I've definitely experienced this but never copped that there'd be a difference when using darker malt extracts.

I'm guessing when you refer to blonde ale kits being labelled as lager, that's more or less any lager or pilsner kit which still uses top-fermenting yeast and is thus fermented in or around room temperature?

BeerNut

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

I'm guessing when you refer to blonde ale kits being labelled as lager, that's more or less any lager or pilsner kit which still uses top-fermenting yeast and is thus fermented in or around room temperature?

Exactly, yes.

hatrickpatrick

BeerNut wrote: »

Exactly, yes.

This is pretty much exactly what I was describing when it comes to long term cold storage, I made one of UKBrew's 1.6kg "lager" kits (with top fermenting ale yeast) last year and somehow a few bottles ended up tasting like incredible draught lagers after being left in a very cold cellar for the entire summer by accident. Did this intentionally with a full batch of the same kit and they all ended up that way. Normally, when conditioning them the usual way with only a week or two of full cold before drinking, they do indeed taste like very, very bland ale with pretty much no taste and just fizz, but for some reason the cold conditioning in the bottle evolves them into something epic.

I'd defer to your experience on the idea that they make it more difficult to hide mistakes in the process though, so won't recommend this to anyone who doesn't have a good handle on what they're doing already...