Homebrew Beer Howto

Conor,

When doing a lager temperature control is pretty important as is the yeast. A lot of lager kits include an ale yeast which can produce fruity flavours - this can be great in an ale but in a lager it can taste a little off. You can get a decent cheap dried lager yeast (Saflager) which ferments at a colder temperature and produces less off-flavours. I wouldn't worry about if for this batch but it might be worth looking into for your next lager. Just make sure you ferment at the lower end of the kit's recommended temperature and you'll be fine. Lagers really benefit from aging in a secondary as it will help the flavour mellow and the yeast drop to the bottom before racking. I aged my first lager for a month before bottling and there is no visible sediment when I pour into the glass. Given that this is your first brew i don't think you'll want to wait that long to taste the result :-) but you can bear it in mind for a future batch.

Speaking of graduating I'll be trying my first extract with steeped grains this weekend, Noby take a bow - your earlier post got my interest and I've finally got round to getting a supply of hops and grains that should keep me busy for a while.

i'm sure it will work out just fine, sounds like you've got it under control. the kit yeast is more than likely an ale yeast so the lower range will probably be around the 18C mark and it probably shouldn't go too far above 20C. If it falls too far below it's minimum range the yeast will become dormant but you can move it somewhere warmer or warm the room up to get it going again. If you do decide to go for the saflager yeast in future it's best range is 5-10C and it helps to pitch two packs to give it a good start.

Just stumbled on this thread. Great to see it. I'm in the middle of a pale ale brew and hope to rack into a couple of 5 litre demi johns tomorrow. I'm working from extract mainly. Hope to graduate to grain in a while but lots to learn from extract yet. I get my supplies from grape 'n' grain but am a little worried about the freshness of the hops. They seem to source them from Young's in Britain but they appear poorly packaged and no doubt oxidised somewhat. I'm a hop head so got some Northern brewer for bittering in the boil only to discover that the guy at grape 'n' grain had weighed out 100 grams himself and stuffed them into a plastic bag. The English sites seem more promising for foil wrapped hops but the expense of postage can add to the overall cost. Generally, I think Ireland is very poorly provided for regarding Home Brew. Perhaps with an increase of popularity in home brew and a weaning of the nation from the commercial muck that is peddled in most pubs, there will be an improvement in supplies...

Thanks for the hop advice, bigears. Just ordered some decent bittering and aroma hops from the hopshopuk you suggested. Racked into the secondary fermenters this morning. Took a little sip of the green beer; not bad and perhaps, dare I say it, a little too bitter. Never thought I say that but I was fairly liberal with the hops during the boil.. I tried to compensate for the condition of the hops, which wasn't great. Still, after some maturation I'm sure all will be well. I ended up with an odd volume left so racked a few bottles off straight from the primary. I've never managed to burst a bottle by adding too much priming sugar or bottling too early but this time I might be pushing it a bit. I don't like allowing the primary fermentation to go too long and tend to rack off early once the krausen subsides. If these bottles go, you're gonna hear it where ever on the island you might live!

Hey oconn,

You shouldn't have too many problems with the starter kit. I did my first batch in a similar way a few years back and it worked like a charm. There are a few things to keep an eye on though. Whether you're brewing from a kit or have graduated to full mash work, everything that touches the beer has to sterilised. I screwed up a batch or two from being sloppy in this area. Anything that comes into touch with your brew has to be sterilised. (with the exception of the yeast, of course.....) The ingredients you use, like the sugar, will be sterilised by the boiling water that you use to make up the kit. The keg you store in after fermentation should be sterilised also, but things are a little more forgiving after fermentation because during this process there are a number of chemical changes that result in the beer being a little more resistant to infection. The major change is the alcohol production (Yay!) which is antibacterial in itself and also a drop in pH making the brew more acidic and less hospitable to bacteria. I have found that the major worry with regard to infection is wild strains of yeast which live just as happily in your brew as the brewer's yeast that you add yourself. Their action can be quite insidious as they grow slowly and can taint your beer over time. I got a batch once, after a long bottle conditioning, that smelt like phenol - a medicinal kind of smell, that is typical of a wild yeast infection.

I've probably scared the crap out of you now and you're certain that there is no way you can avoid contamination, but it's not the case. Kit brewing requires little movement of the beer, especially if you're kegging it so it won't be exposed to the air very much. This greatly reduces any chance of contamination. Give all you equipment a good soaking in the sanitiser solution and rinse it out throughly. Make sure to do the inside of the siphoning tubes and rinse through fully (I hate doing this bit, it seems like it can never be clean enough)

As for the best place for the fermentation vessel....the shed doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Temperature fluctuations could make things a little difficult and the yeast they have given you with the kit is likely to be an ale yeast despite the fact that you bought a lager kit. There's no real harm in that but ale yeasts like to work around 16 - 20 degree C and the shed might be too cold and the yeast could get a little sluggish. In my experience there is very little smell form the fermentation vessel and you should be able to keep in indoors with little problem. Just keep inquisitive hands away from it until the fermentation is in full swing. The beer is nicely protected from infection at that stage by the foamy head formed by the yeast and the carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air and sits on top of the brew.

I'd be confident that everything will go well and it's the sweetest thing to have your own homemade brew on tap. Let us know how you get on. I'm new to this forum but from what I've read, there are a number of guys who know there stuff here, so any questions you have could be answered, I'm sure

one more thing....I plan to use bottled water can i use the 2liter bottles afterwards to store the beer as i dont have any glass bottles ? or will leaving it in the plastic 5gal keg be ok to serve from ? I thought I could fill a few 2 L bottles from the keg as I wanted to dirnk them...throw them into the fridge to chill ?