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I be brewing my own BERRRRRR!!


ClueTwo

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Ok, so here is my latest batch, I call it "odds-n-ends ale" I had a bunch of leftovers and shit I had picked up on sale/clearance from my local homebrew supply store, 8lbs Alexanders pale malt extract, 4 oz Citra hops for bittering, 2 lbs local organic avocado honey, 4 oz Willamette hops for aroma and Safale US-05 dry yeast. 8 days in primary, 3 months in secondary, I primed w/ local organic wildflower honey and it has spent about a week in the bottle so far, pretty good carbonation already.

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Very strong citrusy hoppy flavor to start, with a sweet finish that has hints of grape and apple. All in all not too bad for a bunch of shit I had lying around.

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there was a home brew thread somewhere. I was posting up a lot but it has been a minute since Ive done something new. I got 17 gallons of a end of the year fig/strawberry wine mash up from last year that i HAVE YET TO TASTE! Im nervous...I want so bad for it to be good and I keep forgetting to by a new turkey baster to pull a sample!

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  • 3 months later...

so nervous about the whole sterilization part. don't wanna fuck it up then drink fucked off beer.

 

but my lady bought me this for christmas

 

DIYAbout500.gif

 

gonna get brave soon. been reading the book she got me also

 

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seems like it's easy as shit with the kit after reading all this, so I'm gonna try soon. this thread reminded me. might use glass bottles though. don't like the plastic ones the kit came with.

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i got the same book, just not the gear.

 

when i get home ill start brewing, or do a course over here.

 

read a few interviews from headbrewers and owners of breweries, some mentioned they lost the passion for drinking beer after working with it for a long time, i hope like fuck that wont happen.

 

if i bought a 500 dollar homebrew setup, i would have spent the equivalent of 10 cases of beer, should be pretty cost effective after a few runs.

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I have a setup that cost about 250-300, brews 5 gallons at a time, it's pretty fuckin sweet.

As far as sterilization goes, if you don't want to use a diluted bleach solution, you can use cheap vodka. It works just fine.

I would certainly recommend getting "The Complete Joy Of Homebrewing" by Charlie Papazian. It will tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about brewing, and a lot of stuff you don't even care to know about.

 

The key to getting a wort is NOT boiling the water... bring 1 gal to 155*F and steep the grains, then sparge them shits with 2 gallons water at 170*F. Then add DME, and bring to a boil while adding hops at specific intervals.

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$500 is waaaay more than you need to spend.

About $100 For fermentation and bottling equipment

here

$60 for a kettle

here

Immersion chillers run about $30-$80, I made mine for free with some copper tubing and some compression fittings I "found".

If you are going to start out going all grain, which I don't recommend, I have seen lots of guys use coolers like this as a mash tun with pretty good results.

So it's out there, you just gotta look.

 

*Edit: after posting all that I remembered you are touring the honky motherland, and most likely be doing this brewing in AUS. I am retarded.

 

Ute.jpeg

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I have a setup that cost about 250-300, brews 5 gallons at a time, it's pretty fuckin sweet.

As far as sterilization goes, if you don't want to use a diluted bleach solution, you can use cheap vodka. It works just fine.

I would certainly recommend getting "The Complete Joy Of Homebrewing" by Charlie Papazian. It will tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about brewing, and a lot of stuff you don't even care to know about.

 

The key to getting a wort is NOT boiling the water... bring 1 gal to 155*F and steep the grains, then sparge them shits with 2 gallons water at 170*F. Then add DME, and bring to a boil while adding hops at specific intervals.

 

I said that wrong, my setup can potentially brew 21 gallons still leaving a 6 gallon bucket as a blowoff catcher, and all that only cost a little more than 250. But brewing good beer is more expensive than buying shit beer, it's more about the quality and the ability to know exactly what that beer went through before you drink it. I guess some people buy massive amounts of grains and yeasts and shit, and can make up recipes, but I'm not there yet.

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eviltrailer: haha good that you remembered; for the "shipping costs" i will likely pay somewhere in the realm of double the price you might expect to pay in Europe or honky sisterland. i havent checked out prices yet, dont really want to. im flat broke right now and ive got to buy a plane ticket home some day and a car when i do get home. seeing the price for setting up homebrewing is only going to piss me off.

 

redeyedanimal; if i can brew a 5 gallon batch (2x24x330mL cases yeah?) for less than 80-100 dollars, i will be saving money. 40 bucks in AUS will get you a carton of piss water, nothing more.

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  • 2 months later...

currently:

finishing off the last of a "Hoppy" Pale Wheat i brewed in feb.. 100% Amarillo hops. citrusy and delicious.

 

in the Secondary:

-Single Hop Pale Ale, all Citra hops, dry hopping on 3 additional ounces, 14 days.

-Imperial Coffee Stout, aging on oak cubes soaked in 40yr old whiskey and maple syrup. been sitting for about 3 months in the secondary.. shooting for 5-6 months in the secondary but sampling here and there.

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finishing my brew

kit from makebeer.net

 

the lager

 

 

mixed everything fine, sterilization this go around wasn't bad, as the PET bottles and the plastic fermenting thing were clean anyways, just required a rinse.

 

 

it's day 22 and the lager has been bottled at day 14 and chilled since then. sampled at day 15, very green apple taste - the yiest produced esters which give off a fruity taste and will go away as the beer ages... tastes like a Hornsby's Apple Cider on day 15, but really tart. day 20 we sampled, my homey loved it, he said it tasted just like cider. i explained that was a bad thing, he didn't care.

 

as a side note, i pissed out my ass the next morning. not sure if i can blame it on premature beer, but the idea won't leave my head.

 

 

it tastes like Fosters... shoulda guessed. can't wait to drink the rest when it's done. success

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  • 2 weeks later...

Figure this is as good a thread as any. Started making bourbon mash on Thursday, laid down about 140L so far. Going for a grain on fermentation, thought some people might be interested.

 

RM7dc.jpg

 

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It's ticking away ferociously on the American Whiskey yeast I threw at her. Really looking forward to stilling it all off. Hoping to get about 30L of raw from each 140L wash run.

 

Yorr!

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Tax murders us in Australia, that's why there is only a handful over here. You can turn around a Whisky in two years, and generally sell for over $100/700mL. Labour input isn't massive, you can run a fairly large setup with two people a week.

 

Not much money in it on my scale. I just have a shit load of fun.

 

70% Corn

20% Rye

10% Mod. Pale Malt

 

Started at 1075 - I wanted a lot higher, but I've never used corn before, so conversion rates are all a new world for me on this stuff.

 

Fermenting on grain should give me a 'sour mash'. Everyone I spoke to is surprised I'm doing it the old school way. Fuck doing it twice, do it once, do it right.

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i thought sour mash was using old mash with live yeast to catalyse the new batch? altough, to be honest, ive heard the term 'fermenting on grain' a fair bit but dont know what it means, if you could educate a brother,,,

 

interesting move starting on a bourbon mash than something like a scotch 100% malted barley mash, seems a bit more difficult to increase the variables,

 

good luck, ill be interested to see how it works out.

 

i guess it also depends on the whisky youre trying to make, bourbons should be decent after 2 years (4 is the legal and normal minimum in the U.S from what i remember) but the aus distillers selling 3-5 year old single and blended malts are wayyy off the mark, half the shit is 5 years away from being a balanced whisky.

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Legally Bourbon doesn't have any specific minimum aging requirements, just that it is aged to some extent in new charred white oak barrels. 4 years is an accepted standard for most distillers. 2 years is the legal min. for Bourbons labeled as "straight" and "blended straight" must be labeled with the age of the youngest whisky in the blend.

 

Whiskynerdoner

 

@ protester, that cider that we talked about was a disaster. It got infected at some point, came out almost totally flat, tasting like soap, dirt, and bruised/rotten apples. I have never had to dump an entire batch before, a few bottles here and there, but not the whole thing. Guess I should just stick to beer.

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You can go all the way down the garden path with 'straight' and 'youngest' etc. label requirements. But you're right, there's no hard and fast law like there is with Whisky.

 

Bummer about your cider.

 

Beer is a bit less temperamental due to the rolling boil process. Generally a soapy flavour will be a result of leaving the beer/cider on primary fermentation too long.

 

For future reference, patience can pay off there, as it is usually literal fatty acids that have come out of solution, but they can be broken down again over time.

 

A 'bad apple' flavour is usually the strong presence of acetaldehyde. This can be two main things, first, if it is a high ABV the ethanol conversion takes a lot longer, if you're up around the 7/7% mark a few months wouldn't be out of the question. Second thing could be the pitching rate of the yeast, if you've gone too low, or your yeast isn't as active as you'd expect, then you will get acetaldyhyde.

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i thought sour mash was using old mash with live yeast to catalyse the new batch? altough, to be honest, ive heard the term 'fermenting on grain' a fair bit but dont know what it means, if you could educate a brother,,,

 

It's sort of one and the same. You can go to different extents though. As you know, when you brew beer you separate the wort using the run-off and sparge system, so what you're boiling is just liquid (and proteins and blah blah, but essentially), with the mash process I've used you have no separation, I simply mash my gelatinised corn/rye/barley for about 90 minutes at 65deg (like I said, I've already gelatinised the corn flake) to get the conversion. The barley is pretty much just there to confirm enzyme activity, as far as I can tell.

 

That entire mash then goes into fermenter, grain and all! It's new to me, but it seems to be working pretty well, ferment is just starting to slow but it appears to be around 9%. Not bad for the input.

 

Sour mash is similar to lambic brewing.

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protester,

 

i just racked into secondary

 

-red.

 

been sitting only one week, temp was probably off on OG, and should have read higher, probably the wort was at 78-80*F when I first read it. After tasting, and as you said, 200g of hops isn't an insignificant amount. Very upfront hops flavor.

 

I assume my OG was actually closer to 1.052, accounting for temperature influence. This reading was at 65*F. But it seems like my fermentation was ridiculously fast this time also.

 

*edit-brewed on the 3rd of may, racked into secondary on the 10th of may.

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How many days did you leave it at your FG for? Sounds like it possibly wasn't actually finished before you went to secondary.

 

So are you going secondary into bottles, or are you going to a full vessel and then force carbonating? Sorry if we've covered this already. My mind, she no work so good.

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It was stabilized for 2 days at 1.005. No more bubbles at all. I just moved it into another carboy, gonna let it sit there for another week i guess.Our place stays at about 75*F, I think that might have something to do with the fast fermentation.

When I bottle I use priming sugar, no co2 setup yet....

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It was stabilized for 2 days at 1.005. No more bubbles at all. I just moved it into another carboy, gonna let it sit there for another week i guess.Our place stays at about 75*F, I think that might have something to do with the fast fermentation.

When I bottle I use priming sugar, no co2 setup yet....

 

Racking after one week is a bit early. I would leave it in the secondary carboy for at least 2 weeks and once bottled, dont open it for at least another 2 weeks. Also, be super careful how much dextros you use, you'll still have a gang of very active yeast and you don't want your beers to explode.

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75 is what, 23c? If you have a way of getting somewhere in the house down to around 17/18C, the US05 will really benefit from having a longer ferment. You will be picking up faults from fermenting that high/quick - I use US05 on most of my beers and now I pitch at 20C and take it straight to a control room at 16C.

 

As an average;

 

8 day ferment, 2 day conditioning - keg/bottle - 10 days warm conditioning, one week cool conditioning - drink/sell!

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