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So I got a homebrew starter kit for Christmas and I have a few dumb questions: I picked up the Irish red ale extract kit off northern brewer since it looks popular and tasty. Anyone have any good tips or tricks for making it? I'd love to put a little twist to the recipe if it will enhance the final product without risking me screwing everything up. I'm also probably going to buy one of those cheap 35 dollar 5 gallon kettles this weekend. Is that an okay place to start ffor boiling equipment? Last but not least, would it be worth sinking another 30 dollars intoa glass carboy for secondary fermentation or would it not really be worth it for me right now. Thanks in advance!!
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Jan 16, 2014 23:22
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| # ¿ Apr 17, 2024 00:15 |
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Haha northern brewer sent me an extra packet of hops in my Irish red ale kit, I'll take that as a sign I need to goof around with my first ever home brewing and make this thing kinda hoppy. Even more awesome is that these are called "liberty" hops 
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Jan 21, 2014 00:13
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I think I've busted my inner packet in my Wyeast pouch and thrown it on top of my computer, truly the goon way to activate yeast. Let's hope that sucker expands and I can make my first brew tonight!!!!
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Jan 25, 2014 22:10
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adebisi lives posted:I think I've busted my inner packet in my Wyeast pouch and thrown it on top of my computer, truly the goon way to activate yeast. Let's hope that sucker expands and I can make my first brew tonight!!!! Goddamn this thing blew up like a balloon already, I hope it can hang out for a few more hours so I can feed it some delicious wort.
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Jan 25, 2014 23:09
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On the subject of cleaning used bottles, would it be effective to load them into my dishwasher with some oxyclean or abw? Or does scrubbing every bottle end up being the best solution? On my first batch I bottled half the batch in new bottles to give away and half in commercial bottles I drank and rinsed out a couple times immediately after pouring from. I think a couple of the used bottles did impart a slight taste on my beer or I could be imagining things.
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Mar 5, 2014 13:28
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https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/abs-april-ipa anyone mind checking out my IIPA recipe? I came up with it based on ingredients I got pretty cheap and from reading the recipe from northern brewer's pliny clone which seems to be getting really good user reviews right now.
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May 7, 2014 21:02
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So I'm thinking of moving from extract to all grain BIAB but I'm not sure if trying to boil everything in a 10 gallon kettle on my flat top electric range. I guess getting propane burner would be the best option but that's another 50 dollars I'd have to sink into this hobby on top of a bigger kettle.
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Jun 9, 2014 16:57
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withak posted:So what's the problem. Well I'm trying to save money for a trip right now. Plus brewing outside would probably be a pain in the dick since it's really hot and humid plus I'd worry about bugs and crap flying into the kettle. Hmm maybe doing 6 gallon batches in halves would work best.
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Jun 9, 2014 19:20
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Imaduck posted:Although your kettle is 10 gallons, you're only going to be doing 5 gallon (+ a little for boil-off) batches, right? Is your current kettle 5 gallons? Fill it up to the top with water and see if your kitchen stove can get it to boiling. If that works, you're good to go. A friend of mine can do this on his electric burner just fine. If worst comes to worst, you can still brew a little under volume and top off at the end. This will hurt your efficiency a bit, but you can always compensate with more grain / some sugar additives. I think I'll try boiling 5 gallons of water with my current kettle on my stove to see how that goes. My next beer will be all grain one way or another, cost savings among other reasons. On another note I just bottled my double ipa and the sample taste I took definitely tasted like a warm, uncarbonated double ipa so I'm excited. adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 18:36
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logic; you're screwed.)
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Anyone have a good witbier recipe? I've been looking at a bunch on brewtoad and random recipes on the Internet but I'm not sure what I want to go for. Probably something like blue moon but umm better I guess?
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Aug 4, 2014 21:14
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I'm trying to finalize my brew in a bag witbier recipe and I'm trying to decide if I should go with white wheat or flaked wheat. White wheat would be the easier way to go but I guess unmalted raw wheat is the authentic way to do it. Anyone have any experience making like a 50% flaked wheat beer? It looks like you just have to do some protein rest and hope you don't gently caress it up or something right?
adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Aug 13, 2014 |
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Aug 13, 2014 21:34
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So I cracked open my first bottle of the witbier I made after 3 weeks in the fermenter and 1 week in the bottle and it tastes like I over shot the spices. I think the orange, lemon zest and coriander are fine but maybe the chamomile and ginger root were a little excessive. Is there any chance these flavors will mellow out a little with time?
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Sep 22, 2014 12:46
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Has anyone here made a good two hearted ale clone? I've mainly looked at 3 recipes: the northern brewer dead ringer, some recipe on the home brewing forums that's got a more complicated grain bill and different hop addition times, then a recipe that looks like it was released by Bells with yet another different grain bill and hop addition schedule. So far the one thing I've gleaned from all of this is to use wyeast 1272 or the white labs California V yeast.
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Oct 12, 2014 04:51
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LaserWash posted:It's come to my attention that I need a better way of checking mash temperature. I want something that is digital, possibly hangs on the side of the pot, has a long stem and doesn't involve buying a $100 Thermoworks. Give me some suggestions goon brewers. My first time doing BIAB was frustrating since my temperature readings during the mash process varied wildly depending on how deep in the kettle the probe ended up being. I tried to just stick the end of the probe in the middle of the kettle but it was kinda annoying that the temperature seemed to vary by like 20 degrees from the bottom of the kettle to the top.
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Oct 12, 2014 15:03
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I don't know if anyone saw this but but in funny homebrewing Internet  news northern brewer launched a heady topper clone recipe that's almost a complete copy paste job of a recipe on the homebrew forums:http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/2jfbyk/new_heady_topper_clone_from_nb/ http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/heady-topper-can-you-clone-390082/index262.html The recipe is one of the ones you can tell some serious beer autism went down where people experimented with dozens of batches in collaboration to come up with it. In other news I might try the recipe for my next batch if I think it's not too much of a pain in the dick to get my hands on the hop extract, yeast, and grain. adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Oct 17, 2014 |
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Oct 17, 2014 12:16
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Anyone ever do a biab mash in an oven? I might try it this weekend because I had a hell of a time keeping the temperature at 150 the first time I tried all grain. The main thing seemed to be keeping enough heat from the burher to keep it from cooling off while not using so much heat that it would go back up to like 170. It also seemed like the bottom of the kettle was consistently 15-20 degrees warmer than the top of the kettle despite lots of stirring.
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Nov 14, 2014 20:55
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I'm trying to think of something pretty weird for my next beer and came up with this for an ipa: some kind of belgian yeast with a malt bill of maris otter and lots of rye. Hops would be a few New Zealand ones like green bullet, moteuka and/or nelson sauvin. It sounds pretty unique but I'm also thinking the yeast and the rye or hops might clash too much. My other idea was just a rye ipa with Chinook and some other piny/spicy hops.
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Jan 27, 2015 00:58
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I hate to be that guy but what are the chances my heady topper clone is infected?   I hope it's just me being paranoid because I forgot to add the brown sugar at the end of the boil and dumped it in while the wort was chilling. On the positive side of things the sample tasted okay, hoppy and kinda hot with alcohol. It's been in the fermenter about 13 days.
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Mar 21, 2015 04:09
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McSpergin posted:What yeast did you use in this? I know mine finished fermenting in 8 including dry hop at 1.020. Finished around 1.012. The benefit with this style is that it takes a major infection to taste the infection lol The yeast bay's vermont ale yeast. The starting gravity was around 1080 so the abv should be around 8.1%. Between the amount of hop juice and alcohol in this thing you think it would be inhospitable to any other form of life so eh hopefully it will be fine.
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Mar 21, 2015 12:29
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Scarf posted:After 2 weeks conditioning in the bottles, I decided to do a little A/B test with some London's Pride to see how close I got on this recipe. Of course I'm biased as gently caress, but I'd say it's pretty drat close. The overall flavor profile is strikingly similar. I was worried it was going to be a little too bitter, and maybe it is just a tad, but it's not so much the level of bitterness as it is the taste. So something is just barely off on my late-addition hops. Can you post the recipe? I made an English bitter recently and my only regret was accidentally mashing too low and overdoing it on the bready tasting grains: https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/city-of-blokes-clone
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Apr 20, 2015 15:09
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How crazy does this look for a saison recipe? https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/pacific-jade-saison-1 I'm not sure what yeast I'll want to use so I'm up for suggestions. I mostly want an average gravity saison with pacific jade hops, some rye and Vienna with lots of oats.
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May 8, 2015 16:54
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HatfulOfHollow posted:The Nelson/Pacific Jade IPA I brewed tasted exactly like a mimosa. I didn't get any pepper at all and there was so much orange flavor that I'd be hesitant to use it in something like a saison except as a very late addition or a dry hop. I'd be very interested in knowing how this works out for you. Yea I'm hoping the rye and yeast will give it some spiciness and I'm also considering checking out an indian grocery store to look for some green coriander. I've sampled some saisons recently to try to get an idea of what I like and I really enjoyed ommegang's Hennepin saison. It sounds like that it might as well be a witbier though so I'm not going to try to copy that recipe. I also tried Brooklyn brewery's sorachi ace and 1/2 ale saison and didn't care for them, the 1/2 ale in particular tasted like shirt ginger ale. Edit: my phone autocorrected lovely to shirt but I think I'll let that stay as is.
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May 8, 2015 18:43
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Jo3sh posted:Hm. At least for me, Brewtoad has been down because of capacity issues. Anyone else having issues using it? It's been down for a few days. Their twitter account posted something about summer grilling recipes and got flak from some people and was a replaced with a message about them trying to fix their servers. Does beersmith have a good calculator for BIAB water volumes like brewtoad? That's probably my favorite feature on brewtoad other than the ease of it being on a browser and being free. I do BIAB with a rinse sparge and can't seem to find another calculator to handle that.
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Aug 14, 2015 19:49
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Welp after 10 days fermenting my imperial red ale is only down to 1.037 or thereabouts. I think it may be due to my mash temperature being higher than I wanted, probably 155+ F. When I added the dry hops I gave it a good shaking and drained the water from my bath tub swamp cooler set up. Any other tips? I'm hoping the WLP007 will wake up and get this thing down to below 1.025.
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Aug 27, 2015 04:09
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Jhet posted:Did you pitch it from a starter or just one vial? Also, it's only been ten days, so as you've called it imperial I expect you started with a high OG as well. I find that the higher I start, the longer it takes on those few final points, even with a big starter. It really may just take a bit longer and you just need to drink a beer and forget about it for another week or two. Starting gravity was 1.093, I pitched half of a 3 pint starter into this 3 gallon batch, the other half of the starter went into a zombie dust clone. I already threw in the dry hops hoping I could bottle this in 3 or 4 days but maybe I'll just try to skim out the loose hops and maybe pitch some slurry from my other batch? I guess I'll keep shaking the carboy once a day since I'm worried more about the gravity than a little oxidation.
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Aug 27, 2015 13:39
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Does anyone have any good suggestions for tripel or quad recipes or at least what yeast to use? I plan on brewing 3 gallon batches of a tripel and quad in separate fermenter and making a huge yeast starter to split. I think I may even throw in some oak cubes and mix in some kriek with the quad to really make it crazy. Right now I'm leaning towards the chimay yeast but I might go with something a little more subtle so both beers don't just taste like bubblegum.
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Sep 23, 2015 18:48
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How good or bad of an idea would it be to use a bottling bucket as a primary then use the spigot and some tubing to transfer the beer to another bottling bucket for sugar mixing and bottling? Northern brewer has some new big mouth bubblers with spigots installed for doing this without having to siphon. It sounds like it would be great in theory, depending on how lucky you can get as far as the spigot being above the trub line but not so high up as to lose access to a lot of the beer. I make 3.25 gallon batches these days so I'm wondering if I could pull something like this off by just buying another bottling bucket to ferment in. Siphoning can be pretty annoying, I seem to suck up plenty of trub by accident or not get all the beer out I feel should be.
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Oct 5, 2015 16:23
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Scarf posted:
The sierra nevada in asheville is a great place to visit, on the free guided tour you can try 9 of their beers. As a home brewer you'll also appreciate being able walk into a refrigerated hop room where you can have the rare pleasure of smelling an entire bale of Citra hops. The restaurant and gift store were also great. I think the new belgium east coast brewery is opening in asheville either late this year or early next year too so between the big breweries and the dozen or more smaller breweries in town there is plenty to see. Hell, I want to a local pizza place in a nearby town that I heard makes their own beer and ordered their double IPA. The waitress brings out this cloudy ugly rear end beer that looks like something I would make and sure enough it tasted identical to a heady topper clone I had just bottled a couple months prior. On one hand I was disappointed that the beer I ordered tasted like my own stuff I'd been drinking a bunch of recently, on the other hand I felt like I must have brewed the beer pretty well to match the restaurant's attempt! adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Oct 28, 2015 |
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Oct 28, 2015 19:25
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Brew in a bag is easy, even with a 5 gallon kettle. Just split the batch in 2, brew it twice, combine in your fermenter. I wish I did that from the beginning instead of making shittier beer with extract. Plus going all grain saves money and opens up a ton of options for recipes and process tweaking. I do a biab with sparge rinse which means I can do 3 gallon batches in a 5 gallon kettle by rinsing with 2 or so gallons for the sparging step.
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Nov 2, 2015 21:02
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You're in the right ball park but if anything the process is simpler than that. https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/zombie-dust-39 That is a recent beer I made recently. If you click on the mash/boil calculator and select biab with sparge rinse it will show you what water to start with and rinse with. There is no lautering with biab. I put in the water I need, heat to the strike temperature, add the bag, dump the grain in. The trickiest part I've found is getting the mash temp where I want it and having it maintain that temp for 60 minutes. After that I lift the bag out into a basket strainer that holds it over the kettle where I rinse with water I've heated up. After that you just toss the grain and proceed to boil. Instead of splitting batches I've started making two 3 gallon batches of different recipes and splitting a big yeast starter. I've got a quad and tripel fermenting in seperate buckets right now from doing this. The only equipment I had to buy from doing extract is the bag and another bucket for doing the split batches.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:34
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Drone posted:This seems to be by far the simplest solution to get me to a batch size of 5 gal/20 liters, so I'll give it a shot once all my kit arrives. I'll have 4kg/8.4 lbs of grains, so the first challenge will be to figure out how much water to mash them in without overflowing. If you use brewtoad it can take your kettle size and recipe and tell you exactly how much water to mash with and how much to rinse sparge with. It calculates the numbers so that if you are using a smaller amountil of grain it will tell you to use more mash and less sparge water and for more grain it will call for less mash and more sparge water. So basically if you use brewtoad it will take all the guessing out of your hands and you don't have to worry about overloading your kettle. I can't speak for what beersmith can offer for this situation but it might do something similar. As far as scaling recipes to smaller biab batches the easiest thing is always to pick a 5 or 5.5 gallon batch and just split the ingredients in two for 2.5 or 2.75 gallon batches. If you want to be a 3 or 3.25 gallon batch renegade like me you can either figure out the ingredient amounts yourself or just make brewtoad scale the recipe to a new batch size for you. adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Nov 3, 2015 |
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Nov 3, 2015 15:16
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So I'm trying to think of a good hop combination for my next two beers I plan on brewing side by side. For the ipa I was thinking of going with mosaic, Amarillo, and Pacific jade. For the hoppy amber ale I was going to do cascade, Nelson sauvin, and williamette. Do these combinations sound alright or anyone have any suggestions? I'm going with pretty tame malt bills for both beers so this is my last big hang up before I settle on the recipes.
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Dec 21, 2015 15:52
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rockcity posted:The IPA hop combination sounds pretty good. The willamette in the other combination may be a bit out of place. That's an earthier, spicier hop and the other two are noted for citrus. I see cascade and williamette paired up in a lot of pale ale recipes and my favorite local amber ale has the two along with Chinook. I think it's supposed to be pretty mild and just adds some complexity to more vibrant hops.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:11
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I'm still trying to figure out my hop combination for an ipa I want to brew soon. Right now I'm thinking I will go with amarillo, pacifica, and a third hop. For the third hop I'm thinking of either going floral/citrus like the other two hops are described, or something a little piney just to balance the fruitiness I'll get from the other two. I guess Simcoe is the obvious answer but I'm hoping for something a little more subtle and not dank. Would Dr rudi hops fit the bill? They sound like they might be a little grassy which I don't think I'd like.
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Dec 28, 2015 16:30
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I'm going to be a little contraversial and suggest you start right away with doing all grain brew in a bag. I started off with extract and became much happier with my results once I went all grain. We had another newbie in here not long ago that I think lived in Germany and dove straight into BIAB and I think he ended up doing alright.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:21
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I just wanted to check in and say that my nelson sauvin, cascade, williamette amber ale turned out amazing. The Nelson kinda amplified the citrusy grapefruit taste from the cascade and the earthy/spicy flavor of the williamette is subtle and blends well with the malt. My pacifica, amarillo, Chinook ipa turned out great too!
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Jan 28, 2016 21:28
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So I'm going to brew an ESB and barley wine soon and I can't decide which base malts to use for both. Right now I'm leaning towards optic for the ESB and pearl for the barley wine. I have access to Maris otter too but I like to try less popular ingredients when I can. The ESB is just a straight forward mish mash recipe with wlp 007 that I'll split with the barley wine, which I'm try to make like a big foot style beer with American hops and British yeast and malt.
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Mar 31, 2016 18:48
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For two hearted ale you would probably want to use wyeast 1272 to get closer to bell's house strain. Or if you want to use the actual strain you could try to get your hands on the Midwestern ale from these guys: http://www.theyeastbay.com/brewers-...GHI0gMS1Jkdov0w Us05 and wlp001 are the same strain and neither has the esters you'd pick up from two hearted.
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May 10, 2016 16:56
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I sampled the two beers I brewed 10 days ago when I added dry hops to one and holy cow it's great when you can tell beer is going to be really good once it's done. The first is an old chub inspired wee heavy where I took a clone recipe and replaced the 2 row with golden promise and upped the smoked malt a hair and I can't believe how smooth it tastes already. The Simcoe/nelson/liberty pale ale tastes like straight up pineapple juice which is usually a good sign in a hoppy beer before the dry hops even make it in. I guess the moral of the story is brewing 2 x 3.3 gallon biab batches at the same time and splitting a big yeast starter is way more satisfying than when I was brewing 5.5 gallon batches of mediocre extract beer and the only equipment I had to buy was a second fermenter and a grain bag. adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 22:55 on May 25, 2016 |
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May 25, 2016 21:54
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| # ¿ Apr 17, 2024 00:15 |
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Oops that's not the edit button.
adebisi lives fucked around with this message at 22:55 on May 25, 2016 |
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May 25, 2016 21:57
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