I'd like to try homebrewing, and I've read a great deal about the process, but I will have more time than money (I'm about to graduate from college). It seems like most people buy a lot of equipment and then start with 5-gallon extract kits. The reasoning behind this seems to be that extract kits are easier and take less time to brew (and have fewer opportunities to make mistakes), and most recipes are calibrated for 5-gallon batches. However, I've …
I accidentally used 6kg's of grains (Simpson's Ale base malt & Caraaroma) for a 10 liter brew, 10grams of Mangrove Jacks Empire Ale Yeast and 75grams of Hops (Columbus,Centennial and Yellow submarine). I am in day 3 of a 14 day fermentation process after which I plan to bottle and store for at least 2months. What will the implications be for using excessive grains?
After getting started with a few kits, I'd like to start experimenting a little bit. I'd like to start off with 1-gallon batches on anything I'm not sure about, though. I have a growler that I'm considering trying to fit an airlock into, and I've also seen some people mention using the 2-gallon fermenter from the Mr. Beer kit for small batches. Are there any other good options? EDIT: You can buy the fermenter that comes with the Mr. Beer …
I'm making the move from brewing all-grain kits to a "full fledged" recipe Weizen. However, I'm having trouble with some of the details: namely quantities and sparging. Some background: I've been doing small batches (4L) with fermentation on a demijohn. Only done 2 weiss so far. For those 4L, the instructions I had ask for 3L of mash water and 4L for sparging (which I do by slowly pouring the water over the sieved grain). I've found the following 5 …
From what I've read, it seems that the old technique of adding a given amount of sugar to each bottle for priming isn't recommended anymore. Instead, just about every source recommends boiling priming sugars in water and adding the cooled solution to the wort before bottling. Why is this? It seems to me that by adding sugar to individual bottles, I don't have to worry about uneven carb levels from a non-uniform mixture of my priming solution. Reasons I've thought …
I'll be brewing a small (1.5 gal) batch of beer soon, and in my quest for laziness efficiency, I was thinking of brewing in a smaller pot, rather than in my 7-gallon monstrosity. However, my immersion chiller doesn't fit inside the small pot. Would I be able to get sufficient chilling with an ice bath? I'll be trying a more hop-forward brew, and I'd still like to retain as much aromatics as I can, so I'd like to cool it …
To elaborate, the recipe I have was for 20 litre batch at OG 1046. I used my 12 litre (safely boilable) pot to mash the 4.3 kg grain bill specified for a 20 litre batch. My problem was that I only ended up with 12 litres of wort at 1044 in my FV after liquoring back. Despite keeping the amount of grain the same I didn’t end up with wort concentrated enough to get near my 20 litres target. Was …
Brand new to home-brewing. Currently making 1 gal small batches. I see a lot of recipes that call for either corn sugar or cane sugar, with honey as another alternative. How does corn sugar affect the beer vs cane sugar?
I just saw a YouTube video where since guy puts the mashing tun - a pot in this case - in the oven to help with heat loss. I believe he didn't heat it, but world heating the oven to around mash temperature would help? Is this a common technique for small batch brewing?
I was recently given a 5L oak barrel from Oak Barrels Ltd. and I've never used such a thing before and have some basic questions. The barrel came with a great little instruction guide which talks about basic barrel prep, sanitation, and storage (among other things). Also on their website they link to this article by Terry Terfinko from 1995 titled, Oak Barrel Experiment, which answers a lot of questions about beer making with barrels. However there are a few …
When it was (potentially) too late I've noticed that I've used the 4L of water for mashing that I should've used for sparging - which was instead 3L. Could this be a problem? The end amount is the same. I've also noticed that the mashing temperature was very stable (probably due to higher water volume).
it's my first post in here. I've just done my first batch of weissbier (or any other). It turned out quite alright so I'd like to repeat it to check I wasn't lucky. However, since it was from a kit I'd like to buy the ingredients in bulk from elsewhere rather than buying their £10 ingredients-only kit. The following link is the ingredients kit: brewcraftbeer I was looking for some help on the (some) type of crushed grain I can …
I am working on a small batch, 1 gallon of Pale Ale. It came in a kit and the yeast was not labeled so I am not sure what kind it is. This is only the third batch I have brewed. On my first two batches I saw a lot of activity by the second day and things died down by day seven, I racked to secondary (these were 5 gallon batches) on the 7th or 8th day. What I …
I was wondering if, for the sake of testing, it was a good idea to do very small batches of beer. I almost always see batches of 5, 6 gallons. I would like to make tests, and I don't want them to take 46 bottles of 500ml! :) I wanted to know what are the possible bad things about brewing small quantities of beer. And by small I mean down to 1 gallon. I read once that bigger batches are …
Obviously it is better to immediately boil the wort when it is freshest, giving any wild yeist or bacteria as little time as possible to grow and contaminate the product. It is also a well established practice to mash all of a recipe's different grains together simultaneously. These practices work wonderfully when brewing a single recipe at a time. I am knocking around the idea of brewing multiple, smaller (2-3 gallon) batches simultaneously to allow more experimentation in my recipes. …
I normally make 5 gallon wine kits. I purchase a 1 gallon kit and I have 6 gallon fermentor. Will this hurt the wine using the same fermentor? Do I need to get smaller fermentor for small batches?
I do small batch brewing (3.5l-4l) and using hydrometer is a big pain for them, as I need to take very big amount of beer out to test it. I've learned to do OG readings with refractometer, but I get very wrong results when I do FG reading (after applying refractometer formula). Refractometer is very well calibrated (checking it before every measurement), but I get results like 3.1% brix, which yields very low FG results, like 1.001. That sounds unfeasible …
So I am attempting to make my own hard cider. At my school, there is a farmers market every Thursday and at this market they sell flash pasteurized cider; the process is stopped partway through so it is clean to drink but can still ferment. Anyways I have tried (with success at about a gallon per batch) to create hard cider simply by pouring the cider into bottles, stopping the bottles with cotton balls, and leaving them in a dark …