Hillbilly mead My best bud has been home brewing for about a year now and Ive wanted to contribute to the cause..............looked into growing hops but decided against it ( I am WAY too lazy). So I did a little research and have entered into the world of mead. Just a couple of really simple recipes to get started but it looks like the ride is gonna be a fun one !! Found this HERE
I have been homebrewing for about 15 years now. I love it and have a great time while brewing. My wife is my bottling assistant my Father-in-law is my assistant drinker. One thing I would say is it is not so much Sterilisation but more Sanitization. Keep your stuff clean but don't go insane with it. Read the book by Charlie Papazian and "relax, don't worry, have a homebrew!"
Hey Rodd ! Too early to tell............we sampled some of a batch that was 2 months old and it was HARSH ! Gonna give it some more time and see what its like in another month or 2. I hear after 6 months the stuff really starts to shine. Ill update later !! :eatdrink047
Nice Kegerator! Nothing like pulling a draft of your own........ now i'm getting thirsty........ hey, it is after five
I bought the gear for homebrewing a couple months ago and bottled my first batch last week. The ingredients for my second batch are on the way. So I'd like to resurrect this thread to see if there's anyone else on here interested in discussing recipes and technique. Any takers? (Rodd? Anybody?)
I am doing extract/mini-mash right now. Full boils over turkey fryers, mostly 5 gallon, but I did a 10 gallon batch with a friend about a week ago. I have been trying different stuff out, trying to find what I like and don't like, and trying to learn more about tasting, and figuring out what to do to enhance a recipe. I have been getting kits mostly from austinhomebrew, but I got a kit locally, and put together a blonde recipe based on some recipes I saw online, and did a hard cider recipe. Pretty enjoyable. How have you been brewing?
I'm doing extract. I'm at the very beginning of my home brewing adventures and I'm having all kinds of fun. Kinda like when I got my first DE. Anyway, I'm waiting for the ingredients to my second brew to come in from Austinhomebrew. It's a recipe I made up all by myself and I'm really looking forward to trying it out. Here's the details: 6 lbs. pale LME 1 lb. dark DME 8 oz. roasted barley 8 oz. coffee malt 8 oz. crystal 40L 2 oz. black patent 2 oz. carapils 2 oz. Kent Golding (not sure when I'm going to add these. I'm leaning towards all at once at the start of boil.) 1 package alcohol boost. OG should come in somewhere between 1.055 and 1.065. It's definitely a stout, but who knows if it'll be any good? I'm currently waiting on my first batch to finish bottle conditioning. The waiting is killing me.
My father in-law and I have done a few batches. He's done several over the years. I'm still a total noob at it. We've done a few kits and a few extensive cooks with good success. We just bottled a dark beer batch last week. Hopefully it will turn out. I did a brown ale on my own a couple years ago that tasted pretty funky. I thought I screwed it up until I had an English Brown Ale at a restaurant and found that it tasted almost identical to the one I made. ::
so I tried a bottle from my first batch last night and it was horrible. it's still very green- needs to condition for at least another week, probably two. But your story about the brown ale got me thinking that maybe my expectations were wrong. I bought an amber beer- doesn't say if it's ale or lager- but the scent, taste, and consistency are all on target for my beer. Tone my first batch down a bunch of notches and my brew would be this beer. And I don't like it. That's not as bad as it sounds. The beer will still be drinkable. I just won't buy the kit again.
We struggle with patience too. It is so hard to let the beer mellow out for a few weeks. More important for the darker ones which we generally make. We are probably going to sample one this weekend just shy of 2 weeks. Can't resist.:eatdrink004
Sounds good! Glad you are having fun with it. Time really does make a difference in a lot of the beers. It is strange, beer I drank previously was best fresh, this stuff just seems to get better and better the longer it sits. Enjoy!
Well we cracked one open last night after just 9 days in the bottle. Not very good but it should be nice in another week or 2. Patience is so hard sometimes.
I keep thinking of this story as my first batch continues to age. It doesn't taste bad anymore, but I still don't like it. I think it's a style of beer I just don't like. Anyway, I'm looking at stepping up to partial mash brewing. I cannot afford all grain, in time as well as money. But I like the idea of reducing my malt extract usage- or, to be more accurate- supplementing my malt extract usage. I like big beers and I cannot lie. And buying more than 6lbs of malt extract gets really expensive. Anybody (ahem, Rodd?) do all grain? I wanna describe the partial mash system I've thought up and see if it sounds reasonable.
I have a grain mill in the mail now, so I am hoping to do all grain for some of my batches soon, but I haven't done it yet. I have been doing partial mashes/mini mashes, but so far it has just been grain in a bag in my boil pot. I would like to build a cooler mash tun, but I am going to start off with a brew in a bag and see how that goes. Have you seen the web show brewingtv? I really enjoy it, and get a lot of good information from it. brewingtv.com I am currently fermenting an open top Hefe-weisen, it's my first open top ferment, smelled great! This weekend I am going to ferment a Belgian White. I have really been enjoying the Belgians.
Just a little update here since I have seen several other people talking about brewing in the beer thread. I did a all grain brew in a bag a couple weeks ago. A dry stout. I actually got pretty good efficiency. It is not ready to keg yet, but the recent gravity sample was promising. I also got a 10 gallon Gatorade cooler, and converted that to a mash tun, so it looks like I am now an all grain brewer, although I haven't had a chance to try out the tun yet.
First batch ever started yesterday. I stood there today for a good few minutes watching all the CO2 bubble out of the fermenter vent. a couple of weeks and I'll have a Kolsh here. I feel like an expectant father, counting down the due date. C. S. Budzi
there's a bit of a parallel there, but... if you start singing to your homebrew, buying it cute little presents, and showing wallet sized pictures to your coworkers you've probably gone a bit far. +1. Indeed.
I love Belguims and Whites/Wheats. I love to hear some of you recipes. My first batch was a kit, but I want to stray away from that. I'd like try from scratch. Maybe my 3rd or 4th batch I'd like to try all grain. I'd really love to try and make a triple Belgium but I feel like I'm a long ways off from doing something that complex. Haha! I told my friend the same thing about being like an expectant father. To which he replied "Well just be happy even if your beer turns out to be be gay or retarded" Sorry if that offends but my friends has a crass sense of humor. C.S. Budzi
