Home brew
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Relevant awesome news from Fort Collins today: http://www.coloradoan.com/article/2...nveils-plans-open-brewery-Lory-Student-Center
Found the "cider" recipe on HBT.
EdWort's Apfelwein - Home Brew Forums
Where are people getting the 6+ month timeline? His recipe says 6 weeks.
I definitely want to give this a try.
EdWort's Apfelwein - Home Brew Forums
Where are people getting the 6+ month timeline? His recipe says 6 weeks.
I definitely want to give this a try.
EdWort's Apfelwein is super easy, and delicious. You can't hardly go wrong with that recipe, but I ended up using half corn sugar and half brown sugar at the same total ratio. If I did it again (and I will soon), I would probably go all brown sugar. It seems to leave a residual sweetness to the cider that I found to be missing from batches made with pure corn sugar, with no back-sweetening. I also used champagne yeast...don't know if it made a huge difference or not, but it operates in a higher alcohol environment. Leave it in the carboy for 3 weeks...bottle it with a little bit of bottling sugar like you would a normal bottle-conditioned beer batch. Bam.
edit: I mistyped when I originally said "months". It only needs to be in the carboy for 3 weeks.
edit: I mistyped when I originally said "months". It only needs to be in the carboy for 3 weeks.
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I just started a batch a cider and it took about 24 hours for the airlock to have big bubbles.
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Since my hombrewing is becoming well-known among my friends, I have started to make custom beers for their weddings. I will make a 5-gal batch of their favorite "style" of beer, or something they want me to create. I'll serve 1 case (24 beers) at their wedding (if allowed), give 12 to bride/groom, and keep the rest for my own "research". Everyone seems pretty happy. I've done a chocolate blackberry porter, and a really big tripel.
The last one I did, I used BottleMark for custom bottlecaps as well, made to look like their wedding invitations. Won over the bride and her family with that detail. BottleMark did a great job, highly recommend.
That's pretty cool. I actually did two 5 gallon kegs for my buddy's wedding in upstate NY, (we all lived in NYC at the time). I was pretty new to the brewing at that time, probably less than a year in. Just did extract batches of NB's black ipa (a good recipe btw) and a surly furious clone (at the time it was calle shirley furious or something). Kicked both kegs pretty easily, and knocked a lot of people unfamiliar with craft beer on their butts... Those higher abvs get up on top of you.
My next beer is going to be an attempt to clone Brooklyn BLAST! It's a crazy hoppy double ipa, but there are no known clones out there right now that I can find. I'm not sure how they do it, but Brooklyn Brewery manages to get that bad boy up to 9% abv with an OG of 1078. I can't for the life of me get the supposed yeast (wyeast 1098) they use to attenuate to that abv in the hopville software, even when maxing out the expected attenuation. I'm wondering if they aren't getting mashing for a 1078 and then adding corn sugar to bring the abv up to the 9%.\
Meanwhile my conical has taken a backseat to my keezer project (4 perlick 525ss and a stout faucet. Using a gas blender I found cheap on ebay to mix nitrogen and co2). Looking forward to double ipas on nitro... Supposedly the blender will pay for itself pretty quickly with nitrogen refills versus beergas refills.
Looks like it'll be next year or birthday (late fall) before I can justify the conical. I would really like to throw my "house" beer into a 10 gallon fermenter to make it easier to do, but carboys aren't really that much work, and I kind of like being able to see what is going on inside. The one other added benefit is being able to split the batch and either dry hop it differently, or try two different yeasts on the same wort. Fun to compare them side by side and you learn a lot.
Btw, my apfelwein is still bubbling like crazy almost 3 weeks in. Jarrods79, I'll let you know someday about the all brown sugar versus the half brown sugar since I've got both going now.
I'm about to start brewing after a new buddy showed me his set up. Going to buy my equipment soon, not sure if i want to get it online or BeerCrazy. Anyone know if BeerCrazy has the individual ingredients to build your own recipes, not just the kits? My buddy made a delicious Hefeweizen that he let me try, and I'd be happy if that's all i ever brew, it was great.
Any suggestions on getting started?
Any suggestions on getting started?
Newbie question: I've brewed 4 or 5 different extract kits. All were good, not great. Still had just a hint of that homebrew taste. I've read that going to full boils can really help get rid of that. True?
I'd like to do a test to try an extract version of a recipe against a full mash version. The nice thing about extracts are they are much, much quicker to do, with half or a third less set-up/clean-up. Also, your calcs are pretty accurate as you know what you're putting in 'sugar' wise, versus the variation you can get when mashing.
So that being said, I'd say it's perfectly possible to get a better beer out of extract than out of a mash. Mashing introduces a whole bunch of new variables that need to be mastered, meaning there are a lot more places to screw up. Mash temp to hot, screwed. Mash temp to low, screwed. Low end of the appropriate temp range, a drier beer, high end, a maltier beer as it's less fermentable. Water PH issues, etc. Anyone can interject if I'm messing this up, but the gist of the story is that one isn't necessarily better than the other but all grain is a heck of a lot more work.
That all being said, a lot of people say that all grain batches tend to be fresher tasting... Even partial mashes are supposed to make a difference, but I personally haven't seen it that much. Some of my favorite recipes have been extract recipes from northern brewer or midwest supplies. Most of those had steeped specialty grains with them, which may have made a difference.
Curious about the "homebrew" taste you mention... Typically for me that means it tastes good, though likely hoppy since a good majority of homebrewers seem to be hopheads...
Hard to explain in words but the finish is just a little "different"...like a very, very faint plastic taste. Again, the beer is still good just not to the point where I'd call it great. Maybe I've been drinking commercial beer to long and this is just how homebrew tastes different.
I guess my question is: will the beer be any different or "better" for a partial boil vs. full boil for an extract kit?
bklyn hit it pretty close above. Mainly, IMHO, the biggest variable is process control and sanitation. If you can make the same beer over and over using the same inputs and get the same beer out every time, you might get some better results with partial boil/mash brewing.
Like everything homebrew, the best thing is darn near anything is worth it, depending on how much you want to put into it, how important it is to you.
Just take the grain bill in to Beer Crazy and they will mill it for you and bag it up.
Im on board with your "homebrew" taste although I dont think the fact that its homebrew is whats causing the taste.
Im relatively new to homebrewing as well but I have brewed multiple batches. 2 of them were "kits" from Beercrazy. The kind of kits that pretty much everything from hops to yeast are already packaged. These are very handy, you know you have everything that you need. But I think the "kits" are the problem.
My hypothesis is that if you pay attention while buying the kit you will notice Bcrazy has a lot of kits on hand. How fast do they got through those? I mean how fresh can some of those be?
The two batches that I made from "kits" of pre-packaged stuff have had a distinct "off-flavor" and have been the only two that I didnt like.
If you want to do extract/PM batches just buy the ingredients separate and skip the kits. Makes me feel like I get "fresher" ingredients, could be completely off but this is my theory going forward.
Very good point on the kits. Although I've bought 3 of the 4 kits from Northern Brewer. I'd imagine those are fairly fresh. My 4th brew (a nut brown) has been sitting in bottles for about a month and should be getting very close so we'll see how that tastes.
I think the "homebrew taste" is just temp control, bottle aging, and potentially infection. There is a difference in scale and equipment between breweries and homebrewers. When I homebrew, I throw the wort in a fermentor, set it in the corner, and do what I can to keep it "cool". Breweries have jacketed fermentors that keep the wort to within about 1 or 2 degrees of the desired brewing temperature. They also have the ability to cold filter the beer, and age it in walk-in coolers. Most homebrewers don't have that option.
Also, if you bottle your homebrew and don't keg it, bottle-aging of beer will also impart a different flavor.
One last thing that can affect beer taste is infection, so keep everything as clean as possible, and disinfect everything.
