Whats in your carboy?

cyclonewino

Active Member
Apr 11, 2006
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Carboy? I have 10 gal og Cynthiana Port (5 - 10% black raspberry, 5-extended maceration); 5 gal semi sweet Chardonel; 4.5 gal extended maceration Noiret; 4.5 gal Corot noir; 4 gal short maceration Noiret; 3 gal Traminette; and 1 gal of Vignoles. I have bottled 5 of Traminette and 5 semisweet Noiret and 5 semisweet Corot Noir. All of the grapes were homegrown.

I bottled my first beer kit 4 weeks ago, a Northern Brewer Dry Irish Stout.

Legally one adult can make 100 gal of wine per year max. of 200 per household.

Making of wine and beer are surprisingly different. Wine aims to be 12%alchohol and a pH of less than 3.5, just keep equipment clean and really very little risk of spoilage. The biggest problem is sweetening a wine and keeping it stable, a good dose of potassium sorbate usually does the job, although at recommended rates i have had bottle fermentation, finding a sticky wet floor in the middle of the night is not much fun.

If a person is interested in starting use minimum equipment and kits to get a feel for the effort and the results and if you enjoy then expand.

CHEERS!!!
 

jumbopackage

Well-Known Member
Sep 18, 2007
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I was looking at finding a couple of 10 gallon rubbermaid coolers and rigging something from there. I still have to convince my wife to give up some precious space for some beer kit adders. My issue is that once I have the coolers then I need a bigger kettle (I only do partial boils now due to space and $$), a wort cooler, propane burner, etc. It seems to snowball into some expense once you decide to make the jump to all grain. Since I do the whole brewing thing not only for the final product but also because I enjoy it, I think I am ready to make the leap.

I will be brewing an IPA in a couple of weeks (after my wheat gets transfered to the secondary). I am adding 3 oz. of hops during the boil but I also got 2 oz. of mt. hoods (leaf hops). I plan on adding the leaf hops as a dry hop. Do you think that it will be too much? I have not dry hopped anything yet, any suggestions?

The Home Depot has those coolers for around 35 bucks/piece. You can get by with just one of them, but two is really ideal. It lets you do fly sparging if you want, and also lets you heat up your sparge water in the same pot you're boiling in while your mash is mashing. That's what I do personally, since I only have one burner and I don't like having to move the 15 gallon keggle once I get it full of wort (and I don't always have enough room in my "Hot Liquor Pot" to get all the sparge water heated up at once).

Yeah, you'll have to go to a full boil if you want to get to all grain, unless you want to boil two different batches (but that's a lot of extra time). And it's probably best to get a burner too, since it takes along time to heat up 6-7 gallons of wort. The turkey fryer setup works pretty well for a lot of folks. Don't be scared off by aluminum pots either, though stainless is certainly better IMO.

Back in the old days, while batch sparging, people used to make two beers from one mash. The first runnings would be a stronger beer, and the second runnings would be a weaker beer. I guess you could do two 2.5 gallon batches that way. That way you could offer a "light" beer along with your regular one, just like Budweiser :D

Brewing, like everything else, can get very expensive if you let it.

No such thing as too much hops! (that's my mantra anyway). The APA I have in secondary right now has about 5 oz per 5 gallon batch. I only put about .5 oz of that in as a dry hop addition. There are a bunch of small additions near the end of the boil, though, for flavor. 2 oz in secondary as a dry hop sounds great to me! Mt. Hood isn't generally used in pale ales, but I'm sure it would be just fine, and something unique too!

There isn't much to say about dry hopping, really. It's pretty simple. Just make sure the beer is in secondary with the hops for a couple of weeks. Just dump the hops in (or put them in a bag if you want), rack the beer on top of them and let them sit. Some people (myself included) prefer to put them in a hop bag just to keep cleanup to a minimum. If you do that, it's nice to put a couple of sanitized marbles in the bag to keep the hops on the bottom of the bucket/carboy where they can do the most good.
 

Dave19642006

Well-Known Member
Nov 21, 2006
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Des Moines
Yes it's legal! As long as you aren't selling it you are allowed to brew like 60 gallons or some obscure amount a year. Which is stupid because you drink it right after you brew it so you can basically brew as much as you want.

Whew that was close, I was at 59 gallons, and the police wanted a extra gallon for the Chief. Thank god I did not do it.

Cobra-E-2.jpg
 
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jumbopackage

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Sep 18, 2007
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sorry to hijack the thread that is going on but I had a question?

How much does it cost to start brewing your own beer, and is it farily easy? I have wanted to do it for awhile but have no clue where to start.
Thanks for the input (if there is any):wink:

It's not difficult. If you can make chili, you can make beer (and the two go very nicely together!).

If you're interested in getting started, Beer Crazy in Urbandale ({ Beer Crazy  Open for Business! }) is the place to go. Mark there can set you up with everything you'll need, and his prices are as cheap as any web site I've found on most things.

Equipment
If you already have a big pot (preferably one that will hold around 7 gallons, but as long as you can boil ~2-3 gallons you should be fine), you'll probably need about 100-150 bucks worth of equipment aside from the pot including ingredients for your first batch.

That includes:
  • a Couple of Food Grade Buckets (at least one of which has a spigot on it)
  • a lid for one of them (at least)
  • an airlock
  • some sundry tubing and hoses
  • a bottling wand
  • A bottle capper
  • some caps
  • a hydrometer - this allows you to measure how much sugar is in your beer, so you can figure out how much alcohol it is capable of containing, and how much it does contain...not essential, but necessary if you want to know what's going on with your beer
  • a racking cane
  • some sanitizer.

Ingredients
Once you have the equipment, you need some ingredients. For an extract batch that would include:

  • Malt Extract - 6 lbs or so of this stuff. It's the sugar that your yeast will turn into alcohol. Think of it sort of like beer kool-aid :D
  • Hops - Depends totally on the recipe as to how much and when you add it. Anywhere from 1.5-5 oz is typical.
  • Yeast - can be either dry or wet. Sometimes comes in a "smack pack" which you smack and it activates the liquid yeast inside. Dry yeast does better if you re-hydrate it first.

Depending on the beer, ingredients will run 20-50 bucks or so per 5 gallon batch.

BREWING
The process is fairly simple, for extract (which is where you'd likely start).

The Boil
You basically just boil some water, toss in the extract (which is either powder, or this gooey liquid stuff), and add the hops at various times during the boil according to the recipe. Most beers need about an hour boil.

After you're done boiling, you need to cool it down (probably in an ice water bath), and then put it in the fermentation bucket (which needs to have been sanitized with the sanitizing solution beforehand), making sure to filter out with a colander or strainer, as much of the gunk in the pot from the boil (hop leaves/residue etc). If you don' have a pot that can hold the full volume of the boil, you'll need to top the bucket off to your desired volume (probably around 5 gallons or so) with some water (preferably boiled first, but it probably won't hurt not to). In fact, some people just toss a bag or two's worth of ice into the bucket along with the hot wort and just cool it down that way. At any rate, the goal is to get the wort (which is the name for unfinished beer) down to around 70 degrees F or so and do so as quickly as possible. Your beer is most vulnerable to infection at this point, since it's not in a sealed container, and it's not going to be sanitized after this point (since it's already been boiled!).

You'll want to take a reading with your hydrometer here, and make a note of it somewhere. This number will be your "Original Gravity". This number, combined with your "Final Gravity" will tell you how much alcohol is in your beer. The denser the solution at this point, the more sugar there is to convert to alcohol.

A quick note on sanitizing:
Sanitizing
The only thing that is a bit of a pain is keeping everything sanitized that comes in contact with your beer. When your wort is finished, you've created a great place for micro-organisms to live. That's great for your yeast, but it's also great for a bunch of other nasties that can really mess up your beer. That's why sanitizing things is important. Anything that wasn't boiled needs to be sanitized before you let it touch your unfinished beer (boiling kills off anything of danger to your beer). This includes the buckets, any spoons or stirring devices, containers (including bottles), bottlecaps, racking canes, tubing and hoses, etc. I recommend starsan or idophor for this, but there are other options out there as well. I personally keep a 5 gallon home depot bucket full of sanitizer around for this task, but if you don't have the room for that, it's nice to have a spray bottle full of the stuff laying around that you can use to sanitize smaller things.

Primary Fermentation
Now that it's in the bucket (or carboy), stir it up really good to get some air back in it, and toss in the yeast. Seal it up, put the airlock on it, and let it sit for about a week or two. After a couple of days, it will bubble like crazy as the yeast start chewing up the sugar in the wort, and creating alcohol and CO2. When they are done eating the sugar, the bubbling will stop. This can take anywhere from a few days to a week or sometimes more, depending on the beer.

Your hydrometer comes in handy here. Taking a reading after fermentation is over will tell you how much of your sugar has been converted to alcohol. If you take a few readings in a row on consecutive days, and they are all the same, you know that your beer is pretty much done fermenting.

Secondary Fermentation
After that, you can optionally rack it (transfer it - racking is the name for that process) into another sanitized bucket for a secondary fermentation (which is basically just clarifying the beer - I'd recommend this, but it isn't strictly necessary), wait another week or so, and then bottle it.

Bottling
Take one last reading with your hydrometer here, and you'll know your final gravity. You can compare this with the OG to determine your alcohol by volume.

When you bottle it, you will add a little bit of "bottling sugar" which will give the residual yeast something to eat in the bottle. This will produce CO2, which will naturally carbonate your beer. This process takes about 10 days minimum, but 2 weeks is probably a better bet.



That's it! It sounds way more complicated than it is now that I've typed that out. Once you get a batch under your belt, it's pretty easy, really.

As you go along, you will probably want to do at least what's known as "partial mash" brewing, which is essentially like making coffee or tea with some hot (150-160 degree) water and some specialty grain in a steeping bag before you start the boil. This allows you to adjust the malt flavors and create much more flavorful and interesting beers. This is where a LOT of people find the sweet spot in brewing. You don't need much equipment to do it (you can do it with the same stuff you do all-extract with), and the beer can turn out just as good as all-grain, without as much of the hassle and the extra equipment (and time!) that all-grain demands.

"All-Grain" brewing is basically just creating all the wort from nothing but malted grain, instead of using extract. Extract is sort of a "shortcut" that someone else has done for you, converting the complex sugars that yeast can't eat in the malt into simple sugars that yeast can eat easily, and then extracting that from the grain, drying (or condensing) it and packaging it.

When you "partial mash", you are doing part of this with just the specialty grains that give the beer flavor and character, but letting someone else do that for the "base" grain, which makes up the bulk of the grain bill, but contributes the least amount to the end character of the beer.

The specialty grains make a stout a stout and a pale ale a pale ale. The base malt for either of them might be exactly the same, but a lot of roasted barely, and chocolate malt might go into a stout, while some caramel 20 and maybe some carapils might go into a pale ale.
 

cyclonewino

Active Member
Apr 11, 2006
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My wife was watching the Food channel friday and the next show was Good Eats and it was on homebrew, in this episode he used 4.25 gal of spring water and 7#'s of ice and boiled a concentrate batch added the rest of the spring water and then added the ice directly to the brew instantly dropping the temperature to 87 degrees. This is the method I attempted on my first batch (Iused too much ice and chilled to the 30's), anyone else do this? If not, why not?
 

Cyfan322

Member
Mar 31, 2006
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Ames
I've got a hoppy Red Ale, hoppy Blonde (Summer) Ale, and a German Alt Beer all in carboys. I like hops.

I also have a bunch of cases of bottles in the basement. PM me if anyone would like to trade homebrews or even just sample homebrew.
 

jumbopackage

Well-Known Member
Sep 18, 2007
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My wife was watching the Food channel friday and the next show was Good Eats and it was on homebrew, in this episode he used 4.25 gal of spring water and 7#'s of ice and boiled a concentrate batch added the rest of the spring water and then added the ice directly to the brew instantly dropping the temperature to 87 degrees. This is the method I attempted on my first batch (Iused too much ice and chilled to the 30's), anyone else do this? If not, why not?
The one major downside to this method is that you don't know if the ice is really sanitized, and might have a bunch of pathogens in it. It's certainly an option, and I know a couple of folks that do this (or at least used to). In the long run, I think you're safer with an ice bath or, preferably, a chiller of some sort, but if you're doing a partial boil, and not sanitizing the additional water, you're probably no worse off if you just dump ice in the wort.

WTF is a carboy? Is that like "go to the car boy and me my smokes?"

You know the big water cooler bottles? Those are carboys.
 

AmesCloneFan

Member
Aug 17, 2008
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Just finished an Irish stout from a kit (not loving it yet, maybe a few more weeks of aging will improve it.) Going in next is a Continental Pilsner. I think after that I'll try my hand at an IPA...
 

GoCy

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Apr 11, 2006
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Right now, I have an Itallian Pinot Grigio finishing up - should be ready to bottle in about 4 weeks. Next, I think it's time to brew a batch of Bock beer. I've been on a wine-making kick for the last year, and haven't done any batches of beer in awhile.
 

smcdowell

New Member
Aug 25, 2008
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Raleigh, NC
I think this thread lost some direction for a while, then died. Let's revive it!

Keg 1: 1/2 full of chocolate dunkel
Keg 2: Just kegged a summer pale ale
Carboy: honey golden ale
 

jumbopackage

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Sep 18, 2007
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Keg 1&2: Bells 2 Hearted clone
Keg 3: nearly empty keg of ESB
Carboy: Currently empty :( Haven't had time to brew lately :(
 

jbell71464

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What a great thread! Didnt realize there were that many homebrewers on here!
Right now I have a great Dry Irish Stout on my nitro tap, and a Pliny the Elder Clone DIPA on as well. I have a Belgian Dubbel conditioning in a carboy. Coming up next will be a Munich Helles, an Oberon clone and an English Bitter.

I have to agree with others that if you are getting started, get a kit online from either northernbrewer.com or midwestsupplies.com They make their own kits fresh and both have excellent service and support. I also bought most of my equipment from them as well as morebeer.com

If you are just learning, either buy How to Brew by John Palmer or go to howtobrew.com. By far the best book to get you going.

If you are all grain, look into Mid Country Malt. Great deals on 55# sacks.
 

CO4Cy

Member
Nov 19, 2008
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Lafayette, CO
Heres a question for you. I am making a dry hopped IPA (5 gallons). I was thinking about using 2 oz of mt. hoods in the secondary. Is this too much or just right for a good dry hop?
 

jumbopackage

Well-Known Member
Sep 18, 2007
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What a great thread! Didnt realize there were that many homebrewers on here!
Right now I have a great Dry Irish Stout on my nitro tap, and a Pliny the Elder Clone DIPA on as well. I have a Belgian Dubbel conditioning in a carboy. Coming up next will be a Munich Helles, an Oberon clone and an English Bitter.

I have to agree with others that if you are getting started, get a kit online from either northernbrewer.com or midwestsupplies.com They make their own kits fresh and both have excellent service and support. I also bought most of my equipment from them as well as morebeer.com

If you are just learning, either buy How to Brew by John Palmer or go to howtobrew.com. By far the best book to get you going.

If you are all grain, look into Mid Country Malt. Great deals on 55# sacks.

I'll say it again (I've been saying it a lot!) Beercrazy in Urbandale has essentially the same prices as midwest, and it's a local guy (I see you're in Chicago, so it's a bit different in that case!). I know that he actually goes through the midwest catalog and matches their prices as much as he possibly can, and from my experience it's really about the same, even considering tax.

Heres a question for you. I am making a dry hopped IPA (5 gallons). I was thinking about using 2 oz of mt. hoods in the secondary. Is this too much or just right for a good dry hop?

2oz is a lot for dry hopping, IMO, but I also believe there can never be too many hops in a beer, so go for it! Mt. Hoods aren't a very strong AA hop, so it's not like you're dumping 2oz of Warrior in there or anything.
 

smcdowell

New Member
Aug 25, 2008
23
2
3
Raleigh, NC
Heres a question for you. I am making a dry hopped IPA (5 gallons). I was thinking about using 2 oz of mt. hoods in the secondary. Is this too much or just right for a good dry hop?

I've only dry hopped a couple of times, but each time I used one ounce of Cascade, and that seemed to work well for me. The AA of the hop shouldn't matter, as you aren't boiling them.

Of course, my choice to do one ounce was based on economics. I bought a two-ounce packet of leaf hops and wanted to make it last across two batches. I also wasn't making IPAs. They were more in the Pale/Amber Ale categories.

Did I do a good enough job of not really answering your question? :smile: