So I've started brewing. I currently have 5 gallons of some generic crappy test lager ready in 2 weeks time.

On that time, I'm gonna celebrate by racking up a *decent* pale ale, should everything be working as intended.

Anyone else ever dabbled in homebrewing care to share experiences, mistakes etc so I can avoid any potential fu­ck up and waste 40 pints of beer.

You gotta call it Toot Beer.

Good luck

This.

And when you're done, pics or it didn't happen.

The quality of the ingredients I used does not warrant my name on this...."beer".

Like I said though, next run I'm gonna have better equipment and decent ingredients. I want to get a decent enough knowledge on the subject first though.

Then I'll make Toot beer. I'll call it

TOOTENKOPF.

As a play on words from Totenkopf - or death's head

I do quite a lot of home brewing. General guidelines I'd give:

Start off as you have using the tinned starter packs. Very quick and easy method. You can always go down the route of making your own worts later on, but it can be a bugger of a process. Also, don't necessarily judge success or failure on the lager.

Are you going to do a secondary in-bottle fermentation for the lager? if not it's going to be - at best - slightly spritzy. Don't expect a fizzy head.

Take the time to properly sterilise and clean the kit, and then make sure you properly remove the steriliser or else it will inhibit your yeasts.

Once you've got a cycle up and running, consider getting a second fermenting barrel to make wines etc in. We've fast approaching elderflower season, and elderflower champagne is lovely, easy, and makes a really awesome gift to keep the friends and relatives happy. Make sure you invest in strong bottles though. I made 50 750mL bottles last year and lost about 1/3 to explosions

Once you're confident it's all happy and working, experiment a bit with your yeasts and sugars. Making darker ales with brown sugars or molasses added can give a brilliant flavour note, as can using craft yeasts.

Which reminds me, I really must clean out the fermenter and get this years batches going

A couple more thoughts.

As long as you understand what the processes behind making beer are doing, and you approach it all logically you can't go too far wrong.

Use a hydrometer at the start and during fermentation, and you'll get a feel for the kind of alcohol levels a specific yeast can work up to. Taste constantly (a sip from a tea spoon is enough) and be aware that until it's ready, it's likely to taste sweet, as it's the sugars that get turned into alcohol.

Be cautious about bottling or racking off too early - if there's still too much fermentation to go on, you'll end up bursting the seals on your bottles and pressure barrels. That gets old (and expensive) fast.

Well what I've done so far is - using the starters kit from youngs and watched a ton of video's on youtube and borrowed some books from library.

I was ultra anal about sterlizing everything - so thats not an issue.

So far I've had it fermenting for about 6 days in a normal plastic 5 gallon bin. On the hyrdometer I got 1030 after 2 days and on the 6th day it was 1000. What I've done now is siphoned everything into a pressure barrel - now to leave it 14 days and it should be ready.

It tastes lagerish enough so far (i probably drank about half a pint of it during siphoning) though its nothing special. It reminds me of stella artois or carlsberg or any of the generic shi­tty lagers - so I think I'm doing alright so far, it tastes like its supposed to. It's not sweet at all by the way.

Now if I'm correct, the yeast eats sugar and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide right? So in order to get a stronger beer, logically you would need more of both but it will take longer to ferment?

Good lord, what haven't you done?

If you up the sugar you up the potential alcohol production. however, you have to be a bit clever about it.

Yeasts are not alcohol tolerant, so although they produce a ton of alcohol, it kills them off eventually (exaclty like sealing a human in an airtight room - eventually we'd kill ourselves with CO2 build up from our own respiration). Different yeasts can tolerate different levels of alcohol, and will also impart different characteristics on the booze.

most lager yeasts will die off at about 6-7%. The risk is that you put too much sugar in, but the yeast dies before it can ferment it all. You then end up with a very sweet beer. On the flip side, if you don't put enough sugar in, or the right amount but let fermentation carry on for ages you ferment all the sugar leaving to a very dry (sometimes to the point of sour) beer or wine.

Your further problem is the CO2 production. once you're in a pressure barrel that CO2 will dissolve into the beer (or wine) to give it its fizz. That's great, but there's two other effects. one is pressure build up - if it gets too high you'll break the seals and lose the lot. The second problem is acidity. Dissolving CO2 in beer creates carbonic acid, which not only gives the beer a sour note, but also will eventually kill off the yeast.

It's basically a big balancing act. If you don't dick around with the instructions too much you should be ok, but all these various pitfalls are sat around if you try modifying the recipe.

Different yeasts are a great thing to play around with - even with the tinned kits. Have a look at the differences between top-fermenting and bottom-fermenting yeasts.

Heheh. i have age and experience on my side

To OP,

Time, when making beer, is generally your friend. If your recipe says let it ferment for a week, go ahead and give it two. Don't be in a rush during any part of this.

Oh, and spend a couple hours there (time well spent) http://www.homebrewtalk.com/

shitfuckballs PINK you beat me to it...

Seriously Xenoc, were you there with the founding fathers when they issued the Declaration of Independence? the extent of your knowledge makes me wonder. o_O

Not only that, you can create quite a mess. I have a few friends that brew beer pretty regularly, and at least two of them have had incidents where they jostled their barrel/bottle near the end and created a beer-splosion..

I've never done the home-brewing thing myself, so I don't know the ins and outs, but one guy supposedly had this happen without realizing it. He coated everything in his closet and then didn't notice until a few days later..

I don't know how that's possible.. but he said it was in the back of his closet.. and I guess it was a big closet..

So my only advice for you toot: Avoid beer-splosions in your home, especially near anything absorbent.

You're welcome.

SCIENCE:

Explosions and Beer.

I'm pretty sure he cosigned on the loan to have the first bible published.

Well, good fiction's a rare thing

But yes - I've done a lot of stuff. What's the point in living if you're not going to take the opportunities you're given

I brewed up some shitty fruit beer once years ago. Pineapples or something. Or maybe it was lemons. It tasted like Mike's Hard Lemonade, only worse.

I got introduced to home-brew wines by my dad. He had a great repertoire. Parsnip, Elderflower, and Elderberry were definitely his best.

He also made a tea wine (literally fermenting the left over tea from the pot - no milk!). It was rancid cold (far too many tannins), but if you warmed it up it was the ultimate hot toddy.

Tea-wine sounds ****­ing foul and fruit beer sounds gay.

TEA? WINE?

I used to love Mike's Hard Lemonade, but I haven't had one in a few years..

Now that you've reminded me, I'll be tempted to buy a six-pack the next time I'm at the store.. but something tells me I wouldn't like it anymore.. maybe I shouldn't risk the good memories?

Just bear in mind Toot, that what we mean by wine is a 10-15% fermentation of something.

Seriously, it's well worth a go, and it's more fun experimenting with wine recipes than beer ones - there's generally a lot more scope for customisation.

homebrew buckfast!

So you were there when cavemen invented fire?

how did you improve on that? did you show them how to BBQ?

ITT: Xenoc invented barbecue.

I am man.