Just started my first homebrew!!!

[Stimw]

I made wine back in the 70's. It was interesting how it all works and how easy it really is.
I did figure out that I didn't like wine and gave most of it away!
Hopefully some day they will figure out how to get wine back into the horse that it came out of!! If you catch my drift.

You will be making REAL beer not the stuff sold in stores!
I drank real beer while spending 19 months in Europe, there is a difference.

 

[RobertN]

Cheap fridge from Walmart... drilled a hole in top for tap. Could hold two Cornies. regular bottles are nice though, especially if you want to take a bottle to friend etc. Although, that is what growlers are for.

I use the water from the wort chiller for cleaning; it is piping hot at first. The water is turned on real low; too much water/flow does not chill the wort faster it just wastes water. I boil in 15gal kegs with top cut out; would take a huge ice bath. When I did stovetop partial gravity boils, I did the ice bath as you mention.

When my wife had knee surgery a few years back, she had one of those coolers. But, the hospital did not let her keep it.

I wish I had five gallon bottles....

But I would need a heck of a beer fridge. Right now I have at least 5-6 beers in bottles. A 5-6 kegerator is too expensive, is too big and would have to go in the dining room which does not make the wifey happy! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

I seem to be constitutionally unable to waste water. The idea of using a wort chiller that uses water to just cool something before going down the drain is something I cannot seem to do. :laughing::laughing::laughing: Unfortunately, we have two of these ice bath dohickeys from the wifey's shoulder surgeries. You fill them with ice and water which is then pumped to a "harness" that fits on the shoulder to distribute cold water.

I have thought about sanitizing some gallon zip lock backs, filling them with water and freezing them so they could both cool down the wort and help get to five gallons but I have not done this yet.

Later,
Dan

 

[dmccarty]

Cheap fridge from Walmart... drilled a hole in top for tap. Could hold two Cornies. regular bottles are nice though, especially if you want to take a bottle to friend etc. Although, that is what growlers are for.

I use the water from the wort chiller for cleaning; it is piping hot at first. The water is turned on real low; too much water/flow does not chill the wort faster it just wastes water. I boil in 15gal kegs with top cut out; would take a huge ice bath. When I did stovetop partial gravity boils, I did the ice bath as you mention.

When my wife had knee surgery a few years back, she had one of those coolers. But, the hospital did not let her keep it.

We do have space for another freezer or fridge in the utility room. The only place we have room is in the dining room. Now I have seen some really NICE looking kegerators that look like furniture but the wifey is not buying it. :confused3::laughing::laughing::laughing: She just does not have her priorities right.

There is a danged if you do, danged if you don't with bottles. Bottles take up lots of room when holding beer and when waiting for new beer. We have storage space, sorta for bottles, but not for a kegerator.

When I designed our house we could only build the house and not the attached garage. I have a couple of different designs for the garage but they all include a big room for a shop. At this point, I would use the shop space to make beer more than I would for wood working projects. :laughing::laughing::laughing: The shop space would be for more useful for a brewery. :thumbsup::laughing::laughing::laughing: It would have space for a kegerator. A BIG kegerator.

A big advantage of bottles is that you can have quite a few different beers in stock. I still have a few of my high alcohol beers that I first made a few years ago. Course, the flip side of those bottles is that I want and don't want to drink them. :confused3: :laughing::laughing::laughing:

There are some really good videos on beer making on YouTube. I watched a few videos from a guy in Canada which helped me greatly. I have always been super paranoid about sanitation and I still am but the Canada guy was brewing in his dinging not so clean basement which gave me the heebee jeebees. :shocked::laughing::laughing::laughing: I figured if he could make beer, so could I. It surely is not Rocket Science.

Later,
Dan

 

[Bird]

Way back about 1966-67, someone told me how to make home brew. I'm not sure he knew himself, but I got a 5 gallon water bottle, drilled a hole through the rubber stopper to insert a plastic tube, sealed with a little candle wax, put yeast, rice, malt, sugar, and water into the water bottle inserted the stopper with the tube run over into a coke bottle of water to let it ferment. I've forgotten the timing, but when the bubbles in the coke bottle slowed to a certain pace, I siphoned off the brew into new glass bottles with screw on lids (I think they actually called them vinegar bottles). It wasn't too bad on ice, but was flat; certainly not much like beer. So I tried again, and the second time I bottled it a bit sooner in hopes that it wouldn't be flat. I put the case of bottled brew in the pantry in the kitchen, and then one night heard a little explosion when a couple of bottles blew up. I haven't tried making my own since.:laughing:

I have a cousin who had some nice grapevines in his backyard, so he tried making a red wine. They had a tall bookcase/divider between the dining room and the living room, and he sat a bottle of that red wine on top of that. When it exploded and got glass and red wine all over the carpet and in his wife's hair, that ended his winemaking, too.

 

[jinman]

Holy Cow! Robert, is that the Shingle Springs brewery in your back yard?:laughing:

 

[RobertN]

Yeppers!

Making kraut and sausage right now for dinner. Homemade kraut, with chicken-apple sausage and a Copper ale.

Holy Cow! Robert, is that the Shingle Springs brewery in your back yard?:laughing:

 

[archerynut]

Here's the update...we have bubbles coming through the airlock!!! I had a moment if panic last night when after two days I hadn't seen any signs that my yeast was working. And then... I moved it to a warmer spot in the house and then the magic started to happen. It's was sitting at a spot that was only 62 degrees, and nothing was happening. I moved it to a spot upstairs that stays warmer and it's much happier at 66 degrees. Going to wait another 4-5 days and put into the secondary fermenter to finish. Can't wait for the first taste.

 

[Chilly807]

I brewed back in the mid-90's for a while.. you can make some good beers if you work at it. I got tired of washing bottles all the time and I was drinking WAY too much!! As I recall it was having a shortage of empty bottles, a batch ready to bottle in a few days and thinking "Dam*.. I'm gonna hafta drink 3 dozen beer over the next couple days.."

Sean

 

[krankieone]

The best tip I can give you is to wash your bottles in the dishwasher with a good dishwaher detergent I can fit 60+ small bottles by far the easyest way to wash & steralize bottles

 

[dmccarty]

Here's the update...we have bubbles coming through the airlock!!! I had a moment if panic last night when after two days I hadn't seen any signs that my yeast was working. And then... I moved it to a warmer spot in the house and then the magic started to happen. It's was sitting at a spot that was only 62 degrees, and nothing was happening. I moved it to a spot upstairs that stays warmer and it's much happier at 66 degrees. Going to wait another 4-5 days and put into the secondary fermenter to finish. Can't wait for the first taste.

There are stick on thermometers you could put on the bucket so you can see the temperature of the fermentation. Did you check the temperature range of your yeast? It should have been on the yeast packet. Keeping the fermentation is the correct temperature range is why I can only brew in the cooler months otherwise the fermentation just gets too hot. I have had some fermentations that have taken a while to start working. When I last brewed, I had brewed two five gallons batches and one was going just fine and the other was just sitting there. I don't think I had to pitch a second yeast packet but I can't remember for sure. BTW, I make sure to keep extra yeast packets on hand in the freezer just in case fermentation does not start.

I don't use a secondary fermenter. I just leave everything in the bucket for 3-4 weeks before bottling. I have not had a problem doing this, it is easier, saves time, and reduces the chance of an infection.

Later,
Dan