Posted on 12/05/2008 9:10:10 AM PST by djf
OK.
I have a bunch of empty Grolsch bottles and have been thinking about doing some moon shining of sorts.
Any Freepers ever home-brew? Beer? Hard cider?
Curious about experiences and recommendations, and since Freepers are the smartest people in the world, figured it needed a thread!
I bought a gallon of cider about 3 weeks ago. Drank most of it, but at one point, I left it on my counter overnight.
When I opened it, it burped at me, and that was what got me thinking about it.
As a yute working on a farm in upstate NY, the farmer I worked for always had a couple 55 gallon drums in the basement of the barn.
Start throwing bales of damp hay and that cider would go through you like water! Yum!
Uh-huh!
STAY SAFE,. and STAY OUT OF TROUBLE.
Get your information from the horse's mouth (or other body part).
Bustard's executive summary:
You may brew up to 100 gal of beer per year (200 gal if more than one adult in your household) without registering and paying tax.
You may ferment up to 100 gal of wine per year (200 gal if more than one adult in your household) without registering and paying tax.
You MAY NOT distill alcohol for beverage use in ANY quantity, without registering and paying tax.
I stand corrected, I thought it was legal to distill nominal amounts for personal use only.
so much for my new hobby...:(
-Start with malt extracts and supplement with whole malt.
-Keep a log of all important info. Temperature, specific gravities, cooking times, brand of yeast (there are many, I recommend a liquid yeast from Wyeast), fermentation dates, taste your product after primary fermentation before bottling and record results, repeat after secondary fermentation.
-For easy cleanup get a crab cooker and cook outside or in the garage. This hobby is messy and sticky and will make your kitchen a disaster area.
-Start with five gallon batches and decide if this hobby is something you are going to stick with.
-If you decide that you want to get serious and do whole grain mashing, get an empty keg and have a metal shop cut the top out. This makes a great cooker that can do larger batches. Put a valve on the bottom to drain the wort through a wort chiller. Also make a wort straighter for the bottom of the pot. This is the ultimate home brew set up.
-Hops, hops, hops! Most recipes never call for enough hops. Be generous.
Good news is that home-brewed beer tastes better and is often stronger than the fizzy, wimpy, skunky, yellow swill that Budmillercoors produce. I like brown ales; easy to brew and easier to drink. You'll find that most kits and published recipes presume brewing in 5-gal batches. That's a lot of hooch. I do about 4 batches a year.
is there a home brew ping list? if so, please add me to it. I don’t brew now, but used to and plan to do so in the future.
“Do not ~ever~ make or drink banana wine.”
That’s funny! We make fruit wines (mostly apple, cherry, plum, pear & blackberry - the fruit we have on our property). One year for the fun of it I decided to launch a batch of banana wine. The recipe I used called for dry banana chips. It smelled like very sour milk in the primary fermenter & I was sure I was going to have to throw it out. But I decided to see where it went & as time went on the sour milk smell tapered off. It was gone when we finally bottled it & after two years in the bottle was a fairly pleasant wine. It didn’t taste like banana, but it wasn’t bad.
Well, I drink Grolsch (and actually like it best only slightly below room temp), which alot of folks can’t tolerate, so even if I make a mistake, I can probably still stomach it!
correction - beer develops carbonation during conditioning (add 1/2 cup corn sugar, boiled in 2 cups water and cooled, to 5 gallons of fermented beer).
Bottling beer that is still fermenting WILL result in exploding beer bottles!
5 gallons (about 2 cases) is the standard beer-brewing batch and recipes (as well as equipment) are pretty well standardized to that quantity.
Besides, that gives you enough beer to drink while the next batch is fermenting and conditioning...
Dad used fresh bananas and I don’t know what went “wrong” but that stuff slid down your throat like the sweetest, most innocent honey....and then you slid to the ground, laid flat out.
It was cruelly delicious and brutally powerful.
It probably would’ve made great race car fuel or paint stripper, though...:)
[my dad basically tried to make wine out of *anything* he could pulverize and stuff into a demi-john....wow...those were some *dangerous* years]....LOL
“... priming the yeast...”
I’ve had excellent success with both dry-pitching and priming yeast. Dry-pitching takes less time and there’s less worry about having a contaminated priming container.
1 pack of Safale S-04 almost always generates a sufficient amount of kreuzen so as to overflow the capacity of a 6.5-gallon plastic fermenter bucket, so I’ve been just covering the waterlock hole with a clean paper towel. All to good effect...
“What is a water seal?”
A device (aka “water lock”) that allows the CO2 developed in fermenting to escape, while keeping fresh air (and its contents) out of a closed fermenter.
Also a device subject to clogging when the fermentation is very active (and the foam plugs the water seal). This condition often leads to a very messy result when the seal blows (literally) off the fermenter.
There is a very good instructional video that shows you how to brew beer.
It was made by three gentlemen called, I believe, “The Three Stooges(?).
Their secret is lots and lots and lots of yeast.
And I, in turn, agree with everything you say. :-)
I had forgotten about the importance of a brewer’s log. It really helps you figure out what went wrong and reproduce what went right.
The Stooges worked for Panther Brewing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.