Any Home Brewers?

POSTED BY: pizmobeach
UPDATED: Monday, February 22, 2010 20:49
VIEWED: 4057
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MAL4PREZ

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 4:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by pizmobeach:
Hi Mal4prez... The beers I'm fond of have all jumped about a buck a six pack, some even more. $8 for six beers was a stretch, then $9 and now $10?

Mead - so, like a sweet beer then? Vanilla Porter? Ale-ish?

Yeah, $10 a six pack is rather silly, and I usually do pay that much because I like Guiness. Still that's only a bit more than $1.50 a beer, which isn't much. Ingredients are $.50 a beer at best, for the kits. More when you buy ingredients.

Anyway, money isn't my draw to brewing. It's so satisfying to have homemade! And it's a happy house that has a carboy bubbling away. :) Do you decorate? Supposedly, sunlight is bad for the brew. So I put colorful shirts on them. Maybe a tie sometimes too.

Mead is honey wine. I've had some that are brewed to be like beers, but I can't stand them. Mine are more like dessert wines. Google and you'll find tons of recipes. Most use 10-15 lbs of honey, maybe some kind of fruit, and then little additives like tannin or acid blend.

My ex brewed a cranberry mead that was like a really good Tokay (yummy Hungarian dessert wine). I've never been able to equal that one. Also very good is mead from a high quality wildflower honey. Talk about patience - it takes a good 4-5 years for the harsher flavors to settle out, but once they do wildflower mead is amazing! Like drinking a field of flowers.

I've never tried Vanilla. I've been wanting to try that - a mead with vanilla beans and maybe some plums. I did a ginger that's quite spicy.

Wow - now I feel like brewing! Oh - and I'm glad you started this thread because I went digging through storage last night and found a case of stout I brewed last summer. I totally forgot about it!

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PIZMOBEACH

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 6:00 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
Anyway, money isn't my draw to brewing. It's so satisfying to have homemade! And it's a happy house that has a carboy bubbling away. :) Do you decorate? Supposedly, sunlight is bad for the brew. So I put colorful shirts on them. Maybe a tie sometimes too.

I know what you mean by homemade even in these early stages, just the satisfaction of taking on the challenge. I'm also getting a whiff of the possible improved quality - I had a separate satellite fermenter for testing gravity and the smell was so rich compared to store brands.

Glad you found your stout! A case even, OMG - Cheers!

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JEWELSTAITEFAN

Sunday, January 31, 2010 8:25 AM

I don't.
My dad made 2 or 3 hundred gallons of wine each year, our basement was filled each winter.
I didn't care for it because I had to do all the PITB work.
But Rhubarb wine was the bestest. Still a favorite.

GINOBIFFARONI

Sunday, January 31, 2010 8:39 AM

I make wine, my wife is doing a batch of Chocolate Port right now.

Rhubarb and Strawberry wines are my favorites,

messed up and corked a batch while it was airated now its Strawberry champaign.... Very tasty, but loss a few bottles in explosions

Either you Are with the terrorists, or ... you Are with the terrorists

Life is like a jar of Jalapeño peppers.
What you do today, might Burn Your Ass Tomorrow"

FREMDFIRMA

Sunday, January 31, 2010 11:19 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by GinoBiffaroni:
my wife is doing a batch of Chocolate Port right now.

Oooooooo
*drool*

I've never, EVER been able to get that one right, I'm iffy on beer, fine with shine and I swing for the wall with every bottle of mead - but for some all fired reason I've never been able to turn even a decent bottle of wine, much less port!

And good golly, chocolate port, my fav, eep.

There's a handful of aging tricks you might hear about for mead, some of which actually work, but you *have* to incorporate that concept from the beginning of the process cause trying it on a batch you've already thrown will screw things up.

I've got a pretty quick setup for passable quality mead, just the kinda stuff you set out with dinner, that rack has a sticker of speedy gonzales on the side.

The one way in the back, on the other hand, is the kinda stuff you pour with trembling hand and hold up in reverence to a choral alm before sipping lightly, meh heh heh heh heh heh

-F

MAL4PREZ

Sunday, January 31, 2010 2:16 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by GinoBiffaroni:
I make wine, my wife is doing a batch of Chocolate Port right now.

Oh, yum. Care to share a recipe on that one? I've never tried such a thing, but it sounds fabulous!

I also messed up with a mead and ended up with bubbly. Luckily, it was just right that no bottles blew, and it's quite tasty. I need to try to recreate that accident, because I'm nearly out.

Pizmo - I was thinking about your plans to let your beer age. You racked it off the dead yeast, right? Definitely should do that if you haven't. The dead stuff will give it off flavors.

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STINKINGROSE

Sunday, January 31, 2010 2:35 PM

I got into home brewing when my husband and I decided to make the beer and wine for our wedding. We'd had friends' offerings before and wanted to try it. (Microbrews were few and far between back then.)

It turned out well, all of it.

We haven't stopped since.

After finally trying a few lovely meads by a friend I decided it wasn't as scary as I'd heard. "Cat piss" and "rough" were all I'd been told about it to that point. Untrue!!

I making a batch last year for the first time, it has aged well and is now ready for drinking. (Sour cherry and fresh ginger as balance to the honey, it's dry and sparkling and a suprising shade of light orange-pink.)

I decided to try another batch, which is sitting there waiting for me to either rack or bottle it. Nothing but honey, water, and yeast. The recipe said it would be ready to drink as soon as fermentation stopped. I scoffed, remembering the last batch that definitely needed a little time to decide what it was going to be when it grew up. I was wrong, and I'm having a hard time not breaking into it. Tasty, and still has a bit of room for "even better".

Doctroid just whacked off another batch of beer, which has to wait about another week before it's ready for bottling.

I tried making hard cider last year. It went OK, but I'm giving it time to turn into "yum" instead of "ho-hum".

We also know people who magically have distilled things appear in their hands, and we've got a newly licensed distillery about two hours from our house. I'll have to pop in and see how their offerings turn out. If it's better than my friends' homemade attempts I'll be surprised.

Last midwinter I was given a tiny wee glass (less than a shot) which had been ceremoniously poured from an amber colored little bottle. The offerring party held up a hand and admonished me to smell it first. I almost didn't make it past that point. It was as if July had exploded inside my head filling it with liquid sunshine and warmth. When I finally tasted it the world went golden oozy cherry yum. It started life as kirschwasser, got left in bottles for 7 years, had sugar added, then was left in peace for a further 10. OMG does not cover it. The bottle had started out clear and was coated from the inside. I sincerely hope that wasn't the last bottle, because to think that something like that is not in the world any more is a sad, sad thing...

Now if I could just figure out where to find someone with a machine shop and discretion who would take barter on speculation I could get a good lid for a still made and try to replicate the effort...
It was that good.

PIZMOBEACH

Sunday, January 31, 2010 9:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by mal4prez:
Pizmo - I was thinking about your plans to let your beer age. You racked it off the dead yeast, right? Definitely should do that if you haven't. The dead stuff will give it off flavors.

I just had a feeling there were brewers and vintners and 'shiners out there... it just fits with Rim mentality somehow.

M4P - no I didn't. Funny thing about that is I was going to but I kept reading people say "I've stopped doing a secondary... let it sit in the primary for 3-4 weeks and then bottle." And then I'd see others say what you're saying. I could send you a bunch of links from some brew forums (some get pretty nasty, though not RWED bad

) - the upshot is these "let it sit" people think that given time the yeast will clean up any pollutants, and that you risk more from a second racking with exposure to oxygen and contamination. My 2 local home brew shops are split as well.
My feeling was that I would buck tradition and try what the new people were saying. I also felt like I had a strong urge to do a secondary fermentation but that was largely based on wanting to "mess with it" and that alone should be a sign, "quit fussing with it."
Anyway - next weekend is 3 weeks, bottling for sure then, and then 3 more weeks in bottles. I will definitely post a follow up... unless it's total crap of course.

Scifi movie music + Firefly dialogue clips, 24 hours a day - http://www.scifiradio.com

PIZMOBEACH

Sunday, January 31, 2010 9:12 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by stinkingrose:
Last midwinter I was given a tiny wee glass (less than a shot) which had been ceremoniously poured from an amber colored little bottle. The offerring party held up a hand and admonished me to smell it first. I almost didn't make it past that point. It was as if July had exploded inside my head filling it with liquid sunshine and warmth. When I finally tasted it the world went golden oozy cherry yum. It started life as kirschwasser, got left in bottles for 7 years, had sugar added, then was left in peace for a further 10. OMG does not cover it. The bottle had started out clear and was coated from the inside. I sincerely hope that wasn't the last bottle, because to think that something like that is not in the world any more is a sad, sad thing...

Now if I could just figure out where to find someone with a machine shop and discretion who would take barter on speculation I could get a good lid for a still made and try to replicate the effort...
It was that good.

Great story S-Rose. 17 years... incredible. How people live long enough to get to know the patterns of something that takes that long is amazing.

A lot of people are talking about meads - definitely going to have to try that once I feel I have a better sense of how to make a decent beer.

Here's a question for anyone: I was going to start a brew today, but I have a cold and I thought I should wait since "sanitation" is one of the holy trinities of brewing - sound about right?

Scifi movie music + Firefly dialogue clips, 24 hours a day - http://www.scifiradio.com

STINKINGROSE

Sunday, January 31, 2010 9:39 PM

Wear a mask. (Or a bandanna for that outlaw ambience) Wash your hands. You're probably not going to put anything nasty into it that will affect fermentation, and you won't make contagious beer.

If you're feeling crappy you are, however, more prone to make mistakes which might affect the outcome.

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