ExPo Homebrewers

[Black Dog]

My dad is an American Homebrewers Association member and avid homebrewer and is passing the hobby on to me. Yes.....I opened my Christmas present early. I came home from work one day and found a box from Northern Brewer so what else was I supposed to do? :wings:

He got me the one gallon starter kit with three recipe kits: Caribou Slobber (Moose Drool clone), Chinook IPA, and Dead Ringer IPA (Dead Guy Ale clone). I think I'm going to also get myself the jalapeno saison kit from Brooklyn Brewing Company.

I'm also interested in making cider and mead\melomel and have found plenty of 1 gallon specific recipes plus hints and tips for scaling down full size recipes. And last night I had a bottle of Widmer Brothers Reserve Lemongrass Wheat which is brewed with lemongrass (duh) and muscat grape juice which is used in making moscato wine. I really like that beer but since its a limited release I probably won't ever find another bottle which means I'll have to make my own clone. I'm already found lemongrass heffeweizen recipes so all I need to do is figure out how to add the grape juice and I'm set. Earlier this year my dad was working on a clone of New Belgium's Coco Mole which goes awesome with a bowl of chilli.

So how many ExPo members make their own beer and wine? Got pics of your set up? Favorite recipes? Hand crafted liqueurs? I've got a good Cointreau clone that I'll post as soon as I find the recipe that I wrote down. I'll also post a pic of my first batch of beer as soon as I get it going tonight or tomorrow night.

:beer::beer::beer:

 

[Hafwit]

You might want to try making some prickly pear cactus fruit mead. I think the recipe is in Charlie Papazian's book. I made some back in 2000 that also had some pomegranite juice in it. After aging for more than a decade, it is quite excellent.

 

[HopPhish]

I've been brewing for a couple of years. I have made both the Caribou Slobber and Dead Ringer before. I like the Caribou so much that I use it as a base recipe for all of my brown ales. My favorite version is to add 1more oz of Goldings @ 30min and dry hop with 1oz of Williamette. I have also upped the qty of choc. malt with successful results. You really don't have to change either of those recipes though, both are very good.

 

[Black Dog]

I've got a copy of Papazian's book and I think I'll use that to scale down recipes. I decided to change my brew day to Tuesday because I'll be home all day and next weekend I'm going to be out of town and I don't want fermentation to stop when I'm not home so I pushing it out a few days. We're gearing up to move soon too so once we're settled down and I've got a few small scale brews finished I might move up to a 5 gallon set up.

 

[Black Dog]

Its Christmas, lets make beer!

Ok! My first 1 gallon batch is in its carboy and beginning to ferment. Here is a pictorial. I chose the Caribou Slobber kit first because it only has two hop additions as opposed to 3 or 4 like my other kits. Since its my first brew I'm keeping it simple.

Specialty grains have finished steeping, now it just needs to come to a boil.


Boil achieved, malt extract and first round of hops added to the pot. 45 minutes to go.


Second hop addition, 15 minutes left. It smells like rosemary, oddly enough. I was thinking it smelled like cooking meat and then my wife said it smelled like I was making a roast and we decided that what we were smelling was rosemary. Strange...


Chill out, man! From 212 to 70-ish in about 15 minutes.


Let the fermentation begin! Its cool how it actually looks like beer already.


Eww! Trub! I bet my dog would love to eat this.....


So thats basically it. I left out the sanitation bits because its not as exciting. Just imagine a bunch of random pieces of tubing and an airlock and stuff in a bucket of sanitizer solution. In about a week or so I'll be bottling so that should be exciting, and another week or two after that I'll be drinking my first batch!

 

[UK4X4]

The only thing i regularly brew is cider- the hard version for u american chaps
I make a natural apple yeast starter

Raw apple mush or when lazy just use a store apple juice

Add yeast starter to the juice and let nature take its course

I usualy just use 2 ltr coke bottles with a loose cap

Decant once cleared add a spoon of brown sugar and bottle again
With a tight cap for natural carbonation

Larger quantities the specter water containers work well and either
A loose cap or a balloon/ glove for the air trap

Cant exactly pop into your local brew shop in the middle east

Funnily though in a land of flat bread the supermarkets have a surprisingly large stock of yeast !

 

[6x6pinz]

I also like to make Meads. I have a batch of pyment going right now that should be ready some time late next year. I always have a batch of orange blossom going, can't seem to keep that stuff around. One of my favorites was a lemon mead where I substituted almost all the water for pure lemon juice. It took a couple of years to change from paint stripper to a very nice mead.

 

[Black Dog]

I've never had mead but I've also never seen anyone who DIDN'T like it. That does seem like a problem though, between drinking it and giving it away you will run out long before your next batch is done. So when you make your mead do you bottle it in wine bottles or keg it or something else? I was thinking I might use 1 pint beer bottles when I make mine, that way when I give some away to people it won't disappear from my basement as fast. The only thing I'm not sure about is using beer caps instead of corks, does that make a difference?

 

[6x6pinz]

I use Grolsch style bottles. If giving away to friends so they can drink at their leisure, usually request return of the bottle when done (so can be refilled) or if as a gift I just write off that bottle. I use the 12oz when giving away and the 16oz and 20oz when bottling for my own use.
We have several friends who make mead. Usually can find some when we run low but you still need to manage how fast and how much you give away or you will hit dry periods.
Oh there are some very bad meads out there. Have had a few that some friends made that I could not dump out quick enough. On the other hand there are some I could not get enough of. Much like wine it is a taste thing. I brew for the taste. It has been said I like to drink mine when it is a little too young. I just like to drink it when it tastes good. Funny thing is at the taste testings the ones complaining about how early I drink mine end up taking some of theirs home and all of mine is usually gone.

 

[Adventure IQ]

I just got i to it...enjoy it. Lucky for me I have an aspiring brew master next door and a guy on the other side that brews every week

 

[Warn Industries]

Homebrewer here! Been brewing for about four years; I do about 2-3 batches a year. Just made my latest batch yesterday, which is similar to a Cascadian Dark Ale. However, I think it'll be maltier.

- Andy

 

[Black Dog]

Bottling party tonight! If I had a secondary fermentor (I will as soon as I get to the grocery store to buy a cheap jug of wine) I think I would rack it into there and let it sit a while longer. Last night I got back from a trip back to Nebraska for a few days and all the yeast have settled to the bottom and it looks like a nice brown ale. Which it is of course.....

While in Nebraska, I learned a lot and acquired some free stuff. w0ot! My dad sent me home with a fermometer, kind of like a peel and stick fish tank thermometer but is intended for use on carboys. He also sent me home with a rubber stopper and a plastic cap with holes for an airlock that fits 1 gallon wine jugs, and also a few grommets that fit airlocks so I can do fermentation in mason jars, and finally an extra airlock so I can have two going at once.

We also made a temperature controlled fermentation fridge, no pics I'm afraid. He bought a temperature controller on ebay that will switch between two 110 volt outlets depending on whether you have hit the upper or lower temperature threshold. It runs a chest freezer with a heating element inside, the heater plugs into the "heat" outlet and the freezer plugs into the "cool" outlet. He's already planning on building a second one for lagering. We set it for 21 degrees celcius with a 0.3 degree threshold to ferment a dry Irish stout that we brewed.

We also did a yeast propagation batch. Basically it is just a 1 quart batch of beer that you put a full size dose of yeast into to get them started, then 24-48 hours later when they have eaten up all the sugars you decant the liquid (tastes horrible in case you're wondering) and put the yeasties into a sterile and sealed container in the fridge for use within a couple days. The purpose of this is to get your yeast started doing their thing before you pitch them into the beer, that way you get a faster and more efficient fermentation. He was going to use this yeast to take another attempt at cloning Coco Mole from New Belgium.

So I came home not only with some goodies but also a wealth of knowledge! I like working on projects with my old man.

 

[Black Dog]

Ok, so I bottled my beer tonight and I'm a bit worried that I let it over ferment. It kind of smells a little bit vinegary, and when I sampled some it didn't really taste like beer. My fingers are crossed that it mellows out during the bottle conditioning phase. I knew I shouldn't have gone out of town while it was fermenting!

Tomorrow we're going to Couer d'Alene for Costco and are going to hit up their local home brew shop so I can get a hydrometer and stuff so I can be a little more precise with my timing.

 

[Black Dog]

The Caribou Slobber is done but I think I need to do a few things different. The vinegar smell is gone and it smells good and even tastes good, a little sweet is all, and it is carbonated very well. There is basically no head retention though and on some (but not all) bottles I am getting kind of a weird after taste. I think that may be because I sucked up some of the sludge from the bottom of the fermenter when I was getting close to the end of bottling.

Batch #2 is bubbling along quite nicely now, its the Dead Ringer IPA kit and I brewed it on Saturday. I am doing a few things different with this batch. Number one is that I added a very scant quarter teaspoon of irish moss at the final 10 minutes of the boil. For a regular 5 gallon batch they say to use 1 teaspoon, so I figured 1/5 teaspoon (or less than a quarter) would do the trick and maybe help get things to settle down a bit. I'm also going to try a secondary fermenter using a 1 gallon jug from some cheap wine I got, hopefully that will get some of the gunk out. And third, I'm also making a bottling bucket out of a small trash can. What I'm trying to accomplish is having less icky junk in the bottles that might make the foul aftertaste I am getting in the Caribou Slobber.

 

[Jiggity]

Is your weird aftertaste a metallic like taste? If so, that could be a little bit of the sanitizer. If its just an off taste, it could be contamination where everything wasn't 100% sanitized.

Also, wasn't sure if everyone knew or not, but never give doggies and trub, wort, or whole/pelletized hops. Very toxic to puppies.