homebrewing general

I'm not to enthusiastic about my banana wine to bh
doesn't taste too great
will it get better with age or should I dump it?

>>1131428
what does it taste like?

I fermented some LIDL Vitafit Premium red grape juice with champagne yeast and even though it only just finished and hasn't cleared yet, I tried some and it's really good. Doesn't take as strong as commercial wine but has a good fruity flavor. But it's 99p a liter IIRC so it's expensive.

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UPDATE:

My 6.5gal Queen Anne's Lace Mead is still aging. I need to take time out to bottle it.

>>1131428
ALWAYS allow your brews to age at least 2 years for whites when they taste nasty. Up to 5 years for reds. Banana wine normally doesn't take to long, but if you've screwed up a bit just wait longer.

>>1131622
Sounds good. Did you add sugar to it?

>>1131627
>Did you add sugar to it?
No, nothing but grape juice + EC-1118. If I try it again I'll dilute it with sugar water to reduce the cost.

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>>1131635
That would be why it has low alcohol content. It is most likely closer to a beer in ABV%. You can dilute it after brewing, like when making mixed drinks. That is the main use of cleared-kilju that I've made before.

>>1131627
>ALWAYS allow your brews to age at least 2 years for whites when they taste nasty. Up to 5 years for reds
Unless you're brewing mead or sugar wine/kilju with no added nutrients+potassium, or you're trying to ultra-high ABV, this is overkill. 1 month aging is usually sufficient.

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>>1131641
>when they taste nasty

Has anyone played with rice much? I made it with the sweet rice cakes a couple times before and it was alright but I'm thinking I want to try a batch without mold and all the other bugs this time.

The steaming it is the worst part. How good is amylase for converting soaked rice if I can hold it in low 90sF for a bit? I guess I should just buy some and find out but I'd appreciate any input before my next LHBS trip.

>>1131440
like white wine's retarded little brother
>>1131627
>ALWAYS allow your brews to age at least 2 years for whites when they taste nasty.
I guess I'll bottle up a couple of gallons and try and forget about it for a few years
should not have made 8 gallons of it

using vinegar to clean your gear

yay or nay?

>>1132163
You need to pasteurize it before using it. Otherwise, you'll just be infecting all your brews with microbes that eat ethanol and turn it into ascetic acid. I'd rather not risk it.

>>1132163
use 1tbl bleach per gallon
wash with water 3 times

>>1132171
>>1132244
I suppose you're right
I've been using boiling water before and after the fact, obviously, but I just haven't felt comfortable putting chlorine on utensils that I drink out of, so I've been using vinegar in stead, but it was recently brought to my attention that may not be enough
I've had nothing but successful, very high alcohol percentage batches washing with nothing but boiling water and vinegar by the way, but I guess it's just a matter of time before I get some toxic bile if I keep going like this

Just racked my red irish ale Tastes pretty damn tasty. How long do you think I should leave it in my carboy?

>>1132248
if you use tap water, there's likely chlorine already in it....

I would never use boiling water; having a bottle shatter from the heat would not be fun....a dishwasher can be used to sanitize, just don't use any soap

>>1132263
>>1132248
You can use 'boiled" water which has cooled. That's only for rinsing out. The heat from boiling water, used to wash out, won't help sanitize in any significant way.

>>1132248

I was never bothered by bleach but it is a pain in the ass to rinse out. Star san is cheap and makes a lot. I'm never going back to the iodophor or bleach after that. You can even recycle it a bit. I usually mix a little in the bucket, slosh it around, the rack into bottle which are shaken, poured into the bucked, then set aside or dumped after a few uses. I keep a spray bottle full and squirt everything with it. 70% iso can work in a pinch but it costs more and isn't really ideal.

Hey brewers,
I want to measure the alcohol content of some distillate.
I know, that there are alcoholmeters, that can semi accurately determine the percentage through density but I don't want to purchase one just for this task.
However I have a pretty accurate scale (300g max, 0.01g steps).
My only problem is now, that I can't accurately measure fluid volumes (+-1ml would mean around +-3% alcohol content in a 100ml sample)

Any good ideas, what to use for that task? I got a bunch of small bottles in the 100ml range, but they are a pain in the ass to use and don't really give me the accuracy I want. A small erlenmayer flask or something along the line would probably be best, but I don't want to spend too much money (otherwise I could just buy an alcohol meter)

>>1132391
that seems like a lot of work to avoid buying a $4 tool

>>1132394
the ones I found are 12 bucks + 4 for shipping.
not exactly expensive, but if theres a way to get it for free..

>>1132397
that's pretty fucking expensive
I bought mine on a whim in the store for $4, it came with a neat little test tube and everything, it's great, definitely recommend it, especially if you want to keep doing stuff like this

your mom probably has something similar to an Erlenmeyer flask at her house, women love useless decorative glass shit, either that or she has a couple of 100ml perfume bottles that may be better than what you currently have, so if you don't want to spend money that's where I'd check

>>1132402
>I bought mine on a whim in the store for $4
if you mean a hydrometer, yeah, I can get one locally like $5

>>1132402
>>1132405
Which kinds of stores usually have that kind of stuff though?
I would expect chemistry equipment stores to have it, but there's nothing like that in my town as far as I know.

>>1132406
a brew store

consult google maps to see if there is one anywhere nearby

Strawberry wine guy here from last thread. About to start a mead on saturday in a spare carboy when it gets delivered. The weather is finally warming up so i wont need a brewbelt or heating pad anymore.

>>1132409
There are a few breweries around me, but I've never in my life walked past a brewery supply store (I'm from germany).
I guess I could walk up to them and ask if they have a leftover hydrometer, but that's about all I can do besides ordering from amazon.

>>1132416
there are a lot of breweries in this area, US, and some of them have small stores semi-attached to their bars/restaurants where they sell bottles/cases as well as brewing supplies, mainly for beer

if there's nothing local, amazon will probably be the lesser online choice

>>1132418
>amazon will probably be the lesser online choice
This
amazon is fucking stupid, especially if you live in europe, and especially especially for brewing equipment
there's bound to be a thousand online brewing stores that's better for you, you're in fucking germany, the production capital of the world and the beer capital of the world

>>1132418
>>1132425
Most online stores have amazon substores though, so I doesn't really matter if you buy from them directly or through amazon.
From what I've seen so far, those who don't have amazon substores either don't sell hydrometers for distillates, or only slightly cheaper, but with higher shipping costs.
Amazon is pretty decent in germany (if you don't care about their business practices)

>>1132391
Assuming it's just ethanol and water, you should be able to figure it out from difference in weight compared to pure water of the same volume.

>>1132502
>My only problem is now, that I can't accurately measure fluid volumes
I've found something that works now by the way if anyone is interested.
A 5 ml plastic syringe works like charm (obviously only works if you can measure weight in the same ballpark)

>>1131336
pro brewer about to sparge the first batch of the day -- west coast IPA with big mosaic/amarillo whirlpool and dry hop. happy to answer any questions if people care. speicalties include most american styles (including barrel aged/mixed fermentation), casks, california beer scene, homebrew vs pro brewing equipment/ingredients/techniques. will check in periodically throughout the day.

>>1132548
How do you control the sweetness of your brews? Through mashing temperature, through choice of malts, choice of yeast,or something else? I recently did a bitter with 10% caramel malts, and I think it is a bit too dry and a bit too nutty, almost like what a brown ale should taste. Do you have any ideas on how to make it sweeter? The nuttiness doesn't really bother me.

>>1132570
pretty much all of those things can affect your final gravity (sweetness). could you post your recipe/procedure? mashing higher, adding more specialty grains, or using a lower attenuating yeast could fix your problem.

if I were you, I'd add a flaked (unmalted) grain to increase body/residual sugar... something like 10-20% flaked barley/oats/wheat depending on which you prefer.

>>1132548
>california beer scene
i need more sours

>>1132548
Can you take me under your wing and raise me as your own?

>brew mr beer kit, long play IPA
>it's the most bitter thing i've ever tasted
i've had hops straight before.
How is this more fucking bitter?
Any sugestions on how to fix it, /tg/? It's already carbed.

>>1132779
Just dilute it with some water before you drink.

>>1132874
Use a light beer to dilute it, not water.

>>1132577
Sure, with pleasure.
~4 gallons
Pale ale malt 8 lbs 88%
Cara pale/crystal 10 0.6 lbs 7.2%
crystal 150 0.440 lbs 4.8%

mash at 153F, 90 minutes

OG 1.044
For some reason my efficiency bombed big time this brew, but it isn't so bad since then a best bitter just turns into a bitter.

FG 1.010

Used S-04, fermented at about 65 F, so maybe a bit on the cool side, but I can't control the fermentation temperatures.

But I'm guessing if I wanted it to be sweeter/more in line with the style, maybe using some liquid yeast specifically for bitters would be a good try? Or I might try adding some adjuncts, I like adding oats to stouts so that might be good.

Anyways, thanks for the answers already.

redpill me on campden tablets/powder
my dad says they're bullshit and that the wine turns out better without them

>>1132534
You don't need to measure the volume, only repeatably fill to the same volume.

>>1132921
Well if your relying on wild yeast to ferment you don't need campden tablets . But if you are going to make wine using special yeast strains like for champaign you want a yeast that produces alot of carbonation and has been bred to stand alot of carbonation , you better sterilize your equipment because wild yeast will kill your special yeast.

>>1132921
They're used to kill everything in the wine, it seems.
So if you're not using any other form of desinfection before fermenting, you might want to use them. In my experience, I haven't used it before fermenting, but then I've only made 2 batches of wine. After that I changed to beer.
You also might want to use them after fermentation to prevent infection. You'll also have to use them if you sweeten your wine after fermentation, since if there's anything living in the wine when you sweeten it, your bottles will explode.

Got some small amouts of hops left over. 15 grams of each, Galaxy, Ella and Citra.

Was thinking about a making a pale ale using 85% pale ale malt, 10% wheat and 5% 60L crystal. 66c (150.8f) mash for 60mins with a 10 min 75c (167f) mash out. And just throwing the galaxy and ella in at 20 mins left in the 60min boil with the citra at flame out.

It's only my 3rd brew so not to sure about it but hopefully it would be ok.
Any thoughts?

>>1132921
I use campden tabs to treat my brewing water as it has cloramines in it.

How do you not get botulism? I'm thinking of starting with wild yeast.

>>1133245
For a 5 gal batch it should be good.

>>1126700 here

Well I left the beer in the bottle for 2 weeks. It has only gotten marginally better and there is no carbonation or head when I pour, the weird bitter taste that sits in my mouth is also still there. I think this is probably a failed first brew. Does anyone have a clue as to why it might failed or how I could diagnose it? Do you think bringing a sample to my local homebrew store would help?

>>1133404
You did add some extra sugar/dextrose when bottling, right?

>>1133458
Yeap I did.

>>1133309
There's been some debate whether botulism can survive in beer, and apparently beer is too acidic for it. So it won't grow there, so no botulism for me. The only problem would arise if you canned wort to be used later, since the pH of wort isn't as low as beer's pH.
Also, if botulism was a huge issue with brewing, you really would hear about it, in the same way that it's presented when canning stuff.
Wild yeast can be hit and miss. Mostly miss, I'd reckon. But if you make sure that it's yeast that you put in your brew and not bacteria, it could make for an interesting beer.

>>1133481
What temps have they been conditioning in? If it is cold the yeast will take a little longer to do the job.

>>1132163
Get Starsan.

>>1132921
Depends on when you use it. It's not necessary before you start the fermentation. Especially if you give the grapes a good wash. Before bottling it may be helpful for shelf life.

>>1132248
Why don't you just buy sanitizer? It's cheap as fuck.

Anybody have a good strawberry wine recipe?

>>1133757
Wine is for pooftas m8.

>>1133015
this is equivalent to measuring volume
additionally filling something up to the brim gives you new problems with spillover and surface tension

>>1133404
>>1133583
They should be conditioning at about room temperature, so 70F.

So updates. Went to local homebrew store and had them try my beer. Their conclusion was that it wasnt spoiled, or temp affected primary fermentation went wrong. The after taste is sort of like a strong alcoholy taste, sort of like rubbing alcohol. Their thought was just let it condition for another month, and then sit in fridge for 2 weeks, and hopefully it will mellow out. They thought the recipe I picked (the stores 3 cent triple) probably was a bit hard and the instructions specified too short of a time to ferment in primary and in bottle. It may have also been helpful to add some more yeast at bottling.

>>1133757

Strawberry is tricky and looks ugly if you don't color it. I did alright with 3 jars strawberry jam, and a metric fuckton of pectinase. This was years back before I gave a shit about OG and other nerd stuff like that. I didn't take notes worth a damn. Best I can tell you is it fermented out fine using EC1118. Not the most flavorful though.

You could try doing a Skeeter Pee variant. Water sufficient for 5 gallons: 2qt lemon juice or 60g citric acid, strawberry, some kind of sugar to OG 1.08, pectinase, and whatever your preferred yeast is. If it sucks add 2-5 strawberry koolaid packets and use it to bang cheap sluts as a triple strength wine cooler. If you're using whole fruit maybe 5+/-1lbs is a good starting point

>>1133757
Im trying a strawbery wine recipe i found online, its just 4 cups of chopped strawberry and 2cup sugar. Weel and a half in primary fermenter before tranfered to a glass carboy. I have another 2-3 weeks before bottling.

If brewing w/ strawberries, prepare for it to be a gooey, shitty mess. I'm not sure how to best deal with it, my only attempt at a strawberry mead clogged up my siphon and was a nightmare... but I've heard of a trick of brewing in a bucket w/ a paint strainer bag inside. Then you can remove the bag after the fermentation is done to get rid of most of the solids and use a bunch of pectic enzyme to try to clear it up.

>>1134075

I use pantyhose and it's great. It's also more lewd that way.

>>1133935
wine turtle right? they're a great site, I've used several of their recipes and they've all turned out great, never the strawberry one though
>>1134094
now that's smart

>>1134094
>It's also more lewd that way.
I so want to design a "lewd ale" label now

>>1132665
where in CA do you live? tons of awesome options around.

>>1132753
probably not.

>>1133245
modern pales and IPAs are hop-focused, so I'd skip the C60. as far as the hops, add whatever you have for bittering at 60, and split galaxy/ella/citra between the whirlpool and dry hop. if you want flavor/aroma, don't skimp on the dry hop.

>>1133404
try flipping your bottles upside-down, and waiting another week. sometimes rousing the yeast helps finish off your bottle conditioning.

>>1134075
I used a straining bag to hold the strawberries for initial fermentation and just squeezed them through the bag every few days.
>>1134122
Sadly i cant remember the site, i just wrote down the instructions in a notebook.

Hey guys.
Do you think I could brew 4 gallons of beer in a 5 gallon bucket/pale, or do you think that it's not enough? I see people having issues with keeping them airtight.Do you think that duct tape would be good for sealing it? I was also planning on drilling a hole in the lid, and putting a soda bottle's top on it. Drill a hole in the soda bottle lid, put a carboy on it, can screw on and off easy.

>>1134230
never use duct tape. It leaves a gluey residue behind that's a bitch to get clean.

>>1134246
I've got nuclear tape, it doesn't leave residue like that.

>>1134246
also, the whole point i'm doing this is because Mr beer refills are 10$ at a local store and it's the cheepest way to make beer.

>>1133908
Did you make a wort starter for the yeast before pitching it? Also what temp was the wort when you pitched the yeast. If it was 70 F or higher then it might be fusel alcohols.

>>1134230
I just put cling wrap (saran wrap for americans??) over the top and hold it on with a big rubber band. I use a 30l fermenter and do 25l batch. Hasnt been an issue for average beers 1060 and lower with us05 and the like.

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>>1134249

I also do the plastic wrap and it's good stuff. Have you considered all grain brewing? I bet it'd be even cheaper than mr beer. It's really a lot easier than it sounds if you use brew in a bag.

>>>http://brulosophy.com/2014/04/25/brew-in-a-bag-all-grain-brewing-made-very-easy/

>>1134307
I have, and I've brewed before, but i've only got equipment for 1 gallon batches.

have any of you ever tried selling your brews?
I'm thinking of making a batch og cloudberry wine, but the thing is that cloudberries are fucking expensive, so to get enough cloudberries for an eight gallon batch I'd definitely have to put out a couple of hundred dollars, which I'd like to get back if possible, so if I were to do this I'd definitely want to sell a few bottles

is that legal?

>>1134458
also is there an interest for homebrew wine?
the legality I obviously have to figure out relative to my own location, but say I got a stand at some farmer's market, would people buy it?

>>1134458
>legal
nope, nada, no go

>>1134146
Orange County
The Bruerey and Almanac are great

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My first 3 wines thus far

1) Rhubarb
My popped cherry, made from a can. I had about 5 gallons of this one that has aged nicely over the past year and a half. Well received overall, I enjoy giving it out to friends and family as a gift.

2) Mulberry
The most work was put into this one. Made from berries picked in my yard, this one only has about 1.5 gallons and is kept for rainy days. The taste is a little off, but it's definitely a prized possession.

3) Apple
The run-off of an experiment I ran last fall involving SafCider. It was mixed with my remaining S-05 (used as a control group). As expected, it has a strange after taste. I've tried sweetening it with inverted sugars, but I think I went overboard. Now I use it mostly for cooking. Recommendations welcome.

Regardless, I'm in the process of making Sake, but I gotta decide where to go after this. Thoughts, /hbg/?

Im new to brewing, how long is the minimum time to age a decent hard cider or mead?

>>1134721
Ciders are quick and have short life expectancies.
They take 3-4 weeks to ferment and have a shelf life of about 2 months/2 years, depending on how well you take care of it. Preparation is easy, cheap, and results are immediate.

Mead, on the other hand, usually takes between 6 months to 2 years to ferment and can last indefinitely with proper care. Preparation is difficult, honey can be expensive, and you won't get real results for about 3 months.

You're really picking opposite ends of the spectrum with those 2 choices. If you're trying for the first time, cider is definitely your best option.

>>1134742
not to nit-pick but ciders can be done fermenting in days (3-5) and rarely last longer than a month unless your sanitation/bottling is pro level... and meads finish fermenting quickly but its the conditioning that makes the biggest difference.

>>1134538
if you like sours, I'd check monkish and toolbox, smog city and belching beaver come out with a good product too, just less of it.

>>1134307
I BIAB and can recommend it to everyone, it's really fun and rewarding, not to mention cheap after buying the equipment. Just bottled my 12th brew and with all the expenses, I'm at about 2€/liter. However, if I only consider the price per batch, it's more like 0.5-1.5€/liter, with 1.5€/liter needing such great amounts of hops that you very rarely do that.

I've got approximately 2.5 gallons of apple cider laying around that I completely forgot to take care of. It's been in one of my plastic fermenters for about 4 months now.

Can I still turn it into applejack, or is it too far gone?

>>1134809
its completely fine

>>1133908
>The after taste is sort of like a strong alcoholy taste, sort of like rubbing alcohol
That would be the fusil alcohols -- the stuff that makes cheap wine taste hot. The yeast eats them in time.

>3 cent triple
If you're talking a Belgian trippel, the stuff is damn near as strong as table wine. Leave that shit alone for at least 4 months.

>>1134599
>Mulberry
never even heard of this berry
I want to taste that wine

>>1134842
Didn't know you brewed. Post that one pic of you fucking sharks just to survive.

>>1134853
It's similar in appearance to a blackberry and has a relatively low sugar content. It's very temperamental, and needs to be harvested within a week of ripenning. A sweet fruit with a slight tart aftertaste, it's overall a good berry to pick, but there's little to no commercial value in it agriculturally speaking just because other berries are a lot better at what it does in terms of shelflife, picking season, calories.

It's definitely a fun wine, but you've gotta do a lot to supplement to make it work.

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guys
I got this big jar of tomatoes
the jar holds about 3 or 4 liters maybe, I'm not sure, the writing is in some fucking poor people language
anyway, if I drill a hole in the lid of this jar about the size of a fermentation lock plug will this jar make a good small carboy or will the lid be no longer airtight enough to ferment in once i actually open the jar to poor out it's contents?
the lid is like that on a normal jar by the way, just bigger

>>1135386
I'd be concerned about the chance for some weird flavors from any sort of brine that was in it

>>1135386
Just use plastic wrap held by a rubberband.

i made a batch in a gasoline container which i cleaned properly, now after tasting the stuff i got stomach ache. how many things could've gone wrong and is it still drinkable? i tried drinking water from it after cleaning it and nothing tasted unusual.

>>1135859
yur just not used to it

drink more and feel betr

>>1135863
>not used to it

>>1135859

this is the stupidest thing i've ever read. good lord, why?

>>1135867
It's probably the second stupidest for me.

The award goes to the guy who decided to cum in his wort.

>>1135859

What was the gasoline container made of? typically people ferment in HDPE buckets since it's much easier to clean. Gas cans have a smaller opening. I guess it's not terribly different from using one of those 5 gallon HDPE, PET, or PP water jugs, just a much worse shape.

Could you describe the process? What do you mean by cleaning properly? I hope it wasn't used for storing gasoline before, but even if it's new I doubt it was a food grade storage container. What do you mean by tasting? Is this a finished beer/wine, must/wort, alcohol extract of plastic bucket shit mixed with residual fuel?

You're probably going to die. Go to a hospital.

>implying it's not a troll

>>1135931
Shut up, we're having fun.

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>>1135945

>omg
>oh no he didn't
>you shouldn't do that
>give real advice to troll
hilarious

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>>1135947

>>1135950
On /diy/. Fuck off back to any of the literal dozen of other boards dedicated to shitposting.

>>1135957
Shitposting is not synonymous with trolling, you spaz. It's a subset of trolling.

Trolling can at least be half-amusing when done correctly. Shitposting is just bottom of the barrel reposts.

>>1135859
Are you an Aboriginal?

>>1135968
wouldn't he be sniffing it instead of drinki g?

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Fermentation stopped on strawberry wine on sunday. Let it settle for a few days before tasting tonight. How long does small batch wine usually take to clear and settle? It is still yeasty

>>1136012
crash it in the fridge for a week?

>>1136017
Almost cold enough without the fridge, but if i can make room in the garafe fridge i will.

>>1136021
*garage.
I blame cold hands and a mobile phone.

>>1134146
Cool I will try that.

>>1134257
I used liquid yeast, so no. It was pitched at 70 or so, but was using an older thermometer, so potentially couldve pitched wrong.

>>1136012
looks nice
you should add some clearing liquid though if you haven't

Anyone here got experience with Homebrewing Clubs?

I'm thinking of joining one of the local ones but I'm curious about what I should expect.

>>1136067
Next time, I'd reccomend pitching at 50-60F and making a small wort even if you have a Wyeast pack.

>>1136201
There's a fairly big club in my area, they have a clubhouse in a retail space. At monthly meetings, people bring in their brews, you can try anything anyone puts in the fridge, somebody does a presentation on some aspect of brewing, then people will just hang around and chat or go home. Broad range of people late 20's to 60's, maybe like 75% men. Bit of cliquishness that I never attempted to pierce, I'd go more often if I wasn't awkward.

They also do competitions and beer judging, if you care about that kind of thing. And they pull volunteers for all the beer festivals in the area. They also have a few parties a year where people bring in kegs of homebrew. Everyone gets smashed, and they raffle off some good homebrew gear. A lot of people join the club just to go to the parties and mooch beer, really.

for the life of me, I still cannot find any place that sells mead....the only other thing I can think of would be to check out a brew club to see if any of them make it on the DL

I guess it's worth a shot just to make some and see how it turns out

>>1136513
That's a fair suggestion, thanks. I was reading about yeast online and one persons suggestion was to take the yeast pack and try to double the yeast pre pitching. I am not 100% sure how to do it, but I figure it can't hurt and there only a few styles where you want less yeast not more.

>>1135386
Should be fine, my first 3 ferments were in PET plastic juice bottles which had the lids taken off and a hole drilled through them for the airlock.

>>1137034
make it yourself my dude
all you need is some honey and some yeast

>>1137306
the process of making it isn't the problem (I browsed through a brewing book at the library and it had some interesting recipes), I just want to know what it "should" taste like before I spend 6+ months on something I can't stand to drink

(I kinda got burned on my hopped cider....takes like horribly bitter grapefruit and I have no clue how much time, if any amount, will make it palatable)

in theory it does sound good, I think I'd prefer something sweet...having an idea of what additives would enhance the flavor would help too

>also buying 3-4lbs of local honey, plus nutrients/etc

>>1137313
All the meads I've tried, commercially made, fell short of anything I'd like to drink, or can see the vikings consuming in any quantity.

Very dry, high carbonization liquid. I suppose only pasteurization or sweetening with lactose can stop all the fermentable sugars being devoured by yeast.

>>1137318
carbonated?

the yeast is supposed to die off before being able to eat all the sugar....one reason some people still use bread yeast

>>1137335
Yes, I always add an extra syllable in that word in English for some reason.

Well, I suppose a less high tolerance yeast could be used. I must say I have zero experience at this, though, my beer brews are never that high gravity.

At any rate, that's the experience I've had with commercial mead. Essentially honey champagne brut.

>>1137338
something tells me it's not supposed to be carbonated, no idea how that would change the taste

they might have to do it that way for freshness

tasted my attempt at an all-grain stout today, was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I had originally tasted it after 3 weeks after bottling and it tasted awful. Saved it for another month and a half and it managed to clean up and tastes great. this was my first all-grain as i was an extract brewer before. it feels great to make something that tastes so great.

>>1137043
you could make a starter, or take the easier/more sanitary approach of buying two packets of yeast instead of one.

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Gonna make an all grain stout. Was thinking oatmeal and or coffee stout. Will be my first time doing a wort. Any advice would be appreciated.

>>1137794
>Will be my first time doing a wort.
I don't understand.

What were you doing before?

>>1137395
Both times that I've done all-grain so far have turned out fantastic. Each of them foamed over during fermentation, but both has been the most satisfying brews I've made yet.

Good on ya.

>>1137794
Do you have any experience with homebrewing, or are you just starting?
Anyways, sanitation is king, even more so when making beer. Due to its lower alcohol content than wine and mead, it's weaker against infections.
If using BIAB, squeezing the grain sack is beneficial to get more sugars out of the grain. I haven't found any ill effects.
Also, wort boils over really easy, so you should have some leeway in your kettle(s) so that it won't boil over.
Is there anything specific that you're not sure about?

>>1137043
If you're lazy like me and have money to blow, you can just buy canned wort and a 2L erlenmeyer flask. Later on you might even consider getting a stir plate.

>>1137819
>>1137883
I did cans that you could dump in the bucket with some malt, water and yeast, no boil needed. As far as I can tell nothing went wrong the 2 times I did this and now I'm confident enough to do a boil. After reading a bit more yesterday, I'm probably gonna do extract instead of all grain since I only have a 5g pot.

>>1138222
Pish-posh!

My first all grain boil was in a 1 gallon pot. The only limit is your imagination.

Ditch the training wheels, go all grain, friendo!

what are some alternative distillation methods (not freezing or boiling)

>>1138222
You're probably making the right choice.

All-Grain brewing is quite a bit more complicated than doing malt and requires a lot more temperature regulation. If you're going to be actually cooking for the first time, extract is the best way to get a feel for it before you add the extra stages that All-grain requires.

Has anybody used cacao nibs to flavour beer? What was your experience? I'm intending on roasting 120-150g which I will toss in to a 30L keg of stout as an experiment. The more I read about them, the less it seems they are responsible for chocolate flavour/aroma?

>>1137338
I used to brew mead and would carry out several honey additions during fermentation until the point is reached where the yeast would quit and drop out then I'd rack several times to get it clear and then package. I used to use a standard wine yeast and it'd usually top out around 18-20% abv. It was really expensive to make, took a very long time and difficult to consistently replicate, it also was best with extremely extensive ageing. It tasted like alcoholic honey.

I guess this is why commercial mead brewers do what you've experienced, brew a more typical abv honey wine, stop fermentation with sulphites then either leave it dry or add additional honey or even sugar to sweeten.

I was at a beer festival recently and ended up in an argument with this mead brewer because what I wanted (what I used to make) was nothing like what he was selling (a bunch of honey wines either dry or semi sweet or flavoured with various things like orange peel or elderflower). He accused me of wanting to drink 'rocket fuel' for the purposes of simply getting drunk and got all upset saying he was a professional who'd been doing this for several years on a commercial scale and he knew what he was doing.

I couldn't convince him otherwise even though my intention was not to offend. I'm guessing because while he knew that the first method makes a fantastic drink, it is commercially prohibitive and as such he REALLY wanted people to accept his mead as 'proper' mead even though I wasn't trying to imply he wasn't making 'proper' mead.

I did wave my brewers dick around a bit though because we've got an in house yeast lab and a 80 hectolitre brewery where as he was fermenting in plastic buckets.

>>1138222
You could do a partial mash, with most of the sugars coming from malt extract and adding flavors to that by mashing a smaller amount of grain. Then you can boil the wort with hops and presto, it's done. Not as involved as all grain and you don't need as much equipment for it.

>>1138374
Heh, that reminds me when I got into an argument with a microbrewery person as to why their beers are so goddamn cloudy, as I can cold crash my homebrews to near filtered clarity.

On the same note - at least where I am, I'd say my homebrewing outdoes 3/4 "craft" breweries in terms of quality, most of the swill they have the audacity to sell I would call a "failed brew" and probably not even serve to friends for free.

>>1131641
I age my mead a minimum of two years

>>1138729
Yeah, welI I age my mead a minimum of two decades.

>>1138830
Have you already tasted some of them, gramps?

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Hey brew friends.

I've been brewing all grain for a year and a half with a cylindrical 10 gallon cooler as my mash tun. I want to get greater control of my mash temps so I can multistep mashs. I have cheesing it in the past by adding boiling water in intervals to raise my temperature. However technique is not ideal because you can end up with a thin mash. Has anyone tried to add a pump, heating element and temp controller to their cooler mashtun? I think the heating element would have to be inline with the pump because I wouldn't trust it to not melt the plastic cooler.

pic related, my idea.

>>1138925
Have you tried decoction mashing?

>>1138925
What you're describing is basically a RIMS system. What you could also do is HERMS system, where instead of directly warming your wort with the heat element you have a coil of tubing with heating fluid (water) inside that gets heated by a the heating element.
Or you could go with >>1138999
and do decoction mashing, which would take care of your problems with thin mash. You also wouldn't need any new equipment for that.

>>1131336
Is it safe to grow and use wild yeast? How do you prevent mold, botulism, fungus, and other undesirable things?

>>1139086
it's not recommended for those reasons

it can be done, but pointless when safe yeast is readily available

>>1139088
I was just considering it because it's free and I'm a penny pincher and it seems simpler than getting a refined yeast at a store. How did people get yeast in the old days?

>>1139090
people also pooped outside over holes in the ground in the old days...

cost of having to throw out the whole batch because of off flavors or contamination due to natural fermentation vs buying a cheap wine yeast, or even just bread yeast

>>1139090
Why not just buy a yeast once and then wash it? Assuming you're making beer, you can just buy yeast, and after you have racked your beer off the yeast cake, you either pour fresh wort on top of the yeast cake or wash it. I've been doing it for many batches now, and you can get the price per batch for the yeast to fall somewhere between 10-50 cents/batch. After that, you should find different places to save on.

>>1139095
>Why not just buy a yeast once and then wash it?
This.

I usually do 10 generations then rebuy a vial/dry package. No reason for 10 reuses except that I read it somewhere that 10 is about the limit before it starts to change too much from the original.

I can have upto 5 mason jars of different strains in the fridge at any one time, upto 2 months old.

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>>1132244
Woah there! 1tbsp per 5gal is sufficient.
Add 1tbsp of WD vinegar to the water 5min before the bleach to reduce bleach smell.
Use hot water to reduce dry time.
Don't rinse. Unless it's steralized water, you are reintroduceing bacteria
A rinse with a little distilled water will remove any odd smell. Even that odd "new Mason jar" smell.
Has worked for me for the past 15years without a single infected batch
Pic just because I would like to make one of those

>>1139144
Especially with liquid yeast, it's really just one's own stupidity to not harvest the yeast.
I haven't yet tried any liquid yeasts, do you have any tips on them? Is the workflow the same, so you'll just make a starter, brew, then harvest? Or is there something else I should take into account?

>>1139095
>>1139144
Yeast begins to mutate and you lose the strain, also a yeast cell can only bud 50 times and as you re-pitch you invariably will contaminate the sample and stress the yeast--no matter how careful you are--which slowly degrades your yeast's overall health. You can use a light microscope to take a look at your live yeast count if you feel so inclined, and you can look up better broths to store re-pitched yeast between batches.

Some yeasts seem infinitely re-pitchable because they're very stable, but most can only be re-pitched 4-10 times before quality is noticeably lost. If you're a microbiologist with a strong yeast background you could probably build a small home lab to manage this better, but the brewing and supply companies try to keep a lid on how they preserve strain lineage.

>>1139290
But we're not talking about 20 or so pitches per yeast package. We're talking about that 4-10 times that you can repitch the yeast. I mean what's that, maybe one year of yeast usage if you vary your brews at least a bit. That makes most yeasts go from an expensive choice for a brew to a nominal expense in the brew. And if the quality seems to go down, just dump the yeast and that's it. It's not like we're doing this for commerce or anything.

>>1139290
We (commercial) re pitch until we get problems. Yes yeast cells can only bud so many times before cellular walls become too scarred for them to reproduce effectively, but your yeast is a mixture of many generations at all times so this never becomes a problem.

Yes genetic drift is possible, but with 16 chromosomes many strains selected for attributes overs hundreds of years have lost the ability to even drift in certain significant ways.

Also regarding contamination, while you work as best you can, yeast cultures in brewery application are never single strain cultures. You've always got a mixture of organisms. People will say sterilised, but they mean and we deal with sanitised. The aim is to keep the cell count of undesirable organisms low enough to prevent problems during the anticipated timescale for processes. Of course this is different for labs scaling up small cultures because you do not want to scale up the containments.

We consider yeast suitable for storage for a week as an absolute maximum. Harvested yeast it is reused as soon as possible. We take yeast at the halfway point of fermentation. We do not take yeast from beer over 5% abv.

Our biggest problems with keeping cultures healthy is oxygen. A fresh culture will withstand poor oxygenation for one fermentation, but a couple of pitches with poor oxygenation leaves the culture unable to effectively reproduce and maintain health and we get all sorts of problems.

You can overcome low oxygenation with overpitching, you can overcome higher abv with overpitching, most things can be overcome in a pinch with overpitching to be honest, but you can't go re pitching.

Yeast health and the amount we can harvest from a beer is heavily influenced by the ph of the wort and hop oils as well.

We use a simple microscope for most of our yeast work. You count cells with a hemocytometer and scale to determine viable cell quantities. You can easily see most bacteria and other organisms present.

For making hard cider, instead of pressing apples, would blending thoughly and them filtering though cheesecloth work?

>>1140059

It's not ideal but give it a shot with a one gallon batch. I would cut the core out so you don't get any stem/seed shit in there. That sounds like a lot of blending though. Do you have one of those bigass kitchen immersion blenders?

Not really. You'd quickly clog the cheesecloth being used as a filter with a fine puree and a more chunky one unless squeezed significantly or pressed under weight wouldn't render much liquid.

Pressing works awesome because you can end up with nearly all the liquid and an almost dry cake of pressed material.

Commercially we recover beer from all sorts of processes and blend it back. Like the yeast bed at the bottom of a tank is pretty much slurry, but we press it until it is a completely dry cake and recover the liquid. You'd never manage this with filtration.

Also the worlds most simple apple press can be made with two boards and weight. Get some plastic sheeting if you want, angle it so the run off is consistent so you can capture it.

What's a good starter beer?

>>1140209
Any full-extract ale kit. I'd go with a quick finish (ready to drink in 2-4 weeks) pale ale. Go to a brewing site, look at their extract kits, and find something that sounds like what you'd want to drink.

It's hard to mess up.

going to run a small batch of blueberry starting next week. any decent substitute for grape concentrate for finishing?

>>1140209
Agreed w/ >>1140218 but I'd add to try to find a kit that includes steeping grains and hop pellets. Most brewing-specific stores will sell kits like that. Some commercial kits are just kind of a pre-canned wort of hopped extract without any grains, I don't think those kits are very good.

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>>1138830
No need for bad manners, mate. I've done my research and read some books, not just homebrewtalk. Two years is essential for aging mead. Anything past 5-7 will not improve the taste.

Pic related, current batches. I'm scaling up to 150 liters of demijohns next month.

>>1140653
>Two years is essential for aging mead.

thats simply not true. showing us your closet with <10gal of mead doesn't impress anyone. I've had excellent meads aged a year or less.

>>1140654
It's 40 liters, I don't do imperial, sorry. It had to be cut to this amount due to relocation, and in building up the cellar to go full prod again. Your opinion on aging, to me at least, is an indicator of tastes. They differ. Some say malolactic fermentation is stupid, some say they are essential if you want to bring on a buttery taste. I do 5-10 liter batches because I do A/B testing with single changes in procedures. I aim to be good at this thing in 10-15 years. For now, it's just a hobby.

>>1140656
How much of that is for me?

>>1140665
What he meant to say is that you know nothing and should kys.

>>1140692
Love you too, sweetie.

>>1141039
Thanks mom.

Does anyone use filters when bottling mead?

Brewed a weird ginger country wine yesterday.

Started off with 20L of water in a 36L pan. Tossed in 2kg sugar, 500g brown sugar, 1kg of sultanas, 200ml liquid rye malt extract, 2lb of chopped stem ginger, 6 jars of candied ginger syrup, 2 large oranges and 2 large bananas chopped, 30g dried powdered ginger, 6 red chilli peppers, 5 rhubarb tea bags, a few star anise and a tablespoon of black peppercorns.

I cleaned and sanitised a 26L plastic bucket, lined it with a large straining bag and after the whole lot had boiled for 30 minutes I poured it into the straining bag, tied a knot in the top and dropped it into the bucket, topped up with cold water. Lidded the bucket and left outside to cool the rest of the way to 22C then pitched my starter.

The aim is to do sugar additions at stages until the final gravity is reached. Thing is, I've this giant ball of stuff in a bag sitting in the bucket taking up space, maybe 10L or so. So at some point I'm going to need to remove all the material to make space for the top up water because the bucket isn't large enough to hold the bag.

So my question is.

Do I make less? Simply do sugar additions. Leave the bag in place and at the end of fermentation remove it and what I get is what I get?

Do I remove the bag soon, like within 3 days of fermentation starting while there is still significant fermentation to complete to consume any oxygen introduced by the process of removing the bag?

Do I leave the bag for like a week at least, then remove it and then start on my significant sugar additions with some top up water?

My goal is to extract as much flavour and aroma from the things in the bag. I also want the yeast to have the chance to ferment any of the sugars from the sultanas, bananas, oranges etc as well as the alcohol that starts to become present to leach some of the things from the chilli etc.

Ehh.

I hate west coast beer and beer culture.

>>1140653
With beer the general guide I go by with is:

21 days for <5% ABV
2 months for 5-6% ABV
6 months for 6-8% ABV
A year and more for >8% ABV

Seems to work well.

>>1141051
What do you mean? I use clarification agents like isinglass and bentonite before aging.

>>1141347
Mead is not need though.

>>1141270
>I enjoy flavourless piss water: the post

>>1141382
>DUDE HOPS LMAO
>I CAN'T EVEN TASTE ANYTHING LESS THAN 80 IBU ANYMORE; THAT'S HOW YOU KNOW I'M A REAL BEER FAN

>>1141399
You do know that you can brew fantastic flavorful beer with less that 30 IBU's.

>>1141414
That's my point. West coast fucking shits stuff all of their beer full of hops and I hate it.

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>>1141415
The northeast doesn't shy away from hops either though. That's just craftbeer in general, unless you go for a boring european brew like budweiser or heineken.

>>1141363
I meant after clarification, in order to bottle as much as possible

>>1141430
Yeah, but on the east coast they seem to remember that beer is a grain-based beverage and that "hoppy" doesn't have to mean that it tastes like a pine tree soaked in quinine. On the west coast the grain in the bill is basically just a serving dish for whatever high-alpha hops are in vogue.

>>1141585
They all just want to out do each other in the IBU stakes.

>>1141430
>>1141399
I'd say that's the evolution of discovering something outside of macro lagers.

Initially I was mad over hops, both for what I bought, and what I brewed. Then that sort of... got old.

So I moved onto yeasts and malts - yeasts especially. I think discovering Saison is what kicked off my interest in yeast profiles, really, before then it was a case of "just finish fermenting and don't get stuck, fucker".

I've also gone full circle and enjoy a good, crisp lager. Tried lagering once, not sure what I acquired could be called a lager, but it was decent enough.

>>1141347
Mead is not beer, however.

>>1141562
Just siphon whatever you can. Leave the lees on the bottom. The will be losses always. It's how it works.

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So I'm looking to make a low-abv braggot for the 1st of May. For 3 gallons, I'm thinking:

2.2 lbs honey (last 10 min of boil)
1.1 lbs pale ale malt
0.5 lbs flaked oats
0.2 lbs cara pale
0.2 lbs crystal 150
1 oz chocolate malt (for the color, mostly)

0.3 oz magnum 60 min, 30 IBU
0.8 oz hallertauer 10 min, 6 IBU

1 cup citrus juice
3 oz citrus peel (for that 1st of May feel)

calculated OG 1.045, should go down to 1.005 for 5.5% ABV with a mead yeast, carbonated to 2-3 vols.

What do you guys think? Has anyone brewed a braggot before? Do you think the malts have enough nutrients for the yeast, or should I add some yeast nutrient? Any general tips for brewing with honey? It's my first time brewing with honey, and I'm not quite sure on what malt base goes with it and how long to bottle condition, or whether I should make it even more low-alcoholic.

Any tips and comments on the recipe are very much appreciated.

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Hi guys, I'm new to home brewing and I have a few questions. I have only done two home brews using Coopers canned Malt kits and I've been surprisingly satisfied with the results.

I recently tried Scots Pine Ale, and I loved the taste. I was wondering if it would be possible to somewhat reproduce the taste by brewing a can of Coppers Ale and letting a 1/2 ounce of spruce needles sit in cheese cloth for the first 5 days of fermentation to give it flavor.

I know that canned malt is considered a very amateur way to brew, but would this produce a decent beer?
any suggestions/ talk me out of it?

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>>1141668
I think you might not get the same result. The description for Scots Pine Ale says that they boil twigs of pine in the wort, and make add fresh spruce shoots for a short infusion before fermentation. I think you might have a problem getting the flavor to stick by just putting them in the fermentor. Not to mention the risk of infection.

I'd try to boil some spruce twigs/needles/shoots in a bit of water, that would probably work better and it would sanitize them. Then pour the boiled spruce infusion through a cheesecloth to your fermentor. You can easily test the boil beforehand to see if it gives a taste you like before actually spending on the can. I'd use fresh spruce shoots, those probably give a better flavor than old ones. You can recognize the fresh shoots by their light color (see pic).

Some recipes for spruce shoot syrup say to boil them for 2-3 hours in sugar water, I'd test it with times ranging from 20 minutes to an hour to see if you can impart any flavor on the "tea".

Another way would be to put some shoots in some strong alcohol, like some 40-80% vodka and see if the flavor agents dissolve. Then just add that to your fermentor.

But I say go for it. Where I'm from they make syrup and home-made lemonade from fresh spruce shoots, so it can't be that hard.

I mainly brew apple cider and mead, all my beer batches tasted horribly in my opinion - I do not have the space for the full process, so I always used extracts and the beers always tasted like medicine, for lack of a better comparison. Dunno if it has to do with the extracts. Another issue with my beers was that the foam was kind of coarse and disappeared very fast, this got slightly better when aged long, bet never did I have this nice, mellow and "fine" foam of the corporate beers.

My ciders and meades always come out great, so I stay with them.

>>1141694
What temperature did you ferment your beer in? How long did you give it time to mature?
I think medicine-like flavors might be due to too high temperatures, as it creates fusel alcohols. The problem with the foam is something that a lot of people (myself included) struggle with. The lack of foam may be due to some oils in the beer, or it might be because of the extract/grains. It can be amended by using carafoam/carapils/flaked oats in the grist (if all grain, if extract, then steep these and add the water to the boil).
other than that, it might be your yeast. People have been having problems with the yeast that comes with the Cooper extract cans, I would suggest changing the yeast to something that has not probably spent years in room temperature.

>>1141633
Well yes, but I suspect the general rules of "time it takes for ethanol to mellow" apply.

>>1141738
But it's not really the ethanol that mellows, since it doesn't really change during conditioning. If it was, no-one would get drunk on "mellowed" ethanol, since it would have changed to some other substance, like acetic acid (and you'd soon find out if it had).
Solvent-like flavors are usually due to fusel alcohols, produced during the fermentation. The yeast processes these after it's done with the fermenting. I suspect these are what give raw beer/mead its distinct taste that gets mellowed out with time.
Other unwanted flavors are most likely due to yeast activity during the fermentation, and usually get processed away by the yeast with time. Others might just change to other, less aggressive compounds with time.
But because of this, I think there might be a big difference in how fast the different off-flavors get subdued, depending on if the yeast is alive, dormant, or killed, and how much there is of it. Since beer usually has more yeast than mead, considering racking mead is more common than racking beer, I think it might make beer faster to mellow (for mead and beer with similar gravities).
I could be wrong, of course, this is me thinking out of my ass here.

Want to add oats to an extract stout and read about 20%is a good amount of oats to add. Would 1.5 pounds of oats do for 9 pounds of extract or should I do a bit more? I also bought rolled oats, should roast them in the oven or does it make any difference?

>>1141751
Righto, didn't mean the ethanol goes anywhere, more that is becomes far notable - less of that harsh vodka-ish aroma, and taste. The dangerous category of "Never would have guessed this is 8%".

Solvent like flavours are either fusels (and in my experience this can mostly be fixed if the beer is left alone for long enough, so no need to panic).

I do agree, however, that yeast presence is crucial, good point. If a mead is fermented to the point where ABV murders the yeast, that will stop an efficient maturation from occuring. Cause it's, y'know, dead.

I do rack my beer, however, and it still matures same as it did back when I did not.

>>1141767
Yeah, I think I went a bit full autist there. Oh well, such things happen.

>>1141683
Thanks for the tips!

I'll try to boil a "tea" and see if it produces a good flavor, I can pour in.

>>1141783
Well, turns out I am unable to finish sentences.

Guess homebrewing merits some sort of autism due to the patience needed.

>>1141766
If you want to use oats you have to gelatinize them (or use flaked oats) and then they need to be put in a mash w/ base malt so that the starches can be converted. Oats are just all starch and will add no sugars without conversion. You could steep oats, but you'd just get a bunch of cloudy starch in your beer. Try a partial mash, or if you just want something to thicken the beer, maybe consider maltodextrin or something.

got some peach flavored honey wine....not sure if it's not very good, or I simply don't like alcohol

>>1141694
You describe chlorophenol. It is typically contamination from sanitation practices with products like bleach (insufficient rinsing) or from tap water treated with chlorine and/or chloramine.

Yeast, especially belgian and some fruity english strains produce phenols exasperated at the higher end of fermentation temperture and these react with any chlorine and chloramine to produce chlorophenol which is detectable at very low levels. It is stable once formed and will not age out of the beer.

Either fix your sanitation routine or fix your water. Chlorine can be gassed out by leaving the water overnight or for a day or two. Chloramine can be dealt with by campden tablets (sodium metabisulphite) at a rate of 1 tablet per 20 gallons, though half or a whole tablet won't do any harm per 5 gallons, just crush and add it to your water and leave it for an hour or two before using it.

If you are detecting a phenolic character in a beer using yeast that is not supposed to be able to produce phenols it additionally can suggest contamination with another yeast strain or spontaneous mutation (unlikely in established strains).

Most brewers yeast strains have a natural mutation on the POF (phenolic off flavour) gene where they lose the ability to encode ferulic acid decarboxylase. This is the enzyme responsible for the most common phenol 4-vinyl guaiacol which is produced through the decarboxylation of ferulic acid supplied by malt and hops. Wheat contains more ferulic acid than barley which is why 4VG is a desirable flavour for styles such as bavarian hefeweizen. Other sources include wood contact, smoked malts and certain fruits.

But yeah fix sanitation or water. Then even if you get phenols you won't get chlorophenol.

starting a run of blueberry wine. i really need to clear out basement space and go larger scale.

>>1141767
>>>1141751
>I do agree, however, that yeast presence is crucial, good point. If a mead is fermented to the point where ABV murders the yeast, that will stop an efficient maturation from occuring. Cause it's, y'know, dead.

Aging is caused by, among other things, esther formation, not the yeast. Please look up your high school chemistry, because you are out of your element.

>>1142922
Enzymatic reactions trump spontaneous reactions by a large margin, being 10 to 10 000 (or even 10e6) times faster. The taste of a brew tasting hot or unfinished is IMO because of fusel alcohols, which are processed by -you guessed it- the enzymes produced by the yeast.
We can of course argue the point for years to come, but I think living yeast has a big effect on the brew. At least when talking about beer.

So I'm 100% new to homebrewing. Reading over this thread makes me realize I have no idea wtf is going on. So are there any beginner guides anyone can recommend?

I'm also worried about buying the brewing equipment I need because I don't want cheap, father-day-tier home brewing materials. Recommendations here would also be good, up to a budget of $150 to brew quality, but basic beers. I know that's not much, but again, not looking to go too crazy to start out with. Thanks all.

>>1143115
http://www.howtobrew.com
That is version 1 the printed copies are at version 4 I think and have updated info and corrections.

You could start out with an urn, and just do Brew In A Bag, easy and simple. I started with BIAB and did no chill. Never had any problems.

>>1143115
>>1143118
This. BIAB is easy, you can get everything easily with 150$ and after the initial purchase of the equipment it's cheap as fuck compared to extract brews. Not to mention that you can brew pretty much every beer in existence with the equipment. I've done everything ranging from your basic APAs to hefeweizens to stouts using BIAB, and haven't gotten any problems. I use BIAB, no chill. No sweat, no problems.

Some things that you should take into account:
-Sanitation is king. If your brew gets infected, you got no brew. If you sanitize properly, it's almost impossible for a brew to get an infection. So play it safe, sanitize. It's not hard when you get the hang of it, and after a while it becomes second nature. I use star san as my go-to sanitizer, as it's no-rinse and lasts for a long time. I suggest you get a spray bottle to save more.
-Batch size. You can easily brew 4 gallon batches using a 5 gallon kettle and a 2000W induction top OR 2X 3 gallon kettles and your regular stove. I wouldn't go under 2 gallons for batch size, as it's pretty much the same amount of work, whether it's 1 gallon or 5 gallons. Price per brew is pretty much guaranteed to stay under the price for a 24-pack of the cheapest swill you can get, with the difference of your brew being pretty much guaranteed to be better.
- Water quality. If you live in the US, chances are that you might need to do something to your water before brewing. It might be something as easy as dropping some salts in it, it might be eliminating the chlorine in the water. Check if people on the internet near you have had problems with water.

Resources:
BIAB instructions with pics:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=233289
This has pretty good instructions IMO. Not all equipment necessary, though. The forums have a lot of other info, too.
https://www.brewapp.com/pages/basic-all-grain-homebrewing-instructions
This goes through the general steps with quite good detail. Check it.

>>1143115
buy a kit, once you get the idea, shop for more ingredients separately

go to your local library and look for books on brewing

>>1143076
Enzymes remain long after their producer cells perish. So wrong again.

>>1143145
What if you mash out? Doesn't the heat kill them?

>>1143218
Don't know what the fuck is wrong with the dick waving guy who seems to think /diy/ is /fit/ or something, but yeah most work within a range. Change pH and the enzyme stops working. Lower the temperature and within reason the reaction will slow and eventually stop. Increasing the temperature will cause a permanent change in the active site which is why enzymes stop working when they are heated. We say they have become denatured.

Anyway what was the question? Yeast begin to form fusel alcohols during the lag phase of fermentation during the formation of amino acids or the uptake of amino acids (in the presence of nitrogen). This is why over pitching 'turbo' yeast creates hideous beverages.

This varies from yeast strain, fruity ale yeast producing more than lager yeast. People often look at fermentation temperature and this is true, it contributes to the formation of greater fusel alcohols, but do other factors typically described by the home brewer as 'stressing the yeast'.

Basically anything which creates an environment promoting excessive cell growth such as elevated temperature, excessive aeration, excess nitrogen creates greater volume of fusel substrate which creates a greater opportunity of ester formation.

The alcohol acetyl transferase enzymes AATase I and II catalyze ester formation, combining alcohol with an activated acid. Most abundant activated acid is acetyle-CoA. Pre fermentation oxygenation allows yeast to produce sterols in preparation for budding new cells, sterol production takes away acetyl-CoA from potential ester production in the beer.

So don't under or over pitch. Don't over or under oxygenate. Don't provide too much or too little amino acid nutrients in the wort, specifically referred to as Free Amino Nitrogen or FAN. The lag phase from the proper pitch rate is important in minimising ester production and esters are a more prominent flavour than fusel alcohol.

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one of my bottles just exploded
posted in the last thread about my pineapple wine
guess it wasn't quite done going yet or something because the very pretty bottle I had on a shelf in my kitchen said pop just now out of nowhere and sprayed pineapple wine all over my kitchen
also cut my hand pretty bad while cleaning it up so now there's a shitton of blood and wine and glass everywhere

>>1143661
>one of my bottles
what type of bottle

try googling home brewing supplies and your city

>>1143661
Feels bad man. Chill them in the freezer for a while, then vent the bottles.

A couple months ago I had an over carb'd brown ale. When I opened a bottle the top blew clean off, leaving a perfect ring of glass stuck in the cap. A jet of beer erupted out the bottle, covering my ceiling.

>>1143721
Was it a problem for the batch or just a bottle? Do you carbonate per batch ot per bottle (put sugar as one addition to the batch and then bottle, or put sugar individually to each bottle)? I've found the former has given me no problems during my time brewing.

I'm on my 12th or so batch of homebrew. Been doing 5 gallon batches all extract. For my next batch I want to bump the ABV up a little. I'm making a dubbel that calls for 6 lbs. pilsner malt and also has a flame-out addition of 1 lb dark candy sugar. I have a few different options:
Add DME
Add more liquid malt extract
Add another .5lb-1lb of sugar.
When should I add extra fermentables?
I'm also brewing with spices for the first time and I've heard it's recommended to let the wort sit an extra 10 minutes after flameout before chilling.

any kvas brewers here?

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>>1143663
like this
>>1143721
don't think I'll have any problems with the other bottles
I used campden tablets as I finished the brew, none of them are in the same kind of bottle, they're all wine-corked, they're all cool in the basement, and the one that popped I had added a bunch of pineapple meat to, it was supposed to be decorative, and it was
it also popped on a night I had the fireplace burning, I think it was a combination of the new sugar from the pineapple, the warmth of the fireplace and the total airtight-ness of the flip-top that did it

>>1144606
those are rumored to be dangerous

pop tops would probably pop before exploding

Hey /hbg/, I'm new to brewing, thinking of starting up my first batch some time in the next month, depending on finances. From the research I've done (though obviously I haven't got much experience) I think I know what I should use for the brewing process. Just wanted to see if anyone can help with what extra stuff I need.

>Supplies
20qt (19L) stock pot
Equipment sanitizer
4qt measuring cup
Bottles+caps
Cap press
Funnel
5 gallon bucket with lid
Cooking scale

>Ingredients
5lb malt extract (looking to start with a rye malt)
4 gallons distilled water (buying first, gonna maybe get a water still later on)
1 package brewer's yeast
0.5lb hops (looking with an earthy tasting one to compliment the rye, not a big hoppy kinda guy though)

I'm going to look at recipes a little more and try and find one that matches up with what I'm looking to do (more structured means more idiot-proof I hope), but if anyone can think of anything I'm missing in terms of shit involved in the brewing process, I'd appreciate it. Also if you think I need more or less of anything, please say so. I'm not entirely sure what ratios are required in making it well. Eventually I'd also like to get some cheap analytical equipment for it, depending on how deep down the rabbit hole I go.

>>1145158
You also need cleaner. I recommend PBW oxygen wash or some other oxygen-based cleaner. Remember that cleaning and sanitizing are two separate but necessary steps. You can't sanitize a dirty container.

You'll need a airlock for your bucket lid. Hopefully your lid already has a hole and grommet ready for an airlock, if not you can easily make your own or buy one.

Also a thermometer that can clip on the side of your brewing vessel while brewing is extremely helpful (is that what you meant by cooking scale?)

Since you don't have a wort chiller you'll need to make an ice bath to cool your wort down after the boil.

Other than that looks good, I would add some steeping grains and maybe .5-1 oz. more hops to your recipe but it all depends on what you want to do. I've had great results with recipe kits from Midwest, Northern Brewer and Morebeer. Brewing gets easier the more you do it. Good luck.

>>1145158
You'll need a hydrometer for measuring when your brew is finished. You can also calculate the alcohol content in your brews by measuring the starting gravity and the finishing gravity of the brew. Get a cheap glass one, should be no more than 5$ and it's really useful. More useful imo than wort chilling equipment.
Like >>1145190
said, steeping grains is an excellent way to tune your recipe even with little equipment.

As someone who is about to start their first mead brewing, I need to ask:
Can it be safely made in a glass gallon jug if i put an air lock on it?

>>1145297
why wouldn't it be?

>>1145299
I just had to ask.

Also if I put mead in glass wine bottles after letting it ferment, will it blow the bottles up like beer?

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>>1145158
I've seen cheap pots in the mexcrement stores. Jarhill pots on ebay are cheap too, 33qt for $55, 49qt for $65. Might as well go big. It will fuck with your evaporation but you can put less water in a big pot. You can't put more in a small pot than it will hold.

For bottles you can trawl freecyle or or craiglist. Occasionally they pop up for free or very cheap. Recently I got 8.5 cases free. They needed cleaning but the guy was nice enough to rinse them out before he stored them.

I'd ditch the funnel and get a siphon setup. Steel if you plan to do no chill wort. It works fine for racking if you can start a vacuum, you can use mouth suction to get it started just fine, those autosiphons are kind of a pain in the ass. Pic related, that way you don't get mouth doodoo in the liquid. You want silicone for hot, vinyl is good enough for low temperature.

A spring tip bottle filler wand on the end makes bottling go smoother, alternatively you could put a spigot on a 5gal bucket. I used to put an airlock on my bucket but cling wrap seems to work just as well, I like being able to watch it bubbling away.

I have well water and don't bother to add minerals, tap water is fine if you use metabisulfite to push the chlorine out. If you're really interested in a 'water still' it's not much trouble to drill a hole in the kettle lid, solder a flange on, then attach your collumn.

I'll second the idea of a hydrometer and thermometer being necessary. I use a candy thermometer. PBW is a baddass cleaner, starsan is a badass no-rinse sanitizer.

You can't go wrong with tried recipes then tweaking to taste. Extracts are great, but all grain is cheaper. Look up brew in a bag(BIAB) if you haven't come across it yet. Turns out ausies are good for more than shitposting. I half-assed a bag out of voile curtains, cut to size and then bunched it up.

They toys are but expensive. You can make some good shit on a shoestring budget.

>>1145301
The airlock is just there to let internal gases escape while preventing external shit from getting in. If you have a specific concern about the gallon jug we just need more details to address it. You can safely make wine in a plastic bag if you had to.

As for bottles exploding there's a lot of factors. If there's no sugar and just yeast it shouldn't pop, even with thin wall bottles. They're designed for pressure so some can go pretty high before becoming a bottle bomb. A lot of guys will sulfite and or sorbate the wine to stabilize it. Doing this your chances of a bottle bomb is extremely low, even with backsweetening. A hydrometer is handy to see if it's finished fermenting.

>>1145301
I would not expect mead to be carbonated

you don't start to age it till it's completely done fermenting

>>1145158
>0.5lb hops
hold it
If that wasn't a typo, 8oz of pretty much any hop for a ~3ish? gallon batch is a huge amount. Although what's appropriate depends on the style, hop, AA%, when you add it, and the resulting IBUs.
Definitely find a specific recipe (or a kit from a homebrew shop) and follow that. Preferably something with steeping grains. But if you really want to personalize something or need to scale down a recipe for your batch size, it helps to use some homebrew calculator kind of thing that tells you what the result will be like. I like this one: https://www.brewtoad.com/

Don't use entirely distilled water. Use your tap water, or mix distilled/tap, or use spring water, or do something to make sure there's at least some minerals in there. That mainly matters when you are mashing all-grain, but I think it will also affect the quality of the fermentation or end taste if you use pure distilled water w/ no minerals.

You will want a bottling bucket and bottle-filling wand. Filling bottles straight out of primary sucks and you'll suck up a lot of trub. Also get an autosiphon for racking.

Preferably get equipment for a 5 gallon batch size, because that's what most recipes and conventional homebrew stuff (in the US) is based around. That would mean your fermenter would need to be at least 6+ gallons in size, and you'll need to save up ~48 used beer bottles. It's ok to have a different batch size and have to adjust recipes, but if you're buying equipment now you may as well get what's most convenient.

Booze brothers, how many weeks should I be infusing cacao nibs into a stout?

>>1145616
I'm going two weeks, any longer and the concerns I have about bitterness from them would become unbearable.

>>1145448
IBU/GU is an excellent concept introduced in the book designing great beers and is further expanded upon as a RBR (Relative Bitterness Ratio) incorporating adjustments based on the final apparent attenuation.

Put more simply there is a ratio of bitterness to maltiness which nearly all commercially successful beers follow and drifts only slightly if at all based on style. A 50IBU lager is going to taste far more bitter than a 50IBU barley wine. You can balance bitterness with malt sweetness based on the remaining unfermentables by determining final attenuation when developing recipes.

My point is 8oz of hops might not be too much based on so many factors. You'll know he point of addition within the boil, the length of boil, AA% etc.

However extract only brews can struggle to get below 1.020. Rye contributes beta-glucan which has a high molecular weight and the viscosity of a liquid is the result of the concentration of a solute as well as the molecular weight of that solute. A final attenuation of 1.020 will mean a 100IBU beer starting at an OG of 1.100 would taste like a dry stout.

Of course yeast selection becomes important due to attenuation as well then.

>>1145448
>https://www.brewtoad.com/
I have never seen that site before, looks like it has heaps of recipes, Thanks.

>>1134458
just pick them yourself, they grow in the pnw in the woods pretty commonly. take a vacation and then freeze some bags for it and bring them home?

Looking to start some recreational brewing, beer mostly and maybe some cider or wine. Is there a good guide out there with equipment to get for entry-level or should I just buy one of those mid-life-crisis brewing kits off Amazon?

>>1145917

It's not as complicated as it looks. Get a 5gal bucket, some sanitizer, yeast, and apple juice. If you want to tweak it you can add some tea for tannin or sugars(maybe apple juice concentrate?) for more alcohol. Cover the bucket with cling wrap and you'll keep any nasties out. It's enough to learn the gist of things. You can clear it with gelatin once it's done fermenting, just regular old grocery store gelatin.

There's nothing wrong with those brewkits, I just think the capper included in the kits is a pain in the ass. Save those 500ml soda bottles and use those until you feel like springing for a proper floor or bench capper.

Essentially you need to be clean, something to let it ferment in, and something to put your finished product in. For beer you'll need to add a pot to boil in. I brew in a bag made from voile curtains. I got a friend started and we just siphoned the finished product into a few box wine bags then put it right back in the box. Just a bucket, cling wrap, and some vinyl tubing, along with the fermentables and yeast. Just jump in a try it. At worst you get drunk and pick up a practical hobby to blow all your money on fancy toys. The cost for admission is cheap, kind of like drug dealers giving you the first hit free.

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Gonna try this blogger's saison yeast this weekend. Hopefully I can grow some extra in my starter and save it for more batches, in case it is good.

>>1145868
I haven't used other people's recipes on there, I don't think they're really curated at all. I just use the free version as a poor man's Beersmith, to try to tailor recipes from books/forums to my equipment. Also the mash water calculator is useful.

>>1145917
how to brew dot com

>>1145940
>5gal bucket

however do not make 4-5 gallons worth of something if you're just starting out and or have never used the recipe before

start with 1 gallon, work your way from there

>>1145946

I started out making a 4 gallon batch. If the recipe has good comments it can't be total shit. Even if it is shit it will show the miracle of time on a drink. It's amazing how 6 months can bring something from shit to bretty gud.

It's not a bad idea to do a 1gal batch though. In that case I'd just buy 1gal of juice, pour off a few ounces, then ferment in whatever it came in. Everyone has a drunk granny or aunt with a trash bin full of carlo rossi bottles. If it's not your granny try her neighbors.

>>1145946
Eh, I disagree. It takes around a month to make any kind of brew and the ingredients don't cost a lot. 1 gallon vs 5 gallon doesn't save you any time, it just saves you maybe $20 in ingredients on the off-chance that your brew turns out undrinkably bad (rare). On the likely chance that it's okay, you'll drink your 6-pack and have to wait another frickin' month.

1gal might be good if you don't drink a lot and are more interested in experimenting than drinking, though.

>>1145953
everyone has different tastes, and one should consider carefully the advice of strangers on the internet....

I made a cider recipe with an addition of hops (based on suggestion of people on another site), and it is practically undrinkabley bitter...I have no idea if it will get any less bad with a few months, but if I had made 5 gallons worth it would have been that much more of a failure

>>1145958
>doesn't save you any time
shorter wait? no
but finding out a 1 gal batch tastes bad 3-6+ months later vs. having 5 gal of bad brew....(not beer)

>$20 in ingredients
hey, $20 is $20

might as well get used to the process when costs of screwing up are lower before scaling up

Is mead without yeast nutrient bound to be awful? Is it bound to take super long? Will herbs and spices provide a decent amount of nutrition?

Started experimenting with making mead recently, doing a batch in a cleaned out HDPE milk jug (second batch in this jug), another batch going in a slightly more conventional 5 gallon food grade HDPE bucket.

Rinsed the jug out with diluted bleach and then a ton of water, same for the bucket.
Put honey in container and poured in hot tea for both, along with a few cinnamon sticks and ginger slices.

Used bread yeast for both (wanted to avoid the government spy microbes in commercial wine yeast, I'm under 21), added a quarter teaspoon of some cheap yeast nutrient I got on Amazon to the milk jug batch, nothing for the 5 gallon.

>>1146017
>Is mead without yeast nutrient bound to be awful?
it definitely would be helpful

>Is it bound to take super long?
it's mead, yes

>Will herbs and spices provide a decent amount of nutrition?
no, they're flavoring

>milk jug
fermenting is one thing, but you should probably use something glass for aging

>>1146017

I doubt the guy on ebay is checking your ID. Worst case scenario say it's for a school project and you need something that produces a lot of CO2. Now that I think about it my lhbs doesn't card me either and I'm perma baby face.

After you get it you can wash and reuse the yeast. It's good for a long time refrigerated, and even longer if you freeze with glycerine.

>>1146221
Any comment on the flavor of bread yeast vs wine yeast? A lot of what I've read seems to indicate it comes down to personal taste.

>>1146020
Well yea, but I was figuring something juicy and potent like ginger root would have at least some vitamins. I added some nutrient to the 5 gallon but pretty sparingly, the stuff I got smells strongly of urea (do yeast really need nitrogen that badly?)

>>1146316
>Any comment on the flavor of bread yeast vs wine yeast?
bread yeast will taste yeasty and will die out before converting all the sugar, leaving it sweeter

wine yeast produces higher alcohol content and cleaner taste

mead would be one of the few things where bread yeast is still worth considering

>something juicy and potent
fruit would provide more substance than spices

I just started fermenting a big batch of wheat beer, but I was unhappy with the potential alcohol of the wort, so I added some molasses I had lying around. Did I just fuck up my brew?

>>1146507
Do you like molasses?

>>1146537
It's pretty good, but only when cooking brownies and stuff. I have no idea what's gonna come out of this, gross wheat beer? Will it taste like rum? Is that a good thing? I have no idea.

>>1146558
You added the molasses during the boil right? Not after? The sugar will ferment out but you'll still get flavor from the 'lasses. It might be a little odd but i doubt it will take over your brew. It will dry out the mouthfeel/finish.
I regularly add honey to batches to bump up the abv. As long as healthy enough yeast is pitched to eat all that sugar and get the gravity down enough

>>1145940
>kind of like drug dealers giving you the first hit free.
This so much

I started out with a $50 coopers starter kit, the type where you just add water to pre hopped cans and chuck some yeast in. Came with a fermenter, 30 PET bottles, hydrometer, thermometer and a big plastic spoon.

Next thing I know, I have 2 temp controlled fermentation fridges, sparge urn, grainfather with upgraded controller, more fermentation buckets/barrels, bottles than I can poke a stick at and I'm contemplating buying a pre-made kegerator with 3 corneys and a 6kg C02 bottle.

Has anyone ever added all their hops in the last 5mins or less of the boil?

Thinking about doing a SMaSH with Maris Otter and Citra, just gonna add 60grams at 5mins left of the boil.

Does it really impart a smoother bitterness? Guess I will find out.

>>1146316

I've never used bread yeast so I'm reluctant to comment on it. You'll struggle to get more than 8%abv, and it will be a bitch to clear because it doesn't settle like wine yeast. Distillers get by because they are able to make cuts. The taste could come down to personal preference but off tastes are widely disliked.

You'll get alcohol by using bakers yeast, it could even be bretty gud. It costs the same price though, and with eBay mailing it to your door I don't see much reason not to use a beer or wine yeast.

I admit I'm biased and basing everything on other people's accounts. I might try a small batch sometime since I'm curious now. I've read that of bakers yeast the fast-rise isn't as good as the other ones. Red star active dry is what I'd suggest, I've seen it in Kroger and Walmart.

Is it a bad idea to use beer bottles and bottle caps to bottle wine? Used brown beer bottles are free from my friends and parties and easy to clean and remove the label on, so I'd prefer to use them over wine bottles. I don't drink grape wine much, so I don't have the same access to lots of used wine bottles like I do beer bottles. I also don't want to spend fifty bucks for a dozen of wine bottles when I have free bottles so readily available.

The only thing I can tell would be a problem is if I tried to make champagne in a beer bottle with a cap due to the pressure. But since all I'm making are still wines, beer bottles should be fine, right? Anybody tried this before?

>>1146865
I don't see any reason why not, as long as you use new caps

so far I've used plastic and a few sparkling wine bottles

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Trying my second try at fermentation. I'd done it before when I was underage with some random shit I had, and 2/10 of my attempts were gag inducing failures. Interestingly, the two that worked were the only two I opted for balloons on, rather than airlock (I think sanitation was the issue). I've read up on things since then and have money for real equipment in the future, so I'm giving things another shake.

I know this is max cheap ass (I even used distillers yeast and nutrient to ensure that it worked), but this is more of proof of concept for me. Even if it's shit I'm fine with losing ~10 bucks. I was just too chickenshit to jump right in. Thinking of trying a brew kit with an extract recipe next.

>>1146870
Plastic is ok for aging? Not that I care much about quality for this batch I was more concerned with plastic leeching.

Pressure wouldn't be a concern with bottling the wine then? Good to know; I want to make fruit wines but I didn't want to shell out for proper wine glasses when beer bottles are so plentiful.

>>1146873
>Plastic is ok for aging? Not that I care much about quality for this batch I was more concerned with plastic leeching.
PET should be okay, they sell plastic bottles in beer kits, but if you're worried you can always try to find some empty wine bottles

if it was something I planned to wait a long time on, I'd probably opt for glass

>Pressure wouldn't be a concern with bottling the wine then?
there really should be any pressure since fermentation would be over when you bottle it, either wait till all the sugar ferments out, or use something like potassium sorbate to stop the yeast

>>1146711
What is your batch size? For a standard 5gal batch, 60g won't give you anywhere near the bitterness you need.

>>1146865
I bottle sparkling and still meads both in beer bottles. Never had one explode. I think if you tried to cork bottle a sparkling wine or mead, the cork would blow out if you didn't lock it in with wire. In fact, the homebrew owner in my town told me someone gave him a mead corked in a wine bottle that hadn't completely fermented out and it blew the cork.

>>1146711
The 5 minute point is more for flavoring, not imparting bitterness. That's why AAU isn't important at that point. But there won't be any underlying bitterness to counteract the sweetness of the malt.

>>1146901
I got around 30 IBU from doing this >>1133245. I don't see anon having any trouble with getting bitterness, maybe he isnt after DUDE BRO HOPS YOLO.

I forgot about my aquarium pump areating the wort and it was on for about 4 hours. It had a massie foam head ontop about 4 inches tall.
Will it effect the head retention as those protiens are a one use only type thing.

Anyone ever tried distilling? Thinking of setting up a gin still

>>1133757
Yup. I did a gallon using frozen strawberries. Heat then up like 5lb+ of berries in water to leach out the juice. Add your standard protocol of nutrient, a teaspoon of acid, pinch of tannin etc. Used equal parts honey, white sugar, brown sugar to o.g. 1.1 something... Pitch with Lalvin k1v. Rack after a week or so our whenever primary slows. Rack every few months. Backsweeten. Age. Delicious.

I used a full packet of yeast on a 1gal batch in a 3gal container - is my fermentation going to be fucked up now?

>>1147555

What are you thinking? I've been playing with the idea of stills for a long time now. I think I've nearly settled on one.

Induction cooktop, brew kettle, corny in brew kettle under vacuum. I like the idea of vacuum distillation, for some reason not many people do it. I'd imagine it works better for gin since you have less heat and more delicate flavors.

>>1148484
No.

At most, if it's a style that depends on underpitching to get some esters, it'll be a bit lacking in that respect.
Overpitching is almost never bad. Most likely your batch is going to be fine.
Or if you meant the fact that you have 2 gallons of free air in the container, that isn't bad either. Maybe you shouldn't age your brew for months, but that's it.

>>1148489
Yeah it was the air with lots of yeast. That's reassuring though, should I only pitch for two weeks or so or an entire month?

>>1148491
What are you making? Generally,most beers ferment in two weeks, but a mead that's really strong can take way longer to fully ferment. Use a hydrometer to measure when the brew is fully fermented to get accurate results.
But your brew should be fine to stay in the container for a month, easily, assuming your temps aren't ridiculously high.

>>1148498
I'm just making a simple batch of white wine, this is my first brew. Was in a rush and didn't use a hydrometer, this batch will probably turn out bad but it's a learning process I guess

>>1148530
Eh, I wouldn't worry. Just bottle it normally when it's finished fermenting and let it sit in the bottles for a while, there isn't much in homebrewing that time can't fix.

>>1148545
>there isn't much in homebrewing that time can't fix.
You never had the joy of drinking my first few beers. I learnt that cleaning and sanitation is extremely important.

>>1148696
Well, aside from that.

>>1148488
Gin sounds like it'd be the most fun but it looks like I'll need a lot of gear I don't have. Vodka seems easy but I can't imagine homebrew vodka even being potable

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What's the most difficult brew you've made so far, /hbg/?

Pic related. Here's a sake I've been working on.

>>1148843
You can make vodka that challenges many commercial examples with enough filtering. I'm not sure but I seem to remember a buddy of mine making vodka from failed brews/kilju and filtering it with active carbon filters for 3 times or so, and it was quite palatable. It wasn't russian standard but it didn't burn like the cheap stuff either.

>>1148844
Nice rice-krispies senpai :^)

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So I am setting up a DIY C02 injector for my fish tank. Anyone have any ideas on how I could change the typical setup ( 1c sugar + 1 tbsp yeast + 1c water) to make something drinkable? I've never homebrewed before.

>>1148871
Consider replacing your bottles with juice containers and adding the yeast directly to those. Slightly drained beforehand to allow for expansion.

Cider can ferment and be drinkable in about 7-14 days, thought it can be shorter or longer depending on how sweet/dry you want it. You won't get anything high quality, but you'll definitely get something drinkable.

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>>1148843

I have to agree with >>1148859. Make your cuts and run through a carbon filter. You can even make your own filter without much trouble. Vodka is simple stuff. How bad can 95% filtered then diluted to X% with water be? Especially considering the 12%abv sugar wash is under $2/gallon.

Gin doesn't really need much more equipment than a homebrewer/stiller would already have. You need a boiler, a still, and your ingredients. Pic related and link:
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=48668

The hardest part sounds like waiting for the maceration. It's just flavored vodka after all.

>>1148871
You would need to sanitize the containers with the brew in them - either using heat or a sanitizing solution like starsan/iodophor. Use juice instead of water, maybe a little bit less sugar to compensate. Preferably use brewing yeast (like red star montrachet, should be cheap and pretty easy to find) as long as that pushes the same amount of CO2 that you need. When it's done giving off CO2, chuck it in the fridge for a couple days to let everything settle out. Then carefully siphon or decant the brew off the yeast at the bottom. If your sanitation is good, you could reuse that yeast at that point, just throw more juice and sugar in there and bring it back up to room temp.

I'm just wondering, can I force carbonate my beer in kegs, then bottle it? I read that it spoils a lot faster, I'm not really to sure.

I'm thinking if I kill the yeast, I can then back flavour with anything, and force carbonate, and still share it.

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>>1149151

I don't see how it would spoil any faster. You might want a counter pressure bottle filler for it though. It's hard to keep it carbonated otherwise.

>>1149151
I've heard of people in my homebrew club conditioning some high-abv beers for half a year in corny kegs, so I doubt it will spoil in there. Likewise, if you bottle the beer from the keg and nothing malicious gets in your brew, I have a hard time believing it would spoil faster than bottle-conditioned beers.

http://beersmith.com/blog/2017/03/07/how-to-backsweeten-beer-cider-and-mead/

>>1149151
If you just use a tube attached to your tap that reaches the bottom of the bottle (like how bars fill growlers) you can bottle something that will last a few days before it gets flat and oxidized, so that's fine for just bringing beer to a party or whatever. If you want to store the bottles longer than that then you will want something like a beer gun, like >>1149241 . I think that's how a lot of people who enter homebrew competitions will bottle their beers.

Anybody ever tried skeeter pee? I've tried it twice, once with fruit ("dragon's blood"), and once with just the lemon juice (no fruit). Both times I couldn't get the mother fucker to ferment, no matter how hard I tried. Both times I've pitched multiple starters, stirred the shit out of it twice daily, but had zero fermentation after a week both time.

Is there a better way to make this? I like the idea of lemon wine and it's so cheap, but this is fucking bullshit.

>>1149420
Have you ever fermented anything else?

I haven't tried it but was on my way and got stopped by life.

Store bought juices have anti bacterial shit in them usually. Maybe boil them extra long? I was planning on some pectinase in there too because they would be so starved for carbs.

>>1149430
>Have you ever fermented anything else?
Yeah, I've made a bunch of cider.

>Store bought juices have anti bacterial shit in them usually. Maybe boil them extra long?
The directions don't say to boil the juice (it says to add 1/3 cup when making the invert sugar for some reason). Boiling large quantities of lemon juice would actually produce seriously off flavors.

They add sodium benzoate to lemon juice, which serves the same purpose as potassium sorbate. The directions say to stir it for a few days, which is supposed to get rid of the preservatives and add oxygen to make the must a little bit more habitable for the yeast. I have stirred the fucking shit out of the must for 2 days before pitching a very foamy starter, and stirred vigorously every day for a week. The hydrometer never budged once.

Both times I tried this with ec-1118 starters. I've been suspicious for a while, but this has mostly cemented my belief that it's not nearly has tenacious of a yeast as retards on the internet like to think it is. I might try this again with kiv-1116, but I'm really kind of pissed at how much money I've wasted on a recipe that isn't working for me. Also the 1118 stripping more flavor than 1116 would probably be beneficial for lemon wine, but I dunno.

I'm also starting to think it's a meme recipe that doesn't actually work as written. You could add the juice after fermenting up some sugar water, but supposedly the yeast produce very different flavors in the low ph must (which makes sense).

I want this recipe to work, but I really just don't know anymore.

>>1135908
He did what to his wort?
Damned degenerate

>>1149449
It's 4chan, did you not expect some weirdos to be here?

>>1149430
I've made about 9 batches from store-bought juice.
You just have to look to make sure there are no preservatives like potassium sorbate.

Most store-bought juices are pasteurized, which kills all or most of the bacteria in them. This is why they don't go bad on the shelf. Most I've seen have no extra preservatives. Oddly enough, I've never seen regular grape juice with potassium sorbate, but white grape juice always seems to have it. They are both pasteurized so I have no idea why.

>>1149449
It's in the previous thread if you check the OP.

>>1149420

I've made it a few times and never had much trouble. In the morning I usually pour the lemon and sugar in the bucket and let it sit a spell in hopes the nasty shit floats out. That evening I dump nutrients and whatever other stuff I'm adding, water from high enough to aerate it, and then my slurry or starter. I don't invert the sugar so it's slower I guess. I just add the 2qt lemon at start and the last lemon with fining.

How are your temps? Maybe next starter you could occasionally add some of the must to help acclimate the little guys.

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77% orange liquor before and after watering it down to 40%
If you don't wanna distill, you can make a similar beverage by soaking orange peels (not the white parts) in vodka

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>>1149688

The clear bottle contains 77% and the cloudy 40%? I guess the cloudiness is oil, kind of like with absinthe and louching. Pretty neat but why dilute to 40%? Wouldn't it degrade faster or something? I'm pretty clueless when it comes to spirits.

>>1149688
How'd you get into that kind of thing, anyway? Would love to make something like that, but other than using orange peels and vodka I have no idea how to get started.

Made a shitty batch of Kilju about 3 weeks ago, just opened it and had some. It'll do for parties, but I was hoping to surpass prototype stage.

Can anyone link things to help with? There was a specific site I saw ages ago, and I haven't been able to find it since, I think it was just a text document somewhere.

Also advice here would be cool too.

>>1149909

I've been reading about sugar wash on Home Distiller. They're finishing in 2-3 days on some of their batches
>http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=5230

They like to keep alcohol on the lower side, so it's not exactly what I'm looking for with kilju but our goals are compatible in some ways. Those being a fast, clean, and cheap ferment. It's a starting point at least.

I'm thinking of doing a recipe based on his and chaptalizing until the yeast crap out. I want to end up with something in the 18-22% abv range. Once it's clear and had some time to mellow I'd keg, add shit to make it cream soda, and force carb. I'll have to do test runs to see how high abv can get before the off flavors are too much. Since it will be loaded up with sugar, vanilla, and acid to cover the alcohol it should be possible to get away with some stressed characteristics. Lactose and maltodextrin should give it some interesting character.

>>1149437
The natural solution is to find lemon juice without preservatives.

>>1149833
The cloudiness is indeed from the oil. Actually now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not so sure about the percentages anymore, since the liquor seems to have a lot of oil, which skews the density towards looking like a higher percentage of alcohol than it is.
I diluted it, because that's how you get the most flavour out of it. Also 77% alcohol is a little bit too strong to drink for most people.
>>1149836
If you are able to distill alcohol, you put some neutral alcohol into your pot and place the orange peels in a pervious compartment like a sieve above. The alcohol vapor seperates the oils and flavours from the peels and transports them into distillate.
If you don't have a still, the soaking orange peels in vodka method is probably the closest you can get to that.
I also read about people taking 96% alcohol from the pharmacy in a jar and placing a whole orange on toothpicks over the liquid without letting it touch. After a few weeks in a warm spot the alcohol vapor would dissolve the flavours out of the orange as well.

>>1146711
Get a brewing software like Beersmith and dail in your equipment on it. It will tell you the expected final IBU's. If I did that on my system it comes out at 33 IBU as I have a 15min whirlpool after flameout.

>google search for the regedit trick to reset beersmith trail

>>1149981

I figure the lemon juice is mainly for pH so I substituted 30g citric acid per 1qt lemon juice. I haven't actually tasted it yet but the sg is down to 1.008 so it won't be much longer. I used shitty dollar tree lemon juice in my Pee before so I'm probably not missing much. Lemon extract and maybe some zest should replace any lemony characteristic I want come time for bottling.

If you can even find lemon juice without preservatives it's fucking expensive. Skeeter pee is meant to be cheap.

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How's my batch looking senpai?

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>>1150225
Pretty
Like little hollow eyes, or maybe spider eggs. You should get someone to taste it.

I like when they look like eyes. It's best when the eyes aren't infectiony though.

Im doing my calculations wrong /diy/?

I'm starting with fruit wine. My idea is to create a sweet low alcoholic beverage. I'm not even interested in the alcohol I want to reduce the amount of sugar in fruit juice and add some flavor.

So I get whole fruit juice (apple or grapes) that says 23 g of carbohydrates per cup. I consider 23º Brix. Then I add 70 g of sugar to make a 30º Brix juice (is this right?). I ferment for 2 to 3 days (aiming for long alcoholic content) but the final beverage comes dry as fuck. Feels like the greedy yeast got every molecule of sugar in the juice.

Btw my temperature is around 27ºC and I'm using baking yeast. Today I'm gonna try using white wine yeast and I'm planning to buy saccharomyces bayanus but dn't know about it.

>>1150265

I'm not familiar with brix but google is showing me 23 and 30 brix are 13 and 20% abv. Most homebrewers use specific gravity. 23g/1cup is 96g/L sugar, SG 1.035, or 4.5%abv. I'm not sure how low you're wanting to get in alcohol. Adding 70g sugar/cup will bring you back up around 20% alcohol, too high. What size is the container of juice? If you mean 70g to the container that would be 8% in 1L or 6ish in 2L.

To keep it slightly sweet could use a yeast with lower attenuation, let it go dry and stabilize/backsweeten, or try to halt the fermentation early by coldcrashing and adding sorbate. There are also nonfermentable sugars like lactose, but some yeasts can break it down so as always sanitation is important. Bread yest is commonly said to go to 8% but some people report getting much higher.

>>1150265
>two or three days

I've had some frozen grape juice going for over a week now with wine yeast, and currently tastes like sparkling wine with a bit of alcohol

>>1150275
Oh shit, so in order to avoid dryness and keep things cheap I need to actually use less sugar and add sugar after the fermentation stops?

In my head I started with something like 30g/100mL of must then let it fermented for only a few days so my beverage still had like 20g/100mL. Now I actually need to start with a smaller sugar concentration, get a dry beverage but with low alcoholic content then sweet to taste?

>bread yeast go to 8%
Thats what I want minus the yeasty taste.

>>1150225
Delicious! Maybe!

>>1150290
Remember to stabilize by using sorbate or something before backsweetening if you don't want to simulate trench warfare in your kitchen. The yeast will start fermenting again if you just wait it to go dry and then dump more sugar.

Anyone tried banana wine? I got a paper from college but they used some enzymes to avoid the color turning strange. Another book said they do it very simple in Africa so I went for the african method. After 2 days I had grey milky beverage that smelled too much like acetone. Don't know why but banana goes for the acetone smell very easy.

If a gallon of cider (5L carboy) tastes a bit yeasty will it improve over time? I added a cup or so of honey for flavour but it tastes like the yeast fed on it

>>1150575
How old is it? Give it some time and let it age.

>>1150575
Time fixes it, I'll guarantee it.

>>1150626
>>1150646
I've had it bottled since about December or maybe early January

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I have a 25L sugar wash brewing.

took some pics, shitty quality, my phone camera lens is smashed.

hasn't been a very violent fermentation, came up the blow off tube a bit but never into the blow off carboy.

5kg sugar
25L water
pack of EC1118

kinda looks like 25L of frothy semen, but whatever, alcohol!

>>1150783
What does this wind up tasting like?
just water and alcohol?

>>1150784

I have never tried to drink it as is. this is just a batch I made to test the still i built. i imagine it's bland and dry since it will ferment out fully.

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>>1141668
>>1141683
>>1141851
so i'm this guy over here. I haven't started brewing yet, but a friend told me i could use commercial spruce beer in my beer, by simply pouring in about 6L into my 24L brew.

would it work?

pic related, what i intend to use

My wine has stopped bubbling through the airlock after about a week or so. Is this fine? I didn't check the label before throwing the juice out so I may have accidentally fallen for the potassium sorbate meme

>>1151271
If it started there probably wasn't potassium sorbate.

My juice ferments tend to go for a couple weeks before they slow drastically, but they have plenty of added sugar. If you didn't add enough extra sugar, the yeast may have consumed most of it now, and it may be time to rack the wine.

>>1151140
Preservatives may cause problems.

>>1151271

yeast variety and temperature will influence how quickly / slowly your fermentation will start/finish. The only real way to know if your fermentation is complete is to check the gravity at start and again when you believe it has finished.

>>1151586
I was in a rush and didn't check the initial gravity. I'll know it's done if it is now 0, correct?

>>1151590
It depends on the yeast. Not all yeast strains will completely ferment out. some will leave residual sugar some will ferment until completely dry. If you were seeing activity through the airlock and that has now diminished, if you were to compare that with your gravity readings you should have a good indication of how close it is to being complete. you can pull a sample and taste too, see if it's sweet or not, but you forgot to take a reading so you will have to go off of taste and airlock activity for now.

just make sure whatever you do when you are pulling a sample that everything is sanitised.

if you know the brand of the juice you used can you not look up the ingredients online also? to check for preservatives?

if you choose to do the same brew again and again it will get a lot easier over time, you won't have to take gravity readings you will just know when it's done as long as you keep the variables (yeast strain, brand of juice, amount of sugar) the same.

>>1151592
I just used champagne yeast. Ingredients don't show any preservatives or potassium sorbate so that's good. The wine is still awfully foggy though - is there a way to clear it up? And if I taste it will I get sick from drinking any yeast in it?

>>1151638

No yeast won't make you sick, at least it's never made me sick. you have 2 options for the haze. you can wait, if you give it enough time it should settle by itself. or you can use finings, there's lots of options for finings and different people use different things, i prefer 2 part liquid finings that use gelatin.

you need to make sure fermentation is stopped though before using finings. if you sample and you think it's where it should be, as in it's finished, I would give it a couple extra days just to make sure, then add finings. alternatively you can add a fermentation stopper like potassium metabisulphite to ensure for certain that fermentation is stopped and all yeast are dead, depends on your preference, whether or not you want to keep it as close to "natural" product as possible or you don't mind adding things.

the only thing with keeping it natural you must ensure the yeast is dead before bottling, if there's still activity then you bottle, you'll get the dreaded bottle bombs. that's why people will add potassium metabisulphite because then you are 100% sure it's not going to start re- fermenting in the bottle.

if you use a fermentation stopper keep in mind you will not be able to carbonate in the bottle, so if you are making a cider or beer and you want the carbonation and you are not using a co2 cylinder to force carbonate, you cannot add anything to kill the yeast otherwise when you add your small amount of sugar to the batch it won't ferment in the bottle, which is what you want if you want to carbonate, i say small amount of sugar because if you add too much sugar you will end up with bottle bombs.

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>>1151638

p.s. also here is a info pic i found on yeast, so you can see it's actually quite healthy.

>>1151642
>>1151644
Thanks for the info, very helpful. I'm going to let it set for another week or so and hopefully that'll clear it up.

>>1151751

be careful if you move it to a colder room or the temperature in the room you are in drops significantly. like i'm sure you know, hot air expands, cold air contracts, so if you move it into a colder room, the air gap at the top of the fermenter will contract and suck the liquid from the airlock back into your lovely brew. I had this happen once. this is why you should use a weak sanitizer solution or cheap vodka in your airlock instead of water, then if it gets sucked back into your brew it's not going to let all the nasties in that would have been sitting in it if it was just plain water left for weeks.