Anyone here homebrewed?
So I was looking at things to do while in my last year of University. Even though the booze is cheap, I'd love to be able to brew my own.
Was wondering firstly what is the safest to make? Wine? Beer? Spirits seem to be just like a time bomb, not least as my extraction fan could spark and blow my bathroom up.
Has anyone here ever made Wine or Beer at home? I was checking out tutorials but would like a personal level of interaction. Will go into town to get aupplies later this week if I can think of where to get them on the cheap.
Was wondering firstly what is the safest to make? Wine? Beer? Spirits seem to be just like a time bomb, not least as my extraction fan could spark and blow my bathroom up.
Has anyone here ever made Wine or Beer at home? I was checking out tutorials but would like a personal level of interaction. Will go into town to get aupplies later this week if I can think of where to get them on the cheap.
Comments
This site sells everything you will need. A beer or lager kit costs about £63 to make about 40 pints. And they sell ingredients quite reasonably too.
http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/index.html
If you have any questions ask away.
I was thinking, is it easier to make wine, as Beer can make off quite a stink I assume with all the yeast involved? I have a friend who makes the two and I certainly can tell the difference in his garage.
I was thinking along the lines of something like this,
but if that fails, then I can always go for a regulated kit where I know the %ABV of the end product which y'know, tends to help. Would like to live a few more years.
It's interesting that chippy finds beer easier to make than wine, as wine in my opinion is almost impossible to screw up. You can practically make it on accident. The only hard part is waiting a month or so for it to ferment. I've made everything from dandelion and other floral wines to fruit wines and proper grape wines. The key is making proper airlocks and having enough sugar for the yeast to convert to alcohol. If the alcohol content is high enough and the airlock reliable, it's never going to spoil. The main concern is stopping fermentation at the right time and racking before the sediment can have a negative impact on flavor. I'm an all natural guy and don't add shit like sulfites, and I don't filter. But I still get wines with good clarity because I take the time to rack and bottle to precision. Eventually you want a hydrometer to make sure you've got the right gravity. You can start out without one and have excellent wine but something about it makes you picky and you're going to insist on perfection.
"Made wine" ales are also piss easy. They're basically ales made with a gruit and no malts. Bitter wine, basically. Nettles are really good for this.
Mead has always been my pain in the ass brew to make. It takes longer to ferment, clarify, and taste best. But it's still fairly simple - at the base level it's just honey, water, and yeast.
And that's really the "spirit" of homebrewing in my opinion. I used to be caught up on really "exotic" ingredients for making cool novelty wines that I couldn't even find online but the same basic ingredients can taste 1000 different ways. It's all in the details that go into making it. It's an art.
I can't say I've made legit beer with hops, only ales because I'm cheap and I'm not going to buy hops. Instead I use ground ivy old-school style and malt my own cereals. I've got a few upcoming pursuits including an amaranth ale and a smoked oatmeal stout. Beer and ale can be quite the art as well, there's such a huge assortment of bittering agents and cereals to play with out there. And the bitter wines are almost limitless. Experimenting is half the fun. At my worst, I made a psychotropic ale with mugwort but that's for another time.
The most important points are good airlocks, quality yeast, sterile equipment, a siphoning tube, and eventually a hydrometer. Also from experience, the less sugar you have to add, the better. Adding sugar in order to raise the alcohol level almost always makes the end product more harsh IMO. However, in some cases this can impart a desirable quality. I like to lay on the brown sugar in my bitter wines. Again, experiment.
Oh yes, and if you've never had it before, you owe it to yourself to make a batch of hippocras from a good red wine. It's not really homebrew so much as a mixed drink. Easily my favorite "dessert" drink. I'd drink myself into a diabetic/alcohol poisoning coma with it if I had an unlimited supply.
this is what I use to make before I was old enough to buy alcohol myself. mum figured it wouldnt taste good enough to drink and get drunk off so she diddnt care. she was wrong.............
you will need!
- electric jug
- fruit
- yeast (get wine yeast, not bread yeast or turbo yeast)
- tea
- sugar
- one ballon
- large bottle ( those water cooler ones work well)
- tupper ware container
-pot
-funnel
-pin
firstly! be very very clean! bacteria is the enemy. so are fruit flys
skin and chop up fruit into the tupperware container(leave the skins out haha) pour boiling water over the fruit till water covers the fruit and seal the container.
leave for two or three days.
strain fruit and water/ now juice mix and pour it into a large pot and bring it to a slow boil. add sugar, add the sugar with a ratio 4:1 ( a good guide is 1/4 cup of sugar to every 1 cup of water) stirr till sugar is dissolved. then grap your bottle. pour some boiling water into the bottle and slosh it around to kill any bacteria. then pour the juice into thee bottle (still hot). now brew a cup of tea and throw that in too (hold the milk and sugar). cover the top of the bottle and leave to cool to room temp.
now add some yeast. I used to throw in about a table spoon. watch out you dont use too much or it will taste foul. them put the balloon over the top of the bottle and prick it with a pin.
wait till the brew is more or less clear, bottle and enjoy! leaving it for a further 6 months will make it taste better.
I perffered to use feijoas. tastes fucking beautiful!
this will make you a very basic drinkabe fruit wine. if your really going to get into taste/ smell/ clear quality. your will need to refine the process more. using hydrometres etc, to get the right alcohol content and taste and so on.
You should really give it another go, it's fun. I'd actually love discussing homebrew on here with you guys, I'm always bullshitting with a friend about it who makes just as much as I do. If it makes you feel any better, my first batch of wine was made in a bunch of individual 1.5L bottles because I didn't have any larger containers and I used a latex glove while fermenting with baking yeast. :facepalm:
On the plus side, it was REALLY amusing to see the glove inflate and wave at everyone.
It's pretty cool though how quickly you pick up on it. That batch wasn't too terrible but now apparently my wine is good enough for family to enjoy as well and some people buy bottles off me on occasion. I try to keep my cellar stocked with my own supply but it's hard when you drink proportionately to how much you make and I've almost always got various things in the back going.
I remember the first batch of elderberry wine I made. I left it on top of the spare room wardrobe after it was bottled. Unfortunately it hadn't stopped fermenting, and upon returning from a fortnight's holiday, found that the ceiling and opposite wall were stained dark purple. Even after 3 coats of paint it showed through. I re papered the walls with lining paper and the stain showed through that too.
I've rescued a few batches of sour white wine in the past by adding a little brandy to each bottle
Good news is, it's really inexpensive to get to the point where the drink is good. But it's that way with all drinks, really. Got a bunch of dried fruit in the freezer and nothing to do with it? Make wine. Oatmeal on the shelf and weeds in the yard? Oatmeal stout. Maybe I'm just too much of a cheap ass to bother with kits.
haha I did the same thing, and i used normal store bought juice. yeast dont like preservatives :facepalm:
yeh I'v been meaning to make some more as well. being a broke student means not much drinking so throwing some home brew in the cupboard wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Spinster, are there many fruit trees or berry bushes where you live? A lot of people are cool with having someone come in and pick from their yard and it's a good way to fill buckets with fruit for booze. Most people don't even use the fruits from what I've found. Floral wine can be really difficult to work with because petals just don't pack sugar so you have to really add sugar to the must for any reasonable amount of alcohol content. Otherwise, you're only going to get maybe 5% alc. if you're lucky and it's easy to spoil because of this low number.
A lot of ales should be really cheap for you to make as well, the biggest thing is being able to identify greens that are bitter but edible. This can be anything from dandelion to ground ivy or even mallow. You can get really interesting results using something with any sort of altering effect such as mugwort, wormwood, or wild lettuce but you need to know what you're picking. You use these to make a gruit in addition to spices if you like. You can use this with or without a malt and obviously, you can use hops just the same. Hops isn't magical, it's just a standardized bittering agent that became something of a legal requisite for beer in the early 15th century. As an example of a spruce beer recipe not using a malt:
So you can hopefully imagine that you can make it from tons and tons of different plant combinations and more to the point do so cheaply and easily. The only things you'd really need are yeast and whatever type of sugar you prefer. Maybe some spices. Everything else you can grab from trees or the ground. Plus, you get to drink stuff nobody else is running around drinking. "Bud Light? Hell no bitch, I'm drinking prickly pear cactus wine..." :cool:
you said something about making mead right?
So basically boiling water into container with honey on bottom, whatever shit you like, yeast, and be more patient than with wine.
Im going to try making beer in the future. but I think that I will cop out and buy a kit.
Actually I have no idea. Common sense says you'd be correct since both alcohol and honey are preservatives so if you racked it to perfection with no sediment and kept it in a cool, dark place it should last quite some time. I would look it up. Good luck on keeping a good bottle of mead around that long, though.
haha lol, being made from honey it might have good medicinal propertys too. thats give me an idea, but an expensive idea. Royal jelly wine?
As for my method of keeping stuff clean - it gets washed so all physical traces of dirt are removed. It then either gets 100c water if it can stand it, if it cannot it get 40c water with bleach then a cold rinse. Never had a batch fail.
I just use kits at the moment. When I was a kid I would malt my own barley and buy hops, but there were a lot more home brew shops then. I also put it on the back burner for a few years.
If you are using kits, I would use at least a can and a half of the gloop per 40 pint brew. I know the can says in most cases 'do 30 but its good for 40' but this simply is not the case unless you add something like spraymalt - maltose extract. Beers made with sugar are not beers as wines made with sugar are not real wines, however I have done both and will do again depending on how much fermentables my batch has in it.
The way I do my beer - bitter and stout mostly - is to do 80 pints at once. I start the yeast off first, dissolve a couple of spoons of sugar in a cup with boiling water, add cold so it is blood temp and add the yeast and stir. For each 40 pint fermenting bucket, I add a can and a half of stout or bitter gloup and half a pack of spray malt. Put boiling water in your containers before hand and have some extra spare to get all of the gloop from the cans. Add twice as much cold water (making sure what ever you use is clean - I use the kettle, as it has been boiled a lot recently, its pretty damn bug free) and feel the temp. You want it at blood temp and stir the yeast in.
Let it be for a few hours for the yeast to take hold and then top it up to about 60-70% full. Do not fill it. Put the lid on it somewhere warm and out of the way. After 8 hours it will be near foaming - if you had filled the container it would overflow. You want it going quick so no wild yeast have a chance to breed in and taint the brew or cause settling problems.
When it has finished fermenting, after 5-7 days I syphon it into a clean 40 pint barrel or fermenter and let it stand for 2-5 days, by which point it is pretty much clear. I syphon it into pint bottles primed with 1 tsp white sugar - you invariably get some yeast cary over and this refermentation gasses the beer in the bottle. While this creates a little more sediment, its no problem, as long as you do not throw the bottles around it stays in the bottom. I let them sit a week and then they get 2 days in the fridge. As long as you drink your beer from a glass like a propper gentleman its no probs.
I have got some good recipes for things like elderflower champagne (laughably cheap to make) and ciders you may wish you had never learned to make due to their potency and complete ease of making with relativly little kit.
Oh, and if you use two cans of gloop per 40 pint brew, you end up with some strong, thick stuff. It can be thicker than guinness or best scotch (if you know best scotch beer) and do not add so much water to cool it - let it cool on its own before you add the yeast as it could blow its top once it gets going.
Some of it does, but it is mostly cordial that has preservative in rather than juice. I have made shit loads of turbo cider with cartons of apple juice. For best results, check the ingredients - the preservative I see most often is sodium metabisulphate, although I have fermented juices that contain that.
Yeah you can. I love the stuff.