[hairofthedawg]

From another thread...

Anyone do the Homebrew thing? I have done it a few times but not in the the last few years.
_________________
MaxCast

I had all the making for it and had just popped my yeast when I was offered a position in the field on short notice, so I packed the stuff up and haven't tried again.  I've since gotten rid of the equipment but have been tempted to try it again.  Anyone know of a good supplier that will ship overseas?

How did yours turn out?  I've tasted some that were very good, usually a pale ale and others that were bad, christmas beer.  That's what's nice about it though, if you can duplicate the recipe...you can find a way to make something just for yourself.  Plus, there are supposed to be sites out there, I've seen at least one, that have recipes that approximate your favorites.

cheers,

Dick

[Rocket]

hello,

i'm into home brewing my own beer.  i found it quite easy although a little time consuming when bottling the beer.  

i've tried many different brands even from england, i alway come back to coopers which is a south australian home brewing company, i usually make their bitter or lager beers.

not sure who could help with importing beers.  do they have any home brew shops in cyprus?

anyway good luck.

regards

rod

ps the secret is making sure that the beer is properly brewed, the container has been sterilised and also the bottles when bottling the beer.

[hairofthedawg]

Hi Rod,

How do you lager your beer?  When I think about homebrewing, I usually lean toward ale recipes because I "think" I can ferment them here and be close to the right temperature.  I've thought about buying a mini- refrigerator and a thermostat, but that's more investment than I like at first.

Do you use a premixed recipe or the raw hops, malt, etc..?  My stepdad used to use a premixed and it was really easy to do.  I'm not sure if there are homebrewing shops in cyprus or not.  I haven't looked and haven't seen any in my wanderings.  Should probably search the web for it I guess!

cheers,

Dick

[Rocket]

hello,

there are many home brewing beers available in australia, my favourite is the coopers brand.  it is pre-mixed in a can and is very easy and consistent to use,  the temperature should not be too hard to control.  in winter i use a heating belt and in summer i look for a cool part of the house to use.

24-28 degrees celsius is the preferred range for brewing.  firstly you need to buy a kit from a supplier, may'be you can look on the internet for a local supplier.  also i would recommend using a stand mounting capper as this is much easier to use.

home brew beer is great tasting at about 1/5th the price.

regards

rod

[hairofthedawg]

Thanks,

I've visited a few sites on the web but was wondering if anyone had  one with which they've had a good experience.  I thought lagers were supposed to be done cooler than that, but it's been awhile since I've read up on it.  I'll let you how it goes if I ever get the equipment and try it.

cheers,

Dick

[Wayne1]

Hello Guys,

I just thought I would throw my $.02 in.

I have been brewing for over 20 years now. Before I got back into audio, I brewed professionally for a dozen years.

Most ale yeasts tend to be happiest around 20 C. If you let the temp get too much higher they will start to produce quite a few off flavors and fusel acohols. These will give you a VERY nasty hangover.

Lager yeasts can be fermented at a broad range of temps. The most common is in the 10 to 12 C range. You do need to start them at about 20 C for 12 -18 hours and then drop the temp to 15 C over 24 hours and then to 10 C over the next 24 hours. You should keep it at 10 for about 2-3 weeks until the primary fermentaion process is finished and then slowly drop it 1 C a day to 4C for lagering. Once it is at 4 C. you need to remove the yeast from the beer. Then you can keep it a 4 C for up to 6 weeks for secondary fermentation.

For the most part, it is far easier, and cheaper, to use ale yeasts for homebrewing. There are some very good liquid yeast companies out there that supply homebrewers and pro brewers with the same strains.

Wyeast and White Labs are two of the best.

Some of the keys for making good, clean beer at home are using a very good yeast, making up a starter before hand, so you pitch enough yeast cells, aerate the wort  so the yeast has enough oxygen to reproduce and ALWAYS keep your equipment clean and sanitized.

I think that is enough for one post

Please feel free to ask me ANY questions about beer and brewing. I have lectured throughout the country on most of these topics and once you get me talking about brewing, I am very hard to shut up

[hairofthedawg]

Glad you are here Wayne!  Excuse the way I sound.  I normally use apostrophes and contractions, but the right side of my keyboard is acting strangely.  I hope it is not that drop of beer I spilled on it A few beginner questions.. Is there a difference between using glass carboys and plastic buckets for fermenters?  The buckets seem a lot easier to clean and sanitize to me, but are the carboys better enough to warrant their use?   It has been awhile since I have thought about doing this...sanitizing...chlorinated TSP, right?  Just mix it with water and swirl it around for awhile?  How important is chilling the wort quickly and is it important enough to warrant the purchase or construction of a wort chiller?

I did not realize that the temperature need to be varied for a lager, or that it needed to be that cold?  I will have to see if the fridge I am planning on using will get that cold.  What exactly do you mean by aerating the wort?  Is that the breathing apparatus that goes on top of the fermenter?  Thanks for all the info!

cheers,

Dick

[Wayne1]

Dick,

Glass is much better than any plastic for fermenting. Plastic can be scratched and you can NEVER remove the bacteria completely from a scratch.

Cleaning and sanitizing are two completely different steps. It is impossible to combine the two.

To clean you must remove soils. Only when the soils are removed can you sanitize.

Chlorinated TSP is okay for cleaning but it is NOT a sanitizer.

Iodophor is okay for sanitizing but it is very easy to overuse it . It will cause off flavors in beer.

The best chemical I have used for cleaning is a product called PBW made by Five Star Chemicals here in Colorado.

They also make a very good acid based sanitizer called StarSan.

There are many hombrew shops on the web that sell these products.

To clean a glass carboy all you need to do is to fill it most of the way with cool water, disolve the PBW cleaner in some HOT water and add it to the carboy. Shake it up a bit and just leave it for a few hours or overnight.

Then drain it and rinse. Then you can proceed to sanitize. fill it with water again and add the StarSan. Let it sit for 15 minutes and all the bugs are dead. You can leave the carboy filled with StarSan for up to a week without a problem of recontamination.

Once the boiling process is finished, you have made a perfet medium for spoilage bacteria. They really like a medium at around 25 to 60 C.

It is VERY important to get the temp dropped as fast as possible so you can add the yeast and they can start producing the protective blanket of CO2. A counter flow wort chiller would be the best thing, if you can keep it clean and sanitized. An immersion chiller would be the next best thing. You can ususally get 20 liters of beer to drop from 100 C to 24 C in about 15-20 minutes, if your source water is cold enough.

Once the beer (it is called wort after the mashing process and before fermentation is started) is chilled it is very helpful to inject oxygen into it. This will give the yeast a better chance to start reproducing faster to ward off spoilage bacteria.

You can use an aquarium pump to add air, if you use a good hepa grade filer to eliminate a good portion of the natural bacteria. I use a small bottle of welding oxygen purchased from a home improvement store when I homebrew. Most of the accesories are available from the on-line suppliers.

A lot of the techniques I have been describing are used by advanced homebrewers and pros. I really feel that what I have talked about is very important to create very clean beer.

You can make beer with out going through the steps I have described. It may be cheaper than what you can buy in the store, but it will not taste that great.

To my mind,  one of the reasons I got started in making my own beer, was to make something BETTER than I could buy.  I made beers that were quite different than what was available commercially. It seems that other people shared my tastes as I was fortunate enough to win over a dozen medals for my beers in regional, national, and international competition.

[MaxCast]

those were two real useful posts, Wayne.  I've been told the two most important parts in homebrewing are sanitizaton and the yeast.

Could you comment on the pro's and con's of using liquid vs. dry yeast?

Thanks a bunch,
Oh, sorry about last Thursday...

[hairofthedawg]

thanks for the clarification on cleaning and sanitizing and the recommendations on chemicals!  I knew they were two different processes, but thought it would be more difficult that what you describe with the odd shaped brushes that came with the last kit I bought.  I believe  I am thinking of an immersion chiller, it was a coil of copper tubing that you run the water through around the wort.  I do not think I have seen the counterflow type, does the wort actually pass through it?  Just wondering why you would have to worry about keeping it clean and sanitized?

I will have to check around and see what available for aeration. Not sure I want to invest a whole lot of money until  I am sure I enjoy it.  That is what I want to do as well, make something better and to my tastes.  I enjoy numerous varieties of beers and want to get good enough to come close to their tastes and then modify them more to my preference.

How important is the water?  Would you recommend getting a printout of its composition and trying to alter it?

Do you use software to invent your recipes or intuition/knowledge?  With your experience and awards I would guess the latter, but for a beginner, what is the best way to come up with recipes?

cheers,

Dick

[Wayne1]

Could you comment on the pro's and con's of using liquid vs. dry yeast?

The only pro with dried yest is that it is cheap

With liquid yeast, the yeast is in its natural state and it should be fresh.

Most yeast labs send their product out chilled, in insulated containers, shipped overnight express. The homebrew shops then store the yeast chilled. They also have dates on the containers so you know you are getting a fresh culture.

You have a far greater variety of cultures to choose from and they are all certified to be pure cultures. They are grown up from a single cell of the reference culture.

With dried yeasts, you are never sure what you are getting is from a pure culture. There are losts of oppurtunities for bacteria to contamiate the yeast during the drying process.

In either case, as a homebrewer, you do not have enough yeast to pitch into a batch. You really do need to make a starter culture of yeast before you brew.

This is fairly simple to do.

All you need is to boil up about a quart of water and add about a half cup of dried malt extract to it. Boil it for 10 minutes and rapidly cool it down. This can be done by immercing the small pot in chilled water while stirring the starter. I usually have to repeat this process about 3 times before the starter is cool enough to add the yeast. It should not be above 24 C. I then pour the cooled liquid into a cleaned and sanitized 1/2 gallon (2 liter) glass jug. I then add the yeast and aerate it. I put an airlock on top of the jug and place it in a dark place. Within 24 hours you can see a nice, active fermentation taking place.

Then you can go ahead and start your full sized brew.

When the 20 or so liters is cooled down to around 20-24 C you then add the active yeast starter to it.

This way you are positve you have enough yeast cells in the beer to start the fermentation process quickly, without any lag. You should see active fermentation within 12 hours.

I am not really sure what you are apoligizing for

[Wayne1]

Dick,

A counter flow chiller runs the wort through a coil of metal tubing, copper or stainless steel, that is then covered by a plastic tube containing chilled water running the opposite direciton. This is the fasest and most efficient way to chill your wort.

An immersion chiller will take up to 20 minutes to drop the temps down to 24 C and it can use up to 160 or 200 liters of water to chill 20 liters

A counter flow drops the temp as fast as the wort flows through it. I use a small pump to transfer my beer from my kettle to the fermenter. I can move 50 liters of wort in less than 4 minutes and only use about 75 to 80 liters of cool water.

Water is very important

I would get an analysis of the mineral content of the water you are using and then compare it the water normally used in the area where the beer style you wish to make is brewed.

There are lots of recipe guides on the web and in bookstores.

http://brewery.org/  houses the Cats Meow recipe collection which is amazing

I use Promash to do my calculations for brewing, both home and pro.

http://www.promash.com/

It takes a lot of the guesswork out of color and bitterness calculations.

[hairofthedawg]

Thanks Wayne!

I used to have a copy of ProMash and thought it was pretty good, but it is gone in one of my reformats of hard drives   I do not remember it being expensive either.  Thanks for the link.

When you were talking about lagering, you mention removing the yeast from the beer...is this only for lagers?  I thought the sediment in some ales, Sierra Nevada possibly, was dead yeast.  By removing it, do you mean siphoning  the beer into the secondary fermenter or actually removing the yeast?

cheers,

Dick

edit to add the following question...when I was getting ready to brew for the first time, I was going to use some yeast that came in an aluminum pouch or something like that.  Dont remember the brand, but it had another pouch inside that I punctured and it was supposed to be ready when the outer pouch had swelled up.  Are these good products and do they require a starter also?  Is there a brand that would survive shipment overseas without refrigeration?

[MaxCast]

I am not really sure what you are apoligizing for

Wings 4, Avs 2...

[Wayne1]

Dick,

In all cases, ales and lagers, you should try to remove the beer from the yeast when primary fermentation is over.  

In most homebrewing, this is accomplished by racking (transferring the beer, VERY Carefully) from one glass carboy to another one.

If you have the ability to adjust temps, dropping the temp to 4 C when primary fermentation is done will help matters quite a bit. At this temp, most yeast cells will go dormant and drop to the bottom of the container. This makes it a lot easier to separate the clear beer from the yeast.

If you leave the beer on the yeast after primary fermentation is finished, the yeast cells will start eating each other for food. This is called autolysis and it will add some nasty off flavors to the beer.

When packaging the finished beer, it can be filtered. then are many simple, single pass filters that are used in homebrewing. The filters that are sold for whole house water filtering are very popular. A 5 micron filter will keep beer fairly clear but still let some yeast through.

If you would want to sterile filter, you would need to get down to .5 micron. At a homebrewing level, you would need multiple filters in-line to achieve this.

The yeast you mention is from Wyeast. Their "smack-pack" isn't too bad an idea, but they do not package even close to enough cells in it.

The reccomended amount of yeast  is about 10 to the 6th cells/milliliter per each degree plato of the wort. A starter is needed to achieve this number.

I would suggest you contact Whie Labs and talk to them. I have found Chris White to be very open about his produsts.

I am not really that caught up in pro sports.
I find far greater pleasure watching my son play competive inline hockey.
He has made his high school's first inline hockey team as a freshmane. The freshman team beat their local rival school's JV A team yesterday 3-0

[MaxCast]

I am not really that caught up in pro sports.
I find far greater pleasure watching my son play competive inline hockey.
He has made his high school's first inline hockey team as a freshmane. The freshman team beat their local rival school's JV A team yesterday 3-0

I remember from last year.  We were talking about The Avs, Detroit and your kids playing hockey.  That is great that he and his team is playing so well.  It sure makes watching the game more enjoyable.  We just got a local ice rink build and I see many kids/teams playing there all year long.  My oldest son is three and the second is 1/2.  Hope one of them pick up the game!

Thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule and posting your comments on this thread.  I'm sure those who are reading have learned a thing or four.  I hope to do another batch or two before the cold weather goes away.  That sure helps in knocking the temp down.  I will definitely be taking many suggestions and applying them.

Here's to good brew and sweet tunes

[hairofthedawg]

Nicely put Max, good brew and sweet tunes!  I too, very much appreciate Wayne taking the time to answer my many questions.  It sure seems easier reading about him doing  it than I am sure it really is.     So, armed with this information, it seems I need to do some shopping, except now I will probably need a brewing room system...   I already know where the cables will come from... cheers Wayne!  Then again, has anyone ever done a shootout between the ts audio premiums and your cables Wayne?  I do not know that my hearing is refined enough to differentiate between high quality cables.  

cheers,

Dick

[Wayne1]

It sure seems easier reading about him doing  it than I am sure it really is.    

Whenever you do ANYTHING over 1,000 times (which is roughly the number of batches of beer I have brewed) it gets easier

If you ever get to Colorado, drop me a line and I will see if I can't free up some time so we can brew a batch together  

I have not heard the TS premiums, however Marbles did have this to say in the Odyssey circle:

For your mono's, for the money either the TS premium or Quattro's are great choice.  I can think of none better.

On an absolute basis, the Bolder Cable Nitro IC's will be better based on my prefferences on my system.  These are MUCH more expensive however.

My experience is based on having almost every configuration of Odyssey amp except the mono's (although I have a dual mono)  and the new Collosus.

[KevinW]

Wayne,
Thanks for your post, but that is serious overkill  
In my 12 years of homebrewing, I've made some damned awesome beer, without going to great lengths that you describe.  I've only had one batch of beer go bad, and that's because we were wasted when we made it.  Learned that lesson once.

Now of course my beer is never the same product twice, and that's why I am strictly a hobbiest brewer.  Nothing wrong with doing things right, but I've learned how to cut a few corners in your process that work for me.  You'll probably be mortified

On brewing the wort, I do this in a 4 gallon stainless pot.  When I turn off the heat at the end, I put the lid on and let it sit overnight to chill out.  I put a note on the lid so that nobody opens it, or else they die.  Then I strain the wort through a mesh pasta strainer into a funnel and into the carboy.  As the wort falls through the funnel and strainer, it gets plenty aerated. I then add cold water to make a nice 70F mixture, stir with a santized racking cane, pitch the yeast, install blowoff tube, and I'm done.  I've probably done 50 batches this exact same way, and no problems.

On santization... I always wash the carboys immediately after emptying, and hit them with iodophor.  If you don't wait, then it doesn't take much more then a few swipes with a carboy brush to get all the macro particles off the glass.  Then just before pouring the wort, I do this again, and make sure the wash the iodophor out with several hot water rinses.

I have gotten into the habit of starter cultures of yeast, but with wyeast, you can get away with pouring the yeast in directly to the 70F, wellmixed and aerated wort.  It may take a 24-36 hours for the yeast to get rollicking, but i've never had them be out-competed by other nasties.  I've done it that way probably 30+ times with nary an odd result.

Cutting these corners, I can brew a batch in three hours in the evening, and then transfer to carboy in the morning before work.  Lot's more doable for the amateur.

I've never used a wort chiller, although I have salivated over them at the brewing store.  Just can't get the gumption to spend the $ though. An oxygen pump in the wort is way over the top, IMO.

For the serious hopheads, I recommend using chinook hops exclusively.  2oz in the boil for 5 gallons is just about right.  Best damn hop there is... makes all other hops taste like miller light.

Cheers,
kevin

[Rocket]

hello,

i have been home brewing beer for 6 years and i wouldn't say that i'm into it in a really serious way.  the easiest way to brew is to go to a home brew shop and but a kit which will include the vat, airlock, sterilising equipment etc.

next the easiest way to home brew is to buy a pre-mixed can, as i live in australia i usually buy the coopers range.  although there are many companies which have these types of products.

it actually takes me about 30-40 minutes to brew and i make sure the beer is set between 22-28 degrees celsius.  i then leave the beer for between 5-7 days, making sure the vat is between 22-28 degrees, after it has brewed i check the beer with a hydrometer to make it is brewed properly.

i line up all my bottles making sure they have been sterilised and that i have charged the bottles with a cap full of sugar (this helps with the fermentation process) and then using a tube placed in the tap of the vat i fill each bottle with beer.  i use a bottle capper to put the bottle tops on.  i leave the beer in an area of the house which has consistent temperature for at least 4 weeks. after this it is ready for consumption.

i've had many ppl compliment me on how my beer tastes, as stated there are other ways to make beer but this is the easiest with good results.

do an internet search and look for a home brew shop, with luck you may be able to buy all the gear from them.

regards

rod