MaxTheKnife
Membership Revoked
MrO's thread about ginger beer really got me fired up about homebrew. Once upon a time, I was a regular brewmeister and kept a few pots of beer fermenting all the time. The more experience I got, the more I wanted to advance to better and better brewing techniques and ingredients. I should have known better and just kept it simple, but I just couldn't resist.
It got to the point that brewing up a batch of beer cost more than a good bottle of scotch! I'm not kidding. And I got burnt out on it because of all the failed batches. So I went back to commercial beer and have been buying it ever since. That was about 12 years ago!
So I decided to start this thread because recently I started a batch of beer the way I did it in the very beginning. I bought a can of Premium malt extract (it used to be Blue Ribbon Cane syrup) at the grocery store and brewed up a batch this past Saturday. The brewers yeast comes with the malt extract and it only cost $3.97 a can. Add three pounds of regular white cane sugar and that gets you two cases of beer. Of course it's more labor intensive than just handing over the sheckles for commercial beer. But the reward is in the taste difference if you keep everything clean and follow the simple rules to good brewing. And even if it tastes bad it's better than commercial beer. Ask any dyed-in-the-wool homebrewer!!!
There are many many advantages to brewing your own beer. Primarily, you can control how it tastes from batch to batch by keeping track of what you do or don't add to the wort while boiling it up. The ingredients you choose and the water you use dictates the outcome of a batch of homebrew. That's assuming you use good sanitary practices during the whole process. And the wide variety of things you can use to brew beer from is staggering. For instance, one of my planned projects for this fall is to finally brew up a batch of persimmon beer. Persimmons grow wild around here and my property is just lousy with persimmon trees. You can use rice, potatoes, bananas, beans, and all kinds of things. Which is a fine deal if you don't have malted wheat or barley available.
However, malted barley is the key ingredient in what we traditionally think of as beer. A while back I was buying feed for my horse and the fellow I was talking to told me I should try substituting malted barley pellets for the expensive alfalfa pellets I normally bought. And I asked him "did you say MALTED barley"? Yep, that's what he said. So I bought a 100 pound sack of malted barley pellets and hurried home to fill the feed can and have a look for myself. Yes, it was actually pelletized, malted barley! And how much did 100 pounds cost me? $7.89. That's enough malted barley to brew over 100 gallons of beer!!! Of course, the pellets would have to be toasted to give the beer good body and flavor. But that's not really necessary just to make plain old good drinking beer. And my horse loved it!
Sure, animal food grade malted barley might be a bit on the 'dirty' side. But you'd be surprised how clean animal feed manufaturers have to keep things during the process. And besides, the malted barley has to be par-boiled in the beer making process so that doesn't bother me. And no bacteria can survive the fermentation process so there's no worry.
Ok, so you get my drift. Making your own beer is a prep thing. Talk about trade goods! Oh man, beer will be like liquid gold when times get hard. The problem is finding enough cappable bottles and having a stockpile of bottle caps. That's just part of prepping. If you're anything like me you already have tons of old glass bottles stashed anywhere you can find the room for them. I'm a packrat and don't care who knows it! And you may be wondering where you'd get brewers yeast once the bottom falls out of society? It's in the bottom of every bottle of beer you cap. It's kind of like a good sourdough starter. You just keep adding to it and using it for your next days bread (or batch of homebrew). As long as your homebrew has live yeast cultures in it you can use the last little bit from any bottle of it to start your next batch. And any good homebrew has live yeast in it.
Well, I just thought I'd start this thread to see where it goes. Tell your homebrewing stories and share your knowledge. I shold be enjoying my first homebrew in a few weeks. I'll revive this thread and tell you how bad it was or how great it was. But regardless, I'll drink to your homebrewing health!
It got to the point that brewing up a batch of beer cost more than a good bottle of scotch! I'm not kidding. And I got burnt out on it because of all the failed batches. So I went back to commercial beer and have been buying it ever since. That was about 12 years ago!
So I decided to start this thread because recently I started a batch of beer the way I did it in the very beginning. I bought a can of Premium malt extract (it used to be Blue Ribbon Cane syrup) at the grocery store and brewed up a batch this past Saturday. The brewers yeast comes with the malt extract and it only cost $3.97 a can. Add three pounds of regular white cane sugar and that gets you two cases of beer. Of course it's more labor intensive than just handing over the sheckles for commercial beer. But the reward is in the taste difference if you keep everything clean and follow the simple rules to good brewing. And even if it tastes bad it's better than commercial beer. Ask any dyed-in-the-wool homebrewer!!!
There are many many advantages to brewing your own beer. Primarily, you can control how it tastes from batch to batch by keeping track of what you do or don't add to the wort while boiling it up. The ingredients you choose and the water you use dictates the outcome of a batch of homebrew. That's assuming you use good sanitary practices during the whole process. And the wide variety of things you can use to brew beer from is staggering. For instance, one of my planned projects for this fall is to finally brew up a batch of persimmon beer. Persimmons grow wild around here and my property is just lousy with persimmon trees. You can use rice, potatoes, bananas, beans, and all kinds of things. Which is a fine deal if you don't have malted wheat or barley available.
However, malted barley is the key ingredient in what we traditionally think of as beer. A while back I was buying feed for my horse and the fellow I was talking to told me I should try substituting malted barley pellets for the expensive alfalfa pellets I normally bought. And I asked him "did you say MALTED barley"? Yep, that's what he said. So I bought a 100 pound sack of malted barley pellets and hurried home to fill the feed can and have a look for myself. Yes, it was actually pelletized, malted barley! And how much did 100 pounds cost me? $7.89. That's enough malted barley to brew over 100 gallons of beer!!! Of course, the pellets would have to be toasted to give the beer good body and flavor. But that's not really necessary just to make plain old good drinking beer. And my horse loved it!
Sure, animal food grade malted barley might be a bit on the 'dirty' side. But you'd be surprised how clean animal feed manufaturers have to keep things during the process. And besides, the malted barley has to be par-boiled in the beer making process so that doesn't bother me. And no bacteria can survive the fermentation process so there's no worry.
Ok, so you get my drift. Making your own beer is a prep thing. Talk about trade goods! Oh man, beer will be like liquid gold when times get hard. The problem is finding enough cappable bottles and having a stockpile of bottle caps. That's just part of prepping. If you're anything like me you already have tons of old glass bottles stashed anywhere you can find the room for them. I'm a packrat and don't care who knows it! And you may be wondering where you'd get brewers yeast once the bottom falls out of society? It's in the bottom of every bottle of beer you cap. It's kind of like a good sourdough starter. You just keep adding to it and using it for your next days bread (or batch of homebrew). As long as your homebrew has live yeast cultures in it you can use the last little bit from any bottle of it to start your next batch. And any good homebrew has live yeast in it.
Well, I just thought I'd start this thread to see where it goes. Tell your homebrewing stories and share your knowledge. I shold be enjoying my first homebrew in a few weeks. I'll revive this thread and tell you how bad it was or how great it was. But regardless, I'll drink to your homebrewing health!
