/diy/ - Do It Yourself

[Anonymous No.391766]

Hey /diy/ I've seen a couple threads on home brewers, and I recently just finished my first batch of American Light classic with my Mr. Beer kit and it actually turned out great, and I have the itch for more.

I want to move up to a larger batch size and try experimenting with different recipes. I hear the hobby is pretty expensive but I really like the idea of producing my own alcohol.

Side bar, I would also like to start a batch of mead and since that stuff take a couple months to be good I would like to know any tips and info on that as well.

[Anonymous No.391778]

It's really not that expensive to get into,once you get down to it.

Discounting my starting kit(buckets,carboys),if I want to make a simple extract kit,I can get it for about $25,which gets me about 48-50 bottles. I would have to spend a lot more than $25 to get the same amount of beer from a store. Only real problem I have is I keep seeing stuff,and of course,I *must* have it or make it.

Anywho,homebrewtalk.com has articles and forums which you should totally go through and read. Also Northern Brewer
has a learning section,go watch a bunch of their videos.

[Anonymous No.391779]

Make some ginger beer, dude. There's non-alcoholic recipes, but you can add sugar and let it sit longer, or find an alcoholic one. Add some pineapple/lemon/orange and substitute some of the sugar/simple syrup for honey, and it'll be really good...

[Anonymous No.391782]

OP, you could also consider making cider. It's ridiculously easy to make extremely tasty alcoholic drinks.

As an aside, there's a brew called cyser or cyzer, which is apple juice and honey fermented. Takes as long as mead, but if you're doing a batch of mead you should make at least one demijohn of this.

Also try cold fermenting. Takes longer, but you end up with a much deeper flavour, especially with racking and maturation.

Pic related is 10L of my homemade fruit cider, from apples and strawberries (the light one) and blackberries (the darker one). Was 7.3% abv.

Any questions on cider, I work in the industry, and I'll be watching the thread. I love brewing threads.

[Anonymous No.391801]

>>391782
Thanks, I'm really excited to get more involved in the brewing process.

Do you know a good site or like have a personal starter kit for me to start brewing cider? It seems pretty simple and it looks fucking delicious.

[Anonymous No.391816]

>>391801
http://www.ukcider.co.uk/wiki/

That's a good place to start understanding not just the process, but the culture. There's not really a lot to it, but I'll go through the process and ingredients.

In this case, your juice is likely to be pasteurised if you buy it from a shop, that's good. Try to buy juice which is not from concentrate - concentrate has the pectin and a bunch of other tasty volatiles removed by the harsh heating process. You can use concentrated juice, and you're substituting flavour depth for initial cost, so that's up to you.

Your next decision is whether you want to chaptalise it. This means adding sugar to increase the final ABV. Like concentrate, purists frown on this, but it's your choice. I personally steal concentrate from work, and mix it with real juice, as well as chaptalise it, for a good mix of economy and flavour.

Once you've decided on your juice blend, you're ready to ferment.

Sterility of the vessel is key. Clean with detergent, and rinse with cold water from the tap. In the industry, we use peracetic acid to sterilise, but if you use vinegar, that's almost as good. Boil some water and wash the vinegar out of your vessel, keeping it as sterile as practicality allows. Prepare and sterilise your airlocks beforehand.

Sterility is very important for cider. Acetic acid bacteria, if allowed to propagate, will turn your lovely juice into vinegar, and require no oxygen.

Once you've decanted the juice into fermenters, you'll want to pitch it. Most guides I see just talk about lobbing the yeast in, but our industrial practices have refined the pitching process to increase efficiency and decrease lag time (the time it takes for yeast to start working).

For each 5L fermenter, I would recommend the following pitch process:

>1/4 tsp yeast (cervisae)
>1/4 tsp yeast nutrient
>1/8 tsp diammonium phosphate
>about 20ml water, warmed to about 30 degrees C

>contd.

[Anonymous No.391828]

>>391816

Add the yeast, nutrient and DAP, and mix with the water. Whisk the yeasty mix for about 5-10 minutes with a fork, in an attempt to expose the now-live yeast to oxygen. Finally, just pitch the mixture into the juice. Ideally, the juice should be about 20 degrees, but don't worry if its colder, you'll just shock the yeast a bit.

If you don't have easy access to DAP or fermaid/nutrient, I'd heavily HEAVILY advise you to invest in some nitrogen-rich nutrient. Use it as per the instructions.

You could take an SG reading if you want to. Cider ferments to below dryness if the yeast are healthy, and normal cervisae will ferment to between 10-15%ABV. In work, we aim for 1.090 SG, to give an ABV of 13.30%. You do NOT want this, it's too strong, and you need far too much sugar to get it to this. I tend to aim somewhere between 1.06 and 1.07 SG, and attain about 6.8-7.4% ABV, because the fermentation tends to stop above dryness when making at home. A bit of residual sweetness in the end is good, and you can get this better by using table sugar (sucrose) as opposed to glucose syrup.

Basically, when you've pitched it, leave it somewhere consistently cool and dark. Try not to remove the airlock, in order to preserve sterility. Put something absorbent below the fermenters, they'll probably leak in the first stages of fermentation.

During fermentation, temperature is vital. Anything over about 25 degrees risks spoiling the cider, due to the yeast multiplying quickly. This means there's not enough nitrogen, and they begin to synthesise undesirable chemicals such as indole and hydrogen sulphide. A good thing to do is keep them in a bath with water about halfway filling, if you happen to have a spare bath, This ensures slow temperature variations, obviously.

Finally, when the fermentation's finished, you need to wait for a week or so. This allows the yeast to fall out of suspension. When it's fairly clear, siphon your cider into another STERILE container.
>contd.

[Anonymous No.391829]

>>391766

looks like a jenkem huff-bag

[Anonymous No.391837]

>>391828
Ensure that you leave the waste yeast (lees) in the bottom. You don't want to drink that.

Now your cider is ready to drink. However, I'd recommend about a month of maturation. After maturation, siphon the cider off again, leaving the lees.

You can bottle it if you want. I found a great little trick. Basically, honey fements very slowly. I added 10ml honey to each of my 2L PET bottles and kept them in the fridge for a month. On opening they were pleasantly carbonated and ever-so-slightly sweetened through a slow secondary fermentation, It was like apple champagne.

I intend to sell it every year, but I'm just so damn addicted to it, and it makes a fantastic gift, so I never get round to selling it.

Pro-purist mode: Pick your own apples and hire a macerator and press for a day. I've done this a few times, and it's incredibly satisfying, and incredibly delicious. You'll need to add a small amount of sodium metabisulphite (camphor) before fermentation though, to get rid of the wild yeast on the apple skins. Wild yeast fermentations are fucking rank, don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise, they're hipster cunts. Controlled fermentation of quality ingredients makes lovely cider, and I'm sure, beer too.

Best of luck. Here's my finished product.

[Anonymous No.392059]

recently started doing the same with hubby. imo the initial spending is a little bit expensive, we spent $45 on a 6 gallon carboy and had to buy a bunch of fun things but it came to under $100. doing a 5 gallon batch right now of honey beer and all ingredients required for it ran around $20. 5 gallons of beer for $20 is a win

[Anonymous No.392082]

>>391837
>You'll need to add a small amount of sodium metabisulphite (camphor) before fermentation though, to get rid of the wild yeast
brewerfag here
what the fuck is that about? how do you add chemicals to kill off yeast without affecting the fermentation later?
why not just boil the juice like you do with wort?

[Anonymous No.392123]

>>391766

OK I have had this kind of bug before. I would really like to try my hand at Ginger things. to start I want a non alcohol ale or soda pop. for the kids and test taste. now I live in middle of nazi fucking no place. I need a place that sells co2 tanks 5lb to a Max of 10. where can I find on the cheap. size matters as local house wont fill bigger or smaller without huge fees. if it all works would like to add home made pop to kegrefer. also any good recipes for Ginger ale, roots beer n cream soda would rock all non alcoholic though to start.

[Anonymous No.392163]

>>392082
If you boil the juice you'll destroy a lot of the more delicate flavours. Adding sulphur dioxide in the form of sodium metabisulphite at about 25ppm SO2 (total) stops the growth of the wild bacteria and yeast which are present in small quantities by binding to oxygen and stopping reproduction. When you pitch the yeast, you're putting enough in to overwhelm the 25ppm SO2, and fermentation will take place. Higher quantities of SO2 will stop a fermentation dead, but low levels act as a stabiliser, in the sense that you can be sure the only fermentation taking place is the one YOU want, not yours plus a bunch of wild yeast (brettanomyces, ludwigii).

[Anonymous No.392244]

>>392082
You know how almost all bottles of wine say 'Contains sulfites' somewhere on the label?

[Anonymous No.392255]

>>391766
Seems like most people have addressed the major beer brewing questions, so I'll leave those alone suffice to say brewing your own beer is a great hobby. You will get much more intimate with the process as you go along, which is a lot of fun. I built a wort-chiller about 6 months ago (been brewing for about 4 years) and it has made a world of difference. Pretty easy to make yourself for a lot less than you can buy one for, but I don't have to explain that to a bunch of /diy/ers.

So, mead: my lady and I are currently on our second 3gal batch of mead. It is much simpler than beer, but the patience is a bit more straining. "A couple of months" is a vast understatement if you want good mead. In general, high-quality mead will be 11-14%ABV, which cannot be achieved (without shortcuts that produce poor quality mead) in less than six months. Our first batch hit 13% at 7 months but the flavor really peaked at about 10 months. Our second batch is currently at the 9 month point and is at 13% steady with a really nice flavor profile. You have to make some decisions as to whether your want a dry or sweet mead and wether you want it to be still or sparkling. The other big choice is honey source. Since honey is a byproduct of pollen collection, different pollen sources will have different flavor profiles in the honey. A very nice, earthy taste can be achieved with a cactus honey..and so on and so forth. Clover honey mead is quite boring, in my opinion. If you have the room to tuck a carboy away in a corner, it is a very simple process and you only have to rack it 1-2 times during the entire period.

Let me know if you have any questions!

[Anonymous No.392291]

It's really not that expensive when you consider how much you're making at a time. Wine on the other hand is pretty damn expensive and more time consuming to make. If you want some fail safe kits you can go with northern brewer or midwest brew supply, they pretty much have everything.

Mead is simple to make. You need a fuckload of honey (my last two batches used 12 pounds of it), champagne yeast or similar, and some yeast nutrient. Mead will take longer than a couple months, half a year at the very least if you're making 5 gallons. The longer you wait the better it will be.

[Anonymous No.392351]

>>392255
>high-quality mead will be 11-14%ABV, which cannot be achieved (without shortcuts that produce poor quality mead) in less than six months.
are you talking about fermenting or just general ageing?
the strongest beer i ever made was about 10% and didnt take longer than a few weeks to fully ferment.

[Anonymous No.392358]

>>391766

If you really want good mead (and other alcohol) answers, register at
www.gotmead.com and join the forum.

[Anonymous No.392360]

>>391837
>add a small amount of sodium metabisulphite (camphor) before fermentation though

You sure that's not AFTER fermentation, to act as a preservative and possibly as a fermentation stopper?

Camphor is a different chemical, btw.

[Anonymous No.392377]

>>392351
>high-quality mead
>the strongest beer i ever made was about 10% and didn't take longer than a few weeks
>the strongest beer
>beer

See the problem here? Beer is not mead. Mead fermentation can take several months to run course and then another several months to age.

[Anonymous No.392491]

>>392360
No, I meant before. Low levels of SO2 will do away with wild yeast and bacteria which could cause spoilage. It's what we do in the industry. Mind you, in the industry we use a modified version of the ripper method to measure and closely control SO2 levels. If you fuck that up by putting too much SO2 in you can ensure you never get a fermentation, so be very careful if you do that.

And yes, I have just discovered that camphor is different. I always assumed it was weak, tableted sodium metabisulphite,

As an aside, ascorbic acid (vitamin C) at 150-200 mg/l will also preserve cider post-fermentation, if you don't like the SO2.

Picture from my lab. I got bored and made some different indicators.

[Anonymous No.392964]

I'd like to get into homebrewing with some cider, fruit wine, and beer. Not all at once obviously.

Is there a definitive set of equipment I need to get to handle that? Or is it up to preference? Also, will I need significantly different equipment for different applications?

[Anonymous No.393510]

>>391766
"STIR YEAST"
>FAILED