I am surprised this has not come up here before, as coffee and home brewing seem like parallel hobbies that would attract a similar sort of crowd. Personally, my coffee and beer journeys have a lot of similarities. I got into both over 30 years ago, but did both on a very amateurish level for a long time without evolving much. In the past few years I got more interested in both. I upped my game a level or two – still very basic but significantly improved, and very happy with the results I am getting. I currently have \~120 bottles (6 crates) of 6 or 7 different brews in the garage, so there is always something to drink. For a long time I only made the simplest pre-hopped liquid malt kits. I then moved to non-hopped dry extract recipes, adding my own hops. This is a more hands-on approach (though hardly more difficult) that gives better understanding of the contribution of the different ingredients to the final beer. I then discovered I was a hop-head and aroma freak, so added dry hopping and found that I love what it does to the beer – I will not dream of doing a batch without it now. I am still a very low-level amateur. I have not made the move to the all-grain Brew-In-A-Bag method, but who is to say I won’t do it at some point in the future? Currently I am mostly after hoppy pale ales, light in colour, big on hop flavour and aromas, not heavy on the alcohol (4-5%). Citra, mosaic, cascade, Galaxy, Nelson Sauvin, Amarillo (and a few others) are some of the hops I used recently. Comparing espresso to home brewing, I find that: * It is easier and faster to get good results with beer than it is with espresso (contrary to what it may seem if you hadn’t tried either 😊) * Much cheaper to get into beer than into espresso. A basic beer brewing kit (which is what I use) can be had for around £100, maybe slightly more including ingredients for the first batch of \~40 pints (don’t quote me on that – I haven’t checked recently, but the point is that there is no need for a lot of kit to get started, and it isn’t expensive compared to espresso). * It is easier to find good beer outside than it is to find good espresso (but one can quite easily make ace beer at home, much easier than getting to great espresso at home IMO). If you are already home-brewing – What do you do? What do you like? How have you evolved? What have I said that is completely wrong? If you have never tried home-brewing – what are you waiting for?

@"Doram"#54, I definitely fit the camp of enjoying some home brewing. I did it first as a student, with a plastic bucket and malt extract kits. A few years later I upgraded to a Cornelius keg system (washing bottles is a pain). Later on I decided to go whole grain and set myself up for BIAB (brew in a bag) with a large pot and gas burner. This was my setup for many years until the first lock down. As some of you who’ve read any of my other posts might have gathered I like building things. I therefore decided to upgrade my system from gas to electricity, so that I can brew indoors. I built a controller based on the https://shop.theelectricbrewery.com/, but for BIAB. I then modded my pot by fitting an element, temperature control and recirculation. I also built a counter flow chiller. I still do BIAB, but it’s much easier as I can set everything up in the utility room, and the PID controller and alarm means I can automate a fair bit. This is what my setup looks like now:[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/FBmYhbu.jpeg] Plus I added taps to the spare fridge in the utility room so I have a kegerator: [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/pyWArMA.jpeg] I need to brew again, but am waiting for raspberries to come into season as I want to try a raspberry sour.

@"hornbyben"#p11971 > @"hornbyben"#p11971 I built a controller based on the , but for BIAB. I then modded my pot by fitting an element, temperature control and recirculation. I also built a counter flow chiller. I still do BIAB, but it’s much easier as I can set everything up in the utility room, and the PID controller and alarm means I can automate a fair bit. > > This is what my setup looks like now: Looks fantastic, way out of my league! Makes me feel very humble with my plastic bucket setup, lol: [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/Z0DopuV.jpeg]

@"Doram"#p11973 there’s nothing wrong with a plastic bucket. These days you can make some great beers that way. One of my friends does mini mash, where you use malt extract for the bulk of your fermentables but do a small steep for the specialty grains and boil for the hops in a pan on the stove. This gives the recipe freedom of all grain but is a bit quicker and easier. If my explanation isn’t very clear. Here’s the equipment you’d need: https://www.themaltmiller.co.uk/product/mini-mash-starter-kit/ and here’s an overview of the steps: https://youtu.be/IQb0iQDwwoc I’m envious of your bottle collection. I always like the idea of a good stock of bottles, but was always too lazy to do that much cleaning. Kegs are quicker and easier, but you drink until it’s gone. I do like having CO2 though, as I’ve also set up one tap for sparkling water, which my wife and I enjoy. We try to reduce our waste, and carbonating tap water saves on a lot of plastic bottles vs buying it.

Really awesome to see your setups! It’s a journey I embarked on briefly and have been meaning to get into. I got a all-grain recipe kit that involved two big saucepans on the hob, a large sieve and a demijohn which was dry-hopped and then siphoned into 12 bottles. The end product was actually better than I’d expected but it was such a faff with all the equipment that I’ve not tried again. I’m keen to get into it, and I’ve seen some great YouTube videos but I still find the list of kit I need and the start-to-finish process a bit of a mystery. I’d love to buy a good quality kit of everything I need to make hoppy, hazy beers, but I don’t know what that is!

@"Ernie1"#p12002 the brew in a bag method is probably the easiest. This works as follows: - get a big pot (for a 40 pint batch you probably need 50L pot), fill with water and heat to mash temperature (usually about 60-70⁰C). - There are calculators on line to help you work out how much water you need to add, but I'm this method you're saying everything, including what you lose to boil off. - add a bag (you can buy or make from a net curtain), pour your milled grain in and stir - wait for the mash time (typically 30-60 minutes) - you might want to sit occasionally and heat a bit to keep the temperature in the right place. - pull out the bag to remove the grain - typically you don't rinse the grain. This wastes a bit of sugar, but you can just compensate by adding more to start. Grain is cheap. - bring to boil and boil for 30-60 mins depending on the recipe - you add your hops during this stage - cool - this can be with a chiller, or you can seal in a 25L Jerry can and let it cool overnight - put in fermenter, add yeast and wait - transfer to bottles or keg Everything before the boil needs to be clean and everything after the boil needs to be sterilised. If your decide to get started I would go for something like a porter first as they hide a lot of mistakes. Very hazy West coast IPA type styles are more susceptible to oxidation and probably best saved for when you're a bit more experienced.

> @"hornbyben"#p11995 [Doram](https://coffeetime.freeflarum.com/d/549/3) there’s nothing wrong with a plastic bucket. I posted the picture, so obviously I am not ashamed enough. ;- > @"hornbyben"#p11995 One of my friends does mini mash, where you use malt extract for the bulk of your fermentables but do a small steep for the specialty grains and boil for the hops in a pan on the stove. This gives the recipe freedom of all grain but is a bit quicker and easier. This (mini-mash in a cloth bag) is exactly what I do! My method is very similar to what is seen in your video, only I used dried malt extract and boil it with the hops. It saved having to do a full boil (bigger pot) and the time it takes to do a full mash, so brew day can be completed faster - it probably takes me 2-3 hours from start to finish, including sanitising before and putting things away after. Full grain obviously gives more options and control, and the ingredients are cheaper, but also more opportunity to get things wrong. There is some debate if it gives better results or not. I suppose it depends on how well you do it. > @"hornbyben"#p11995 I’m envious of your bottle collection. I always like the idea of a good stock of bottles, but was always too lazy to do that much cleaning. Kegs are quicker and easier, but you drink until it’s gone. As with everything, there are advantages and disadvantages. My method with bottles is simple and easy for me, because I am used to it. As soon as I drink a bottle, I rinse it with water and store it up-side-down in a crate, so it stays relatively clean and doesn't pick up nasties from the air. On bottling day, I sanitise the equipment in a second bucket, so end up having half a bucket full of no-rinse sanitiser. All I do is dip the bottles in the sanitiser to fill them up, then shake out the sanitiser and put back, up-side-down again, in the crate ready for bottling. This gives me clean and sanitised bottles, and I never had a problem with contamination. Many of my bottles I collected from beer I bought, but at one point I wanted some more so emailed a local small brewery and asked if I could buy some bottles. Beer people tend to be very nice, so they said yes. Had a really nice chat and walked out with some very nice beer and a few dozens of new un-labelled bottles. Beer keeps really well - I have some bottles I probably made 3 years ago, maybe more, and they are alive and well - improving like fine wine.

> @"Ernie1"#p12002 I’m keen to get into it, and I’ve seen some great YouTube videos but I still find the list of kit I need and the start-to-finish process a bit of a mystery. > > I’d love to buy a good quality kit of everything I need to make hoppy, hazy beers, but I don’t know what that is! Like coffee, home brewing can be as simple or as complicated as you choose. People used to do it 5,000 years ago, and I think the internet wasn't that big back then. If you found it too much faff and want to keep things simple - maybe take a shortcut and use malt extract? All you are missing is that you let professionals (with professional equipment) extract the sugar from the grain. In return you get to need less equipment, do a partial boil (smaller pot) and the process is shorter (maybe we can liken extract brewing to buying roasted coffee, and all grain to roasting yourself?). You keep most of the fun bits and can get really nice results with very little kit.

Thanks everyone that’s a huge help. I’m definitely keen to try all grain again, and I’m happy to invest a bit in some equipment that will serve me well! I have no intentions of scaling past 12 or 24 bottles so just things like stable heating/cooling/bottling are factors in what equipment I’d like to buy. I think the faff before was mainly that I was trying to make do with household items (the kit said large pasta pans…) and a sieve and it was just a big mess. Also the siphoning into bottles wasn’t much fun compared to some kind of tapped container. Have you guys played with water treatments? I sometimes read about how the hazier New England style beers have something added to the water.

Water treatment is very important from what my brewing friends have said. Styles like a London porter are suited to brewing with harder water than a Scottish ale. Breweries are quite secretive about how they treat their water for each brew, one of the few things that brewers can be cagey over. The water treatment is similar to water for coffee but with more of a range for hardness and alkalinity

> @"Ernie1"#p12020 I have no intentions of scaling past 12 or 24 bottles so just things like stable heating/cooling/bottling are factors in what equipment I’d like to buy. When you say "bottles", do you mean pint/\~500ml bottles? If so, personally I think you have the faff built in to that small quantity, especially if you are making 6 litre batches. Beer takes time. You start a batch, and you will only get to drink it in a few weeks (minimum). Cleaning, sanitising, brewing will take the same time for a 6 litre or a 5 gallon (20-23 litre) batch. For me, it makes more sense to use the small pot you already have to make a 5 gallon extract batch than to make a 6 litre all-grain batch. Personally I usually do 2 X 5 gallon batches back to back. This gives me \~80 bottles (40 litres) of beer which lasts me for a long time. If I was limited to 6 litre batches I would need to brew all the time and it would hardly be worth the effort in my opinion. My method has no syphoning and no faff (I think). I use an 8-10 litre pot to boil \~6 litres of water. If I do a mini-mash, I steep grains in at about 65C for 30-60 mins. I then do hop additions to the pot as the recipe calls. When done - the pot goes into the sink with cold water and maybe some ice to cool (it's a small quantity, so I don't need any cooling device). I strain that wort to a plastic bucket fermenter, top up with water, add the yeast and let it ferment. I don't have any temp control for fermenting (maybe in the future). Instead I just do it in moderate seasons when the temp in the house is about right (18-20C). Once fermentation is done, I put in some hop pellets in a hop bag for dry hopping. To bottle, I put the fermenter on the kitchen counter, connect a hose to the tap, put a second bucket (which also has a tap) on the floor and move the beer from the fermenter to the second bucket, leaving the sediment behind in the fermenter. I add carbonating sugar, put the second bucket on the counter and use a bottling stick to bottle (a simple pin at the bottom of the stick opens when pushed against with the bottom of the bottle, which is very convenient). Crown caps and a simple capper to finish off and that's it. > @"Ernie1"#p12020 Have you guys played with water treatments? Not really. I use tap water. I add a campden tablet because I have it, but I don't know if it's necessary. It is meant to get rid of chlorine, but I don't smell/taste chlorine in my tap water. I sometimes use 5 litres of Ashbeck to reduce minerals a little, but to be honest - I don't know if it's improving anything. This is another something that I may be looking at in the future, but have neglected for a long time.

Any home brewers in the house?

hornbyben

Doram doesn’t sounds like your stuck at all. It sounds like you’re exactly where you should be. Hitting the sweet spot of effort/cost versus the value you get out of it.

No point spending more and upgrading just for the sake of it. It’s a slippery slope and often doesn’t actually bring you more enjoyment.

hornbyben

Next stage of the fermentation for my raspberry sour.

Rack the beer into a secondary fermenter to separate the beer from the yeast:

I prefer to use my stainless steel fermenter, so I gave it a clean, sterilised it and transferred the beer back. Obviously for each transfer everything was sterilised and the pipes went to the bottom so there was no splashing. I then added 1.4kg of raspberries, which I put into sterilised bags (aka hop socks).

The beer is setup again with an airlock, and I’ll leave it for 7 days before kegging, with a couple of squeezes of the raspberry bags in this time. I didn’t bother routing the gas through the keg this time as the main fermentation flushed it. It will now just sit ready and waiting to receive the beer when the fermentation is finished.

I had a taste and it was very pleasant. Quite clean with an acidic tang, very refreshing.

DavecUK

hornbyben Do you do all this in the Utility room?

hornbyben

DavecUK I do indeed, although it’s a decent size utility room

hornbyben

Gave the raspberries a squeeze. Looks like a murder scene, but taste wise I’m very pleased. Very clean with notable raspberry flavour and a tart hit from the lactic acid the yeast produces. Gravity is at 1.010, and I was expecting 1.008, so A few more days and it’ll be ready to keg.

LMSC

hornbyben Have been reading this thread with a lot of interest. This is not only a great read, but also a pro set up. How many litres does this get you, if I have missed it?

Is there anything you can’t do ? 😂

Well done mate!

hornbyben

LMSC glad you’re enjoying it.

I like to brew one keg at a time, which is 19L (33 pints) so that’s what I sized everything to. I try not to drink excessively (i.e no more than a couple of drinks fri, sat, sun and no midweek drinking), and also like wine and whiskey, so this usually lasts me a while.

There’s plenty I can’t do (sports for example), but I don’t share that online 🤣

Ernie1

@hornbyben

If you don’t mind me asking, and I appreciate it’s probably not a straightforward calculation; how much do you think your home brews equate to per ~500ml?

The reason I ask is that as a consumer of a fair few craft brews, I’ve noticed some are incredibly expensive. It’s not uncommon to see stronger Deya or Howling Hops beers in craft shops for £6.50 per 440ml can, and usually above £5 buying direct. I’ve bought beers above that too, collaboration TIPA style beers for like £7.50 a can.

I appreciate there’s a cost that goes into commercial labelling, distribution and canning (not to mention the marketing etc) but I’d be curious to know what kind of mark-up there is on some of these beers.

hornbyben

Ernie1 my software calculates this so it’s actually quite easy. These prices are for consumables only though, and don’t include electricity, labour, cleaning chemicals, investment, alcohol tax, VAT etc.

Ball park most brews probably come in at 80p - £1.50 per litre.

The cheapest is something lowish alcohol without much hops. I did a 3.2% mild that cost 81p/L.

Hops and fruit can be more expensive. The raspberry sour I’ve just done was £1.21/L.

Like most businesses though the fixed costs and overheads can be a large part of the cost.

Doram

Ernie1 The reason I ask is that as a consumer of a fair few craft brews, I’ve noticed some are incredibly expensive. It’s not uncommon to see stronger Deya or Howling Hops beers in craft shops for £6.50 per 440ml can, and usually above £5 buying direct. I’ve bought beers above that too, collaboration TIPA style beers for like £7.50 a can.

I appreciate there’s a cost that goes into commercial labelling, distribution and canning (not to mention the marketing etc) but I’d be curious to know what kind of mark-up there is on some of these beers.

I think some of the price you pay is tax on alcohol. I bought a few bottles from a local microbrewery and there was quite a big difference in price between beers. I asked what was the reason and the answer was that it’s mostly the tax, which is based on the ABV (higher alcohol content = more tax). When you brew your own you buy grains/malt extract, not alcohol. What your yeast do with it later is none of the taxman’s business. ;-)

LMSC

hornbyben

Giphy - Real Estate New Listing GIF by The Jamie McMartin Group

😂

Ernie1

hornbyben

Really useful info thanks.

We’re in the process of purchasing a house with an outbuilding with plumbing and electric so whilst I’ll need to use half as a studio for work I’m planning to set up a bit of a brewing space and really get stuck into it.

Really appreciate the info, I’ll inevitably be back with more questions when I get started.

hornbyben

LMSC sorry, your going to have to explain that one too me. I don’t get it 🤷

LMSC

hornbyben

🤣

hornbyben

LMSC 🤣 gotcha, although obviously at at least £6.50 per 500ml 😜

LMSC

hornbyben

Assume you will thrown in a forum deal ? 🤣🤣

hornbyben

LMSC obviously, £6 each 💰

LMSC

hornbyben There is already a thread created in our classifieds! Posted in error. You can use that. 😁

hornbyben

LMSC oops

hornbyben

Ernie1 no problem. Always happy to give some advice. It’s a fun hobby, although it does always feel like it’s about 50% cleaning 🤣

hornbyben

Doram while this no doubt has an impact, and can probably justify pushing up the prices by £1 per pint, but I think higher alcohol beers are considered premium, so they can charge more for that reason too.

I just checked the rates (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rates-and-allowance-excise-duty-alcohol-duty/alcohol-duty-rates-from-24-march-2014) and they are:

Low strength beer: 1.2% to 2.8%:
- 8.42p per L per %
- This works out at 10p/L to 24p/L
General beer duty: 2.9% to 7.5%:
- 19.08p per L per %
- This works out at 55p/L to £1.43/L
High strength: >7.5%:
- general duty plus 5.69p per L per % (24.77p per L per % total)
- This works out at: 7.6% is £1.88/L; 10% is £2.48/L, 15% is £3.72/L

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