Making Beer. I just got one of those Mr. Beer Kits. Any tips brewmasters?

by UnConfused 12 Replies latest social physical

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  Bendrr

  Ah beer! My favorite subject besides guns.

  I did the homebrew thing a few years ago and it was fun. The beer was so much better than storebought, in my opinion.

  Most important part of homebrewing is CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN! Don't use tap water, use distilled water. Sterilize everything. Twice. That's the most time-consuming part.

  Like others said, go ahead and splurge for a starter kit from a home brewer supply store. I got mine for $100 and it included everything, even 2 cases of bottles, a big bag of caps, and even the press to cap the bottles. Well worth it as an initial investment, because after that all you really need to buy are the actual ingredients and some more sanitizer and bottle caps. Everything else you just clean and reuse, even the bottles.
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  mustang

  One thing that you are NOT supposed to reuse is Champagne bottles. They wire the sparkly corks down for a reason: pressure.

  Now that pressure is supposed to weaken the heavy walls of the bottle. So, they are supposed to be used only once.

  Well, they were my favorite bottles, so I reused them. But I seldom wired them down. For one thing, I didn't make that much bubbly; I read that chapter and did try it though.

  And I like the champagne stoppers, the plastic ones. This is about the only thing plastic that I go along with in the wine world. I go with the polyethylene being inert enough and small enough in this instance.

  But I had a volunteer bottle of bubbly: pineapple wine. First, nothing I did would clear (or "fine") the stuff. (NO, I didn't try dry ice remuagge.) The ordinary efforts still had little fine pineapple fuzz floating around; OK, so what.

  I left it on the shelf and surprise, when I opened it, the cork popped down the hall. It was bubbly and looked like lemonade; tasted great.

  Then the lady friend comes over and I said, you have to try this. I opened it and the stopper popped again. Wow, that bottle just wouldn't quit.

  I had occasional cork, stopper and carboy plugs "blow the lid" (2 gallons of grapefruit ferment dripping from the ceiling once). But since I didn't wire them down, I never did have a bottle shatter.

  Be careful!!!

  Mustang
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  jgnat

  Dad got in to the wine-making. He got great pleasure from it as it suited his personality very well. From watching him I learned; be clean (see all comments above), be precise, follow the recipe, don't skip steps.