Been looking again to brew some beer for the Autumn. Tried Woodfords Wherry and BrewBarrel IPA. Both really good.

I have searched for Singletrack homebrew, one of the google searches took me to the homebrew site where they had posted the Picolax thread! Distracted me for a while….again. But well worth it.

So, what kits are people brewing? not ready to go on to grain yet. I saw the Tiny Rebel kit, anyone tried that?

Not tried the Tiny Rebel kit, but then I’m not that keen on Cwtch.

I’ve been making the Young’s American range, all are in the style of new world craft beers, lots of strong complex flavours, or my favourite is the Ritchie’s Festival range.

Some of the Festival range are “copies” of commercial brews. “Landlords”, Hook Norton”, “Black Sheep”, “Pilgrims”. The best one was Endeavours Pale Ale, an Inspector Morse tribute, but it was only a limited edition and now not available.

Both ranges are very good, they add extras in the box, sugar, dry hops, priming sugar, etc. Makes an all round better brew TBH.

But Woodfords kits are also really good, the Wherry and the Admirals Revenge both  make decent drinks.

I wasn’t overly keen on the Milestone kits, they all tasted a bit thin.

Oh, to add, it gets addictive, I’ve now got three barrels on the go at anytime. One drinking, two maturing, so you never run dry.

Drinking: Festival Passion Fruit Pilsner.

Maturing: Festival Golden Stag.

About to barrel: Festival Razorback IPA.

I used to use Coopers pale kits (throw away the yeast sachet), with dried malt extract instead of sugar and some nice dried hops, and SafaleUS05 yeast.  All available from <span style=”font-size: 12.8px;”>Hop & Grape if you don’t have a handy brew shop. I found the Coopers kits gave the most reliable fermentation with none of the sticking </span><span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”> you (or maybe that’s I) get with a lot of malt extract kits. Made a lovely us pale ale style brew. The Coopers stout kit is also really good, again with dried malt instead of sugar and some extra chocolate malt. Its a kind of next step to full mash (which I cant be bothered with).</span>

These kits – are they ones where you need equipment or just the ‘bung water in a bag’ type of thing?

Festival Razorback IPA

+1

These kits – are they ones where you need equipment or just the ‘bung water in a bag’ type of thing?

You need a bucket, ideally a bucket and a barrel and a lot of mates to drink it quickly.

Pour the contents of the kit into the sanitised bucket, add a few kettles of boiling water to dissolve it, top up with cold water, add yeast, wait 2 weeks, transfer to barrel number 2, wait 2 weeks, add dry hops, wait 4 days, drink (quickly) or bottle (fizzy pop bottles will do as long as you keep the beer in the dark, light ruins beer).

It’s addictive, I’ve got a BrewDevil now for making beers, a fermentation fridge, a keezer, about 25 demi johns for small batches and wine, and 6 gallons of fermenting wine on the go, we actually had more grapes than we could use this year because the weather has been so good!

The only problem now is I don’t actually drink that much! I’ve been thinking of getting registered with HMRC so that I could keep doing the fun brewing bit and sell on what I don’t drink as the actual economics of doing a a batch mean it’s barely worth doing anything less than the full volume (£2 Vs £10 on ingredients, it still takes all the same equipment and half a day).

Just going to get the Razorback!

I have all the kit. Just had to change the barrel tap, as the OH put the barrel on top of the washing machine when it had beer in. Later in the evening we hear an almighty crash and the beer had gone on the floor with the tap snapping and beer pouring out!

If you’ve got your eye in with a few kit brews, I’d encourage you to think about brewing from grain. Brew in a bag combined with no chill is relatively straightforward, and can be split over a couple of evenings.

I think I will go that way Ransos. My local brewery has been great with help. At a meet the brewer evening he said any issues just pop in and go through things with him. I like the idea of being able to play once I get the hang of it.

not ready to go on to grain yet.

Go all grain you won’t regret it. The difference from kits is night and day.

Are there any other bits of kit I will need then to go grain?

I have demijohns, fermentation barrel and pressure barrel.

Pressure barrels are a lot less faff than bottles. Plus you can’t take it anywhere and give it away.

Beer will keep for six months easily. No need to drink it all in one go.

Unless, you know?

Are there any other bits of kit I will need then to go grain?

Yes.

You need a mash tun and a boiler.

This is a great book for beginners, has some excellent recipes.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Home-Brew-Beer-Greg-Hughes/dp/1409331768/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1536768614&sr=8-2&keywords=home+brew+beer

This is a good website, it goes int a lot of detail, most of which you don’t need to be honest.

http://www.howtobrew.com/

Beer will keep for six months easily. No need to drink it all in one go.

Depends on the beer and the barrel.

Stainless barrels are good, plastic ones are permeable to oxygen.

Hop aromas escape, followed by the flavour, so big stouts tend to last longer than IPA’s.

Being sat on the yeast for a long time can lead to off flavours too as eventually the yeast starves and begins autolytic fermentation.

Bottling is more faff to begin with, but generally leads to better long term stability.

I rack mine after secondary fermentation and cold crashing, into corny’s which are the best of both worlds, they’re even just about portable as there’s no yeast inside to get shaken up. If using barrels I found it best to bottle a few for the shelf then have a BBQ to get through the barrel quickly.

Are there any other bits of kit I will need then to go grain?

The advantage of stove top BIAB is small batches and lots of opportunity to experiment as a result.

But if you can get through a 20l batch with friends and have some spare £££ I’d jump straight to something like the Brew Devil or Grainfather, it’s so much less messy, especially if you go down the corny/keezer route for storing and serving the beer, everything can then happen with pipes, pumps and taps rather than syphons and bits of tubing going everywhere!

Brew Devil -> Hop rocket -> plate chiller via gravity or a little 12v pump (cold water is circulated from a water butt outside with a second pump) -> primary fermenter

Primary fermenter (with a tap)  -> corny (via ‘liquid out’ connection)  via gravity, and the corny already blanketed with CO2 so you can start the flow by opening the PRV.

Syphons were the bane of my life (they may be less hassle if you have a partner who’ll provide the 3rd, 4th and 5th arm required to use them without making a mess).

Kits I’ve liked:

Woodfordes Bure Gold

Festival summer glory

Ultimate brewery classics surfers reward

St Peter’s Ruby Red

Festival Weissbier (was a special edition and very lively on the bucket- blew the lid off!!)

I started Cwtch on the weekend, it’s been a slow starter to ferment but is going well now. Doing the hop tea thing at the start before adding wort was new to me. It’s smelling good!!

I started with bottles then went to pressure barrels but have now gone to corny kegs which are super easy!

You could also look into extract brewing, it’s basically all grain but without the mash.

Starts with just the specialty malts steeped in hot water to get the flavours, then you add grain extract which looks like the kits, but isn’t hopped, and jump straight to the boil stage of all grain brewing.

It’s probably the most expensive way to brew in terms of ingredients, but the cheapest in terms of extra kit required, all you really need is a big stock pot to boil in (doesn’t need to be full volume, a 10l pot will be fine for a 20l batch you just add the water at the end like a kit) and your existing fermentation equipment.

Most recipes have an extract option, and if not you just delete the paler malt from the recipe and replace with the equivalent amount of extract, everything else can be steeped (you can get extracts that include a proportion of caramelized malts which would normally contribute some fermentable sugars).

This is also a good website for very friendly advice.

https://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/

There is someone selling a load of all grain kit of as well, tends to be cheaper than ebay.

https://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=81135

I just stick to 4-12l batches with BIAB all grain. Minimal equipment required and can be done on stove top. I use beersmith to scale down any recipes and order grain and hops online in exact quanties I need so I don’t end up storing lots of stuff. I have a 15l and 27l stockpot, the 15l on its own can handle 4l batches fine (which I do most often) and use the bigger pot for 12l batches. I just bottle mine as it’s not a lot of hassle for such small quantities.

It doesn’t produce that many bottles but it keeps me going and I find I experiment more if I stick to small batches. It’s a fun little hobby for the autumn and winter months.

You need a mash tun

not if you go brew in a bag. But you do need a mesh bag and a boiler big enough to hold the bag full of grain. You can get stainless steel for hob-top use, for about £70 last time I looked, or plastic, digital electric for non-hob use, mine cost £130 iirc.

BIAB is quicker than the mash tun method too. 60min mash, 60min boil, plus the time it takes to get up to mash / boil temp. Plus the time it takes to chill (optional, you could use the no-chill method,  but do not add the yeast until it’s down to < 22degC)

i used to do BIAB demo days at my LHBS, typically start at 9:30am, mash & boil would be over by 1pm, with 19-23 litres of wort in a fermenter ready to take home & add yeast.

two methods of chilling require further equipment but as I said above, not essential. Copper coil immersion chiller – run cold water through the coil until the wort is chilled, typically 45mins – or plate chiller, run cold water through the chiller in one direction, hot wort emptying from boiler into fermentation vessel in the other, until the boiler is empty, typically 15-20 mins

The Mangrove Jack’s kits are good

for the BIAB AG. don’t need anything more than a big pan, spoon, colander, etc. for trying out a load of small batches

https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/have-a-go-at-simple-ag.51779/

BIAB is quicker than the mash tun method too. 60min mash, 60min boil, plus the time it takes to get up to mash / boil temp. Plus the time it takes to chill (optional, you could use the no-chill method,  but do not add the yeast until it’s down to < 22degC)

This is how I do it:

Night 1: weigh out everything – hops into separate takeaway containers (labelled with when they go into the boil), grains weighed into a bucket. Assemble all equipment. Fill brew pot with required quantity of water, dose with gypsum etc if using.

Night 2: put water on, heat to strike temperature, put bag in pot and fill with grains. Cover with lots of towels. Put the kids to bed, eat some tea. Pull out the bag, bring up to boil, follow hop schedule. When finished, let it stand for 20 minutes, then drain into the fermenter (it must be one that can stand hot liquid – I sit mine inside a trug just in case). Leave to cool. Clean everything up.

Night 3: aerate wort (sanitised paint mixer on a drill), pitch yeast, place fermenter in a trug, add water and set aquarium heater to desired temperature. Then leave it alone for a couple of weeks.

If you’re using liquid yeast, draw off some wort on night 2, chill and pitch. I dilute the wort to about 1030 in a demijohn. It will have about 24 hours before pitching on night 3 which should be plenty.

My approach means that my weekends are kept free, only requiring one full evening (night 2), the other nights don’t take much time.

The Festival range are good but I’m now using the cheap Simple kits. Adding your own hops a few days before bottling helps but is not essential.

Brew fridge with Inkspot temperature controller made the most difference – keeping a constant, known temperature.

The Speidel plastic fermenter is a brilliant upgrade over a cheap brew bucket.