I just picked up one of these kits from Williams Sonoma: <a class="postlink" href="http://brooklynbrewshop.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://brooklynbrewshop.com/</a> On a whim, and at half price. It's the summer wheat recipe. I'm not expecting too much from the ingredients, but it's got a one gallon carboy, which is a great size for a guy in a bachelor apartment, plus some tubes, pipes, a thermometer, etc., so that the only stuff you really need besides the kit are a stock pot or two and a sieve. I'm excited.
For anyone following along at home, I just popped open the first bottle, and the batch is surprisingly good. Normally I'm not the biggest fan of wheat beers but this is actually pretty respectable, without much of that orange/coriander flavour. It was kind of a pain in the ass doing it, and there was a fair bit of spillage and frustration along the way, so I suggest you have large pots and a pair of helping hands for the pouring, funnelling, and bottling. I was expecting to get eight half-litre bottles out of the venture, but only got five (partially due to my pots not being large enough, partially due to spilling, I think).
Congrats on your first batch! I think you'll find that once you understand the process and are comfortable with it you'll just want to scale it up to 5 gallon batches. It does require a little more space but if you're going to go through exactly the same amount of time to do 5 gallons as one, why wouldn't you? Plus the majority of kits are 5 gal batches. As for a pot, people may try to say otherwise but I've used a huge aluminum tortilla pot for years with good results. It was under $20. The first time you boil water in it it forms an oxide coating that is inert unless you really try to scratch the hell out of it which you really shouldn't with a plastic stirring spoon....
Yeah, it's fun to brew and all, but getting a gallon isn't quite worth the effort. I've found one of those you-brew places near me that does 23 litre batches (so, 6 gallons), and you just have to show up once to pitch the yeast and a second time to bottle. I think I'll go in this week and start a batch. But that's just because it's cheaper than the beer store.
Funny, in Aus the only fermenters you can buy make up to 25l. I have 2 but only make my brews to 20l, I can decant the whole thing into a keg that way. I brewed for several years with only a 11l stainless pot from kmart (maybe $25), made hundreds of extract and partial mash brews. Now have a 40l electric urn as well, good for double brews and full mashes. <a class="postlink" href="http://store.coopers.com.au/products/diy-beer/coopers-diy-beer-kit" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://store.coopers.com.au/products/di ... y-beer-kit</a>
I brew in 5 gal batches, and most recipes are geared towards this volume. I'm not sure how one would brew a one gallon batch. It really isn't worth the effort.
I imagine it's close to how you brew a 5 gallon batch, but on a smaller scale. Seeing as I'm in a small apartment, it's easier to try the one gallon size thing out; I wouldn't have the space for the carboy or large stock pots that I'd need for a five gallon batch. In any case, last night I threw some apple cider from a local orchard into the carboy with some brewer's yeast from the bulk barn. It took almost right away and the airlock's been bubbling every three seconds. Looking forward to how this turns out.
Quick question... This is my first go at extract brewing in a legit 5 gal. setup. Before transferring from primary to secondary, the gravity was close to the FG range for the recipe, but after two weeks in secondary, hasn't changed much and is still .004 above the high end of the range (FG 1.010-1.013). I understand that home brewing won't ever be an exact science, so there will be some variability in how the recipe reads and how things actually happen. Should I just stop worrying, realize that the beer won't always follow the schedule set forth in the recipe, and let it sit in secondary for another week and check it then? Or, is this a problem--and if so, how should I go about fixing it? Thanks for any help.
First, it's not a problem at all. It'll still taste just fine, just a bit lower in alcohol. The main question is about the OG. Where you exactly at it? If not then the range may be dead on for the recipe. Even reading the hydrometer (which I'm assuming you're using) is a little fickle. I never remember to adjust it for temp according to the chart it comes with. If it hasn't changed much in two weeks it probably won't.
My (temp. adjusted) OG was almost on the money and I made sure to add .001 to the FG reading I took last night to compensate for temperature as well. I've been reading that some extract kits tend to run a little higher gravity than if I was doing all grain, so I'm not too concerned, but I did want to get some opinions from the seasoned guys on here just in case.
Was the gravity stable BEFORE you transferred it? Did you measure it once a day for three days and it was the same every day? If not, you probably just stopped the fermentation a little early. Beer shouldn't be transferred out of primary until it's done fermenting - you take the beer off a lot of perfectly good yeast and it may be that the remaining yeast is not able to finish fermenting the sugars. If you don't know the gravity was stable before transferring, forget about troubleshooting your brewing process - you will just never know if this batch would have hit final gravity or not. If the gravity was stable before you transferred, then it's likely just a variation in how you cooked it from how the recipe started. Some areas where you can get errors/variations: - Final volume. If you do a partial boil like a lot of homebrewers do, you then have to dilute up to volume. Do you have a 5-gallon line on your carboy? If you do a full boil, are you accounting for boil-off? - Measuring ingredients. Particularly malt extract. Unless you have a pre-built kit with all of the right measurements, you probably used partial bags of malt. It's easy to estimate but it's more precise if you weigh it. - Steeping grains. If you have specialty grains that you need to steep, depending on the size of the grain bag, the water temperature, how much you swirl/dunk, all can affect how much sugar you extract from the grains. - Original gravity. If you do a partial boil especially, you need to shake the fuck out of your carboy to get it properly mixed. I know you said it was close to expected OG, but maybe your OG was actually higher than expected and you don't know because you got a sample with a lot of water in it. It actually is a pretty exact science and most variables can be controlled, but a few points isn't usually a big deal and in home brewing it's hard to be so precise as to eliminate all issues. It's always best to hit final gravity because most of the sugars will have been fermented out and you don't have any fermentation going on in the bottle - fermenting in the bottle can lead to bottle bombs. I'm sure the beer will be fine, and will taste great. A point of gravity equates to a bit more than a tenth of a percent of alcohol, so 4 points means your alcohol will probably be off by around 0.5%. Probably noticeable if you drank it back to back with a batch that did hit FG, but not so much that you should worry about it.
Either way, this batch is done, and while there were some hiccups along the way, overall I think things went pretty well. We'll see in two weeks when I crack the first one open.
As they say, RDWHAHB. Relax, Don't Worry, Have A Home Brew. Beer takes care of itself pretty well. I like to look at what I did wrong and try to fix it, but I don't stress about it once the mistakes are made. Things will usually turn out fine. BTW, I almost guarantee that your first comment is why the FG is high. A LOT of beers won't be done in just a week. I never do a primary fermentation that's less than 10 days, and often I'll leave it in for two full weeks. Do the three readings in three days thing and you'll know if the beer is done and ready to be moved - and you don't have to worry about getting the beer moved as soon as its done. It's not going to hurt it to leave it there for a week extra or two weeks extra or even longer. I actually don't even do secondary tanks anymore, I just dry hop right in primary so my beer might be in the primary fermenter for a month. Autolysis - the death of yeast cells, which is why people used to move beers so quickly off the yeast cake - doesn't really happen anymore now that homebrewers have access to healthy commercial yeast lines. Additionally, I've found that my beer is just about as clear as when I was doing secondary fermentations.
So... I just made three batches (4.5 gallons each) of hard cider. First batch I didn't add any sugar, second and third I did. First batch is fine, kinda tastes like white wine with a little apple taste to it. I really like it. The density of the second batch is 0.995, which means it's done fermenting. I tasted it, it's still too sweet, I really don't like it. Is there anything I can do to fix this or should I just throw it away? The third one isn't done yet, it's still around 1.03, but I think it's heading in the same direction.
The gravity of the cider is under 1.0 and it's STILL too sweet? Jeez. A gravity that low would usually indicate an extremely dry, extremely alcoholic cider. Is it still in the fermenter? Did you give it a good stir to make sure you're getting a representative sample for both flavor and gravity? I've never heard of a gravity under 1 being too sweet - the gravity is the measure of dissolved stuff (obviously mostly sugars) in the liquid. Under 1 means there's basically no sugar left. Odd. Anyway... you could cut the batch in half, add more cider and no sugar, and re-ferment it. You could either end up with 10 gallons this way, or throw out only half and thus only waste half.
So... the wife tasted it, she liked it better than the first batch and said it's not too sweet at all. Looks like I just have bad taste buds. Thanks for the help!
I pitched a second batch of cider on over the weekend. I used unpasteurized cider (no particular reason; it should just be good cider), and champagne yeast, and added a bunch of honey. The last time I checked, it was bubbling a lot after a few days of fermenting, and there was massive yeast build-up at the bottom. The fact I'm using wine yeast and not brewer's yeast, and the extra sugar, is almost enough to make me concerned about the eventual alcohol content. Almost.
I don't have a hygrometer and seeing as I'm only making one gallon batches, I'm not sure I have enough cider to waste by checking the gravity. People have managed to ferment sugar into alcohol without much technology for thousands of years, so I feel pretty comfortable just letting my little yeast friends do their thing. Plus, a lot of my education and job relies on measuring things with extreme precision. At home, I'd rather just dick around and see what happens.