Radness. I’ll be waiting by the mailbox for weeks now in anticipation!
I’ll try not to be that slow.
I’ll raid the sticker stash this weekend…
You boys came through with the goods, thanks! First keg goes in this weekend, so excited!
You have to thank Ezylee for dropping his NSP sticker outside my house 
So Antman I’m thinking off learning to brew non alcoholic ginger beer,
You know I’m a non drinker and I love ginger beer,
I was at little creatures pub In Melbourne over Easter and they had an amazing ginger beer.
Have you ever brewed one?
Myriad of info online.
Bottle into plastic, not glass for safety reasons.
Avoid the extract kits as they are artificially sweetened.
Google OZTOPS, they may be a good low cost small volume way to experiment before going 20 plus litres.
NA ginger beer is a fiesty animal because of the activity(fermentation) being cut short.
Good luck.
As an avid and obsessive former brewer, I CBF’d with GB brewing and just resort to Bickfords ginger cordial and sodastream.
My first foray into brewng is still in fermenter…day 19! A dark ale with extra hops/grain added, s- 04 yeast. Was told at brew shop ,and reread in this thread, low and slow for temp was best for ale… kept at 18-20 deg. It is still bubbling away. No white skin in fermenter, smells beer like, everything tight.
This is for a uni design project…labels,etc all ready and waiting.
Do i wait for complete halt to activity or start grav’ readings? Bubbles every 20 mins or so.
So you steeped some specialty malts, boiled up some extra hops and then combined with some canned malt extract yeah? Did you get a fast fermentation at the start? After 19 days I’d say it is done, the bubbles are most likely due to the fact that the temperature of the beer is dropping overnight and then rising again during the day. Take a gravity reading and report it here.
Good advice on keeping the Ale between 18-20C. It’s a good temperature range to develop nice flavours and not have your beer tasting like apple cider.
So now that it is winter people should be thinking about brewing some lagers yeah? I’m making a Kolsch this weekend, it’ll be 2 weeks in primary, then 4 weeks lagering before going on tap.
^ Hey Dan, apart from the different yeast and lower temperature, is there any difference in the process when brewing a lager?
Boyracer - love the labels.
I bottled a cherry stout a few weeks back - Will be giving it a crack this weekend!
I’ve been all over HB cider and GB lately! Lovin’ it!
Monday I plan to christen my new additon of a keg
@ antmandan. yep, Blackrock ale, 2 x hops…golding and crystal, chocolate grains and dark spray malt. 10/10/10 boiled and strained. Added yeast at 22 deg and noticed a good foam overnight through lid. I will do a reading tonight and tommorrow morn…Thanks. PM your address for some more stickerzzzz?
Jolan how did your ‘sonic brew-th’ go? Any left?
Dr Dan can give you the specifics but for a vague explanation.
at the end of fermentation most ppl suggest a diacetyl rest, im not even gunna attempt to explain the scientifics, i would fuck it. as far as the rest goes you let the temp raise to 18-20degrees(depending on potential flavours your aiming for, but thats getting way to complex for me) for a couple of days.
then you proceed to lager, this is dropping the temp a couple degrees every few days untill you hit around 2-4 degrees, then leave it another week for good meassure. as yeast go dormant when they are outside thier comfortable temperature range, by slowly dropping the temp you both give them time to clean up after themselves and… more or less, slowley put them to sleep? rather than just shocking them into hybernation with a cold crash.
this will result in a nice thick layer of crud on the bottom and crystal clear goodness on top.
not sure if that makes sense, im sure someome else/google can give you a more indepth explaination, but thats my basic knowledge of it.
anyways, im feeling kinda motivated again, might need to put some time away next weekend to put something on.
Yep, mash temp and malt choice for starters. You can’t make a lager with that fucken goo in a can either(poor attenuation). And there is nowhere to hide an imperfection in a lager.
1010 on hydrometer over 24 hours…
Tastes good so far. Bottled and cleaned up today. Hint, don’t store your bottles outside in milkcrates by the vegie patch and expect it to be easy to clean 'em.
18 gms sugar in darwin stubbies looks like a lot of sugar!
Any one got a secret squirrel recipe for Sparkling Ale?
Not with goo.
You need to go all grain, and google cooper’s whiteboard. That should yield a recipe.
Harvesting and culturing yeast from a longneck of Pale or sparkling will help your flavour profile, but never ever be deluded into thinking you can clone a commercial beer, by rehydrating goo plus some extras in a bucket in your laundry/spare room.
The 1010 final gravity on you ale i about as good as you will get with extract. Even an Ale like sparkling has a FG of 1003 or something low like that, which means you are miles off the mouthfeel for a start. Just be satisfied with making a nice ale that tastes like beer. Dark ales benefit from at least 6 weeks and ideally 12 in the bottle if you really want them to shine. Tuck a couple away, (dark and consistent temp) and try them in 12 months. You may be surprised.
Hey D, I’m a big boy now. I wasn’t asking for easy. Will look into whiteboard. Cheers. I have put my first one in darwin stubbies for just such a storage time.
Had a couple of 7-8 year old Home brews with Ben the other night…
The thing that shits me most with HB is peeps insistance with trying 'em after they have barely been laid down, bad memories of Cairns and 3L PET of disgusto beer.
All grain beers(real beer) takes, equipment,software, patience, practice and a big slab of time. If you have those resources, then why bother with a kit plus speciality?
It’s time to join AHB(forum) if you want to go AG, or go and see Wayne at Beerbelly.
It all depends. All beers change over time, some for the better, some for the worse. My best advice is to try your beers over several weeks and decide for yourself. I had a porter that was only 1 week in the bottle manage a 2nd place in a comp, the same beer 6 months later fell right down to the bottom of the pack. What had happened was that the intense chocolate and coffee aroma had all but disappeared and the judges were just left with black beer tasting liquid. Beer is about flavour, aroma, mouthfeel and appearance, some of those qualities don’t do well with aging, others do. Consider hop driven beers, my IPAs are always best in the first two weeks because the hop aroma is most fresh. After a couple of months it is still pleasant but lacks the intense burst of hop flavour. Strong beers can age well as the alcohol will inhibit bacterial growth and can also smooth out over time from what might be considered a sharp taste on early tasting. Something to consider.
Jolan, how did the first couple of batches turn out?
I’m about to start getting into brewing, and am planning on taking it pretty seriously. Cheers to antmandan and justdave and everyone else for all the advice in here. But do you guys have any recommendation for reference books for brewing. I know I can get a wealth of info online, but my computer ain’t portable, and I’d love to have a book with me out in the shed for reference.
And what ever happened with this Hamishf? Did he make it work?