bluefoot53

Recipes 

hey all, i just ordered this:

http://www.leylandhomebrew.com/item1033.htm

it should be here fairly soon, has anyone used it before and is it going to be any good? i ordered the lager beer kit. will this have any taste to it or do i need to add something? does anyone have any tips for me as i have never done this before and would like to make a good batch.

p.s. i really have no idea what im doing so advice would be good, quick advice would be even better cos im pretty keen and i can see myself just ripping the packaging open and trying it, which will probably just make bad beer!

joe

Recipes 

1. Buy "The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing" by Charlie Papazian
2. Read the first 40 pages
3. Make beer.

Roy Boy

Recipes 

The beer kit's normally just a tin, and you put 1kg (~2 pounds?) of sugar with that. As long as you're completely obsessive about keeping everything clean it should taste great! The general method is....bung everything in a big tub and seal it air tight.

After cleaning everything real nice I put the contents of the tin in the fermenter, dissolve any sugars in ~4L hot water, put that in the fermenter and stir until its all pretty dissolved, then just fill it up with cold water and add the yeast. It's so easy! When I first started it was kind of daunting, after 2-3 brews its just...meh, lets make some BEER!

Roy Boy

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That spoon in the pic looks kinda hard to clean

But yeah pretty much any homebrew book will tell you the same stuff.

The Professor

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Try to stay away from any recipe that calls for pounds of table sugar. To make the best beer you want to use DME (Dried Malt Extract) to get your fermentable sugars. Also see is there is a homebrew shop in your area. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah and we have 4 of them. Who knew? Anyway, it is very helpful to go and see all of the ingredients available as well as talk to the staff about any questions. If not then ingredients can be ordered online, or even on Ebay.

I do agree though, The new complete joy of homebrewing is the homebrewers bible and well worth a read. Also check out your local library. Believe it or not, most libraries have a homebrewing section with the other cooking books.

Sparrow

Recipes 

G'Day.

I only brewed three batches of Kit Brew to date so we both have a lot to learn.
I found it easy to follow the instruction that comes with most kits. The hardest part was waiting for the bottle to mature.

Good Luck and Happy Brewing.

Drunk

Recipes 

on my first batch, i did some thing wrong. im not sure wich part it was, but the beer tasted like a coors with a little apple juice in it, it was awsome. the bad part is that after two of the big mr. beer quart bottles, i didnt even have a buz.

The Professor

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What was the recipe? And what did you observe during the fermentaion?

Have you ever considered all grain brewing? Its not as hard as many beginers think. I switched after about 6 months of brewing and never looked back. Mashing your grains only takes about an hour and then Sparging (rinsing the sugars and flavor from the grains) will take from 30-60 minutes.

If anyone is interested in switching to all grain brewing let me know and I will post an easy walk through the process. In fact, maybe this forum could use an all grain section.

By the way, it's cheaper than using malt extract!

pilkinga

Recipes 

I am very interested in an all grain walk through. When I made my last batch, it called for 4 lbs of grains, and right now with my kettle that was a lot. Most recipes I look for call for at least 2.5 times more than this so it seems that things could become difficult, messy, labor indusive pretty quickly. A walk through would be encouraging and who isn't looking for cheaper better beer!
Thanks in advance Professor.

Roy Boy

Recipes 

My local homebrew guru just suggested using 150g of cracked grain steeped in hot water to enhance a beer kit rather than using all grain...but the fresher the better go nuts!