Another Dumb Noob "Where do I go from here?" Post

As the title suggests, this is another "What do I do now?" posts from a noob.

I've now completed 4 batches and all 4 have turned out wonderfully. My first batch was a Brewer's Best kit and my last 3 have all been kits put together by my LHBS. I'm ready to start experimenting a little, but I don't want to go crazy partially due to cost and partially because I'm having fun doing what I'm doing and don't want to be too overwhelmed (yet!).

So.. one thing I'm considering is picking up some equipment to keg instead of bottle my next batch, but before I do that I thought I would ask the experts on here if that was a good way to go next or should I concentrate on doing something else first?

Should I devote my next "upgrade", be it in equipment or technique, to kegging, moving away from kits, trying something completely new, or something I haven't even thought of?

I know the opinions on this will probably vary greatly, but I was hoping by opening this up that I might find some really good ideas for future growth and maybe prioritize some of the ideas that I get into a future upgrade path. (I'm a computer guy, can you tell?)

What do you all think?

Rick

I always recommend reading up on anything you can regarding brewing. That's the best/cheapest thing you can do. What equipment do you have and what is your budget to upgrade (say for the next three months)?

OleGoatBrewing said:

I always recommend reading up on anything you can regarding brewing. That's the best/cheapest thing you can do. What equipment do you have and what is your budget to upgrade (say for the next three months)?

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Currently I have a 5 gallon fermenting bucket, a 5 gallon bottling bucket, a 5 gallon glass carboy, standard bottling equipment (nothing fancy), a 7 gallon brew pot, thermometer, hydrometer, etc.

The budget thing is a little bit tricky. It depends on how good business is in the next few months. A rough conservative estimate would be $500-600 bucks over the course of 3 months, but it could be substantially more.

I wold do a fermentation chamber out of a chest freezer and a sct-1000 temp controller. Controlling my fermentation temps has been the biggest improvement I have made in my home brewing. You could easily build it for $150 or so and there are a million build threads on this site.

I would rather improve the quality of my beer then gotten into kegging. You could read up/watch youtube vids on brewing and try to move up from kits to partial mashes into mini mashes or even all grain.

For me it was about making the best beer I could. I'd read that all grain was the best, so I worked on getting into all grain as soon as I could. Bought me a bigger pot and a bag and started doing BIAB after my 2nd batch. If it came to choosing either quality vs kegging, I would go with the better brew.

You could probably have both. Doing full boils, stepping up to partial/mini mash or even all grain with the BIAB method would greatly increase your quality of beer and wouldn't cost you much. And you could get you a kegging system with $500 easily, especially if you can score a used fridge for cheap.

Looks like you have the basics to "make beer" so that is key. While kegging is a large investment its probably one of the those things that once you do it you'll be very happy you did.

Logical progression in this addiction goes something like this. Kits, extracts, partial mash/extract, then you jump into all grain. This isn't what all do, but the each one gets more complex as you move though the types. Thus requiring more "stuff".

Are you able to easily control fermentation temps? If you have a basement or cellar or live in a climate where you have an area that's easily kept between 65-75 degrees you can get away without a fermentation chamber. I live in a warm climate so it was absolutely essential right from the start for me. If you are in a warm climate I would consider the chamber. If not - you're free from investing that cash.

Here are some things that will take you through the scaling of your home-brew setup.

- Counter Flow Chiller/Immersion Chiller. Cooling wort quickly is key.
- Some brewing software (like Brewsmith). I learn visually so seeing how I could construct and tweak recipes was helpful to my learning process. Plus they have a lot of recipes in the database you can try.
- Refractometer. For when you start doing partial mash/all grain. Just a lot better than a hydrometer for checking numbers while brewing. Again a great tool a lot of people wait too long to buy.
- A good burner. Not sure how your heating wort now, but having a good burner is a must.

This hobby "can" be economical, but its got the ability to get nuts. Once you decide to try all grain you'll need a Mash Tun with false bottom and some tubing. Depending on how fast that comes is when you can expect to spend more cash. The stuff I recommend is probably less than $300 so you've got room to play.

If you do decide to keg, I would recommend being patient and crawling the boards/craigslist for gear. Buying quality stuff brand new adds up pretty quickly.

What kind of kits have you done? Extract with grains? If they are wonderful, then you're doing something right.

No one mentioned yeast related stuff like a stir plate and flasks. You can grow, save, and reuse yeast. If you build your own, that is less than $75 investment. Even buying one already made, it's probably around that.

Another vote for a fermentation fridge with temp control. That will really make a huge difference in your beer quality. If you don't already have one that is.

Three linchpins as far as I'm concerned, cleaning/sanitation, fermentation temp control, and pitching rate. Those need to be good before you go anywhere else, including kegging or all-grain. If your beers aren't getting infected you've probably got the cleaning and sanitation good, but if you're not controlling fermentation temps and making starters for liquid yeast, those are the first two places I would go, as others have said. Lots of new folks make the mistake of assuming that the temperature of the room is the temperature of fermentation, and that's not the case. Temperature of the beer is what matters. Best way (in my book) if you've got the space is a fridge or freezer, outfitted with a dual stage aftermarket temperature controller. The fridge gets tied to one probe, set maybe 10 degrees below your desired fermentation temperature. You also buy a FermWrap (or equivalent device) that gets wrapped around the fermenter and tied to the second probe, which you either tape to the side of the fermenter and insulate, or better yet inside the fermenter via thermowell. And then that fermwrap gets set to the exact temperature you want the beer to be at. Voila, perfect adjustable temp control. If you can get a fridge or freezer for free (it's doable) then you should be able to easily set this up within your $500 limit.

However, if you're like me and simply don't have the space/funds/electrical capacity for it, you can control temps by sticking your fermenters in big bins of water, with the water level at or near the surface level of the beer inside. And then by controlling the temp of the water via bottles of ice or an aquarium heater, you can control the temp inside. Water retains and conducts heat better than air, so the temperature of the water outside the fermenter ends up being the same, or very similar (within 1 degree and usually dead on from my observations) to the temp inside.

And then an Erlenmeyer flask, stir bar, and stir plate is another good investment. If you plan on sticking to 5 gallon batches of ales of reasonable gravity, you shouldn't need more than a 2L flask, but if you want to go bigger batches, lagers, or you routinely brew super high gravity beers (1.100 or more) you may want to go with a 5L. Plenty of DIY threads on HBT and elsewhere on building stir plates if you want to go that route. Use the Mr. Malty calculator or YeastCalc to figure out how much starter you need (being sure to set for stir plate if you get one), based on batch gravity, batch size, and yeast age.

If you like your beers already I would buy the kegs. You will use them for a long time. Make the bottling process easier.

This is exactly why I started this thread. You guys have given me some excellent things to think about.

I'll try to respond to all of the things I've seen. Sorry if I miss you..

I have a pretty good source for gently used kegging equipment and that's actually what prompted this post. Before I just jumped in, I wanted to make sure this was the right move. It's a great deal, so I will probably go ahead and jump on it since I will at some point head that direction anyway.

The kits I have done have gotten progressively more complex, and I've done that on purpose. My first one was an easy kit with no grains and pretty much a drop all the hops in and go. My last one included grains and dry hopping.

As far as growing, saving, reusing yeast, (get ready for dumb noob question) won't I want to use different kinds of yeast for different kinds of beer? I like making a wide variety of beer so this may not be a good move for me, unless I'm wrong about the different kinds of yeast thing.

The fermentation fridge sounds interesting. I have a decent place for fermenting and works for what I'm doing now, it's basically a pantry that is not being used for anything else and I have a thermometer on the bucket but I'm not sure how accurate those are. I'll do some research on this topic and incorporate it into my plans. It seems to be the most popular thing on this thread right now.

I feel like I'm pretty good with the cleaning/sanitation. I've not had any problems with anything so far. I'm really obsessive about it, so much so that I drive my wife crazy. She helps me on brew day and if I had a nickel for every time she said "YES IT'S FREAKING CLEAN!! STOP ASKING!" I would be able to start my own microbrewery.

I will also add stir plate to my research. Now I just buy the "smack packs" at my LBHS. I'll look into this further as well. It sounds like I might be able to do all of this stuff and still be under my budget.

Thanks for all of your help! If anyone else has anything to add, I'm all ears!

Rick

oldmuttonhead said:

As far as growing, saving, reusing yeast, (get ready for dumb noob question) won't I want to use different kinds of yeast for different kinds of beer? I like making a wide variety of beer so this may not be a good move for me, unless I'm wrong about the different kinds of yeast thing.

I will also add stir plate to my research. Now I just buy the "smack packs" at my LBHS. I'll look into this further as well. It sounds like I might be able to do all of this stuff and still be under my budget.

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Repitching yeast can certainly cut costs, but for a noob it's the least of your concerns. Once you've found your niche and start brewing certain styles on a regular basis (for me it's English ales, for others it may be Saisons or APAs and IPAs) and you settle on a "house" yeast (mine is Wyeast 1469) then repitching becomes really useful. I will sometimes get 10 batches out of a single smack pack that way. But if you're still all over the place in terms of styles then repitching won't do you much good.

The bigger need for flask and stir plate is that one smack pack is rarely enough yeast for a 5 gallon batch (despite what the pack may say) and you'll get better results growing the cell count up in a starter. That's where the flask and stir plate come in. You can also make starters in a growler and just shake them but it's more efficient with a stir plate (more cells grown in a smaller starter).

Qhrumphf said:

Repitching yeast can certainly cut costs, but for a noob it's the least of your concerns. Once you've found your niche and start brewing certain styles on a regular basis (for me it's English ales, for others it may be Saisons or APAs and IPAs) and you settle on a "house" yeast (mine is Wyeast 1469) then repitching becomes really useful. I will sometimes get 10 batches out of a single smack pack that way. But if you're still all over the place in terms of styles then repitching won't do you much good.

The bigger need for flask and stir plate is that one smack pack is rarely enough yeast for a 5 gallon batch (despite what the pack may say) and you'll get better results growing the cell count up in a starter. That's where the flask and stir plate come in. You can also make starters in a growler and just shake them but it's more efficient with a stir plate (more cells grown in a smaller starter).

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Being a self employed computer tech with a garage full of a computer graveyard, it shouldn't be too difficult for me to come up with some parts for a good stir plate.

If your question was how to improve, that's one thing. But you said they're wonderful, so then I'd go with what makes life easier OR more fun.

As a noob myself with only a couple of batches, I'm in the camp of investing in items that can improve the beer's quality as well as help me advance. I've come to this conclusion recently after researching kegging and keezers and have decided that the ROI on things like yeast starters and fermentation control > keezer for now.

But, Laszlo brings up a really good point:

Laszlo said:

If you like your beers already I would buy the kegs. You will use them for a long time. Make the bottling process easier.

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oldmuttonhead said:

As far as growing, saving, reusing yeast, (get ready for dumb noob question) won't I want to use different kinds of yeast for different kinds of beer? I like making a wide variety of beer so this may not be a good move for me, unless I'm wrong about the different kinds of yeast thing.

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I thought the same thing but realized that quite a few recipes that I've looked at call for WLP001 or something similar (pales, IPAs, some stouts). As someone else already pointed out, in my limited experience, it seems like you'll probably have a house style, or maybe a few similar styles, that are great "go-tos" to fill the pipeline and some experiments to fill the gaps. YMMV.

:rockin:

Fermentation temp control is always the best first investment. Minimal money with maximum payback! If you plan on staying with the hobby/obsession and have a good deal on some kegging equipment i would say, by all means, go for it! Bottling is a massive pain in the butt!!!


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MikePote said:

I wold do a fermentation chamber out of a chest freezer and a sct-1000 temp controller. Controlling my fermentation temps has been the biggest improvement I have made in my home brewing. You could easily build it for $150 or so and there are a million build threads on this site.

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I second this, controlling temperatures is very important.

Ski12568 said:

I second this, controlling temperatures is very important.

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I third this.

If you are serious about making good beer this is the first place that you want to start. If you have the space and money temperature control is a no-brainer. Certain yeasts and/or high gravity beers can throw off a TON of heat so even if the beers you are making are turning out okay that may not always be true. Also with a temp controlled fermentation chamber you can lager! LAGER!

Brewing beer with grain instead of extract is another way you can seriously improve your brews. Of course this opens up another big can of worms - pH, water chemistry, efficiency ... and that's only getting started

With all that said if you are happy with the beer you make then investing in kegs isn't a bad idea. TBH I'm a bit jealous of people with kegs. I think bottling can be a pain in the butt and would love to just dump the beer in a sanitized keg and not have to worry about bottling, priming, etc.

To expand the variety and complexity of the beers you can brew - move to all-grain, with BIAB the simplest/cheapest step up.

To improve your quality of life as a brewer - replace bottling with kegging.

To make better beer - focus on improving your process, with fermentation temperature being a big one (though how you address that can depend a lot on your ambient temperature and it's variability).

A good thermometer is a great investment.
Maybe not on quite the scale you were thinking though...

And i fourth fermentation temp control.

The process I went is partial mash to all grain via BIAB. Moving to all grain using BIAB is a cheap way to start producing better beer than extract. Then I went to kegging. I LOVE this upgrade! I have three taps and I just open up the tap and pour me a glass. It's so much more satisfying than opening a bottle. Next I went to 10 gallons BIAB. Now I am using a mash tun doing 10 gallons. I feel like this let me gradually ease into upgrading my system based on what I felt like I needed.