Hello from alaska

Anyone brewing locally that I could bounce ideas off of?

I just got started brewing and in fact will be doing my first batch in about a week. I am working on making my wort chiller right now. Also I still need to wire up my temp regulator to my kegerator. I am using a keggle that i made for a brew pot and am thinking about making a stir plate for culturing my yeast.

My first brew is going to be a Hefewiezen since that is what I like to drink.

I would like to know what additions I could do to make a killer extract brew? Any thoughts? Type of hops?

Well, I got the stir plate made, the wort chiller made, and just got in my kit from Midwest brewers. I am ready and will be brewing this weekend! I will say how it went next week.

Can you narrow down "locally" - it is a rather large state! Welcome to both homebrewing and HBT.

It sure is, I am in Anchorage. Just put my first batch into the fermentor on Saturday, however, I really botched it and will likely have to dump it. I will brew another batch this weekend and learn from my mistakes on the first batch. Where are you located?

Well hopefully you were able to let your first batch work through its process before dumping it out, and hopefully your second batch was a bigger success. I've got batches 20 and 21 fermenting now, and will bottle/keg them when I return from vacation next week. I'm a bit north up in Fairbanks.

I checked the beer yesterday and it smelt fine and tasted like miller high life or something, supposed to be a heff. Checked the hydrometer and was reading between 1.10 and 1.20. About 1% abv. Added 3 lbs of DME to increase flavor and abv. Should finish at 4% abv and taste more like a heff. we will see, I will rack off in the secondary this Wednesday and leave for another week before kegging. However, I should be drinking my first Homebrew on the super bowl! Fairbanks is cold man! I don't think I could handle that, great summers though. I may be heading up your way in the spring to hunt a black bear.

If you have done 21 batches thus far, then you will probably have some good tips on making a good IPA. What kind of recipe do you recommend?

That sounds great man, hope the vacation went well. I finished my first batch and force carbonated it for 24 hours. After the addition of the DME it really turned out good. It is almost a spitting image of the Glacier Brewhouse Heffe. I think it's even better! Wildly surpassed my expectations. I will brew my next batch this weekend and will be either a raspberry wheat or a different Heffe recipe. I will try an IPA in the next few batches.