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Yeast of Eden

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I've just purchased my first basic kits, and being a typical male, want to run before I have taken my first tentative steps. What's the generally followed home brew progression. Kits then extract, then PM then AG. I'm particularly keen to try PM but dont want to overreach. Slow and steady or jump in with both feet and damn the consequences?
 
Some folks skip the PM stage and go to all grain. A few extract beers are good experience on boiling,fermenting and temperature control while you get a grasp on how the all grain process works. Then you get the extra equipment and jump in.
 
You can successfully progress any way you want. Some folks even started with AG!
Brew your first batch and see how you like it. If you feel like you want more then progress at the rate that makes you comfortable.
Keep us informed! :mug:
 
I've just purchased my first basic kits, and being a typical male, want to run before I have taken my first tentative steps. What's the generally followed home brew progression. Kits then extract, then PM then AG. I'm particularly keen to try PM but dont want to overreach. Slow and steady or jump in with both feet and damn the consequences?

Congrats on getting started. :rockin:

I did two PM batches and went AG. :mug:

If you are patient, and are willing to do your homework so you know what to do ahead of time, moving up is fun and the results are great! The main difference with a PM vs all extract is time, about an extra 45 minutes for the saccharification rest of the mini-mash. It isn't complex. Going AG doubles the time per batch, since you have to sparge, there is a lot more cleanup, and a lot more planning since you have to figure out strike temp, etc.

Cheers
- Eric
 
Welcome to the obsession! I'm oughta control as my wife says. :drunk:
I did two extract brews and went right to all grain. I can tell you that everything you need to know is here in this forum. The people are great and the technical details are very understandable. That being said you definetly have to some home work. It is certainly worth it though! Good Luck.
 
Kits then extract, then PM then AG
Actually, you can get kits that are extract, extract with steeping grains, partial mash, or all grain. Granted, most kits are going to be extract with some steeping grains, but they are available in each. Check out Austin Homebrew Supply (AHS); their kits can usually be ordered in all three (extract, partial mash, or all grain).

I'm not sure there is a general rule; the first brew I did was a recipe I formulated myself. I was three or four batches in before I did an extract with steeping grains kit. I plan for my next to be a partial mash.

I'd suggest a couple of extract w/grains kits to get you going, then try and formulate an extract w/grain recipe (or use one of the ones that can be found here and elsewhere).

Good luck,

Rick
 
Yeast of Eden,

Howdy, I started with a kit and it wasn't fit to drink.
Then liquid extract {LME} has kept me brewing for 14 years.
More recently, {I guess I am getting sophisticated},
I prefer DME and steep in speciality grains to add taste.
It is good enough for me,
and cooking on the stove ...
and the problems with cooling 5 gallons rather than 2,
along with the fact that I haven't tasted all that much all whole grain brew, and what I have, has not impressed me enough to go all grain,
I figurativly speaking have become 'stuck' on:
DME extract, {made of base grains}
with speciality grains steeped in.
It is better than a store bought beer and costs .65
for 12 oz's of 6 3/4% alcohol ale.
'Meine acht pfund Hammerbier'


Thank you


J.Winters VonKnife
{Sandymay is asleep}
http://jacksknifeshop.tripod.com/
 
I'm going to say "brew with the freshest materials you have". If that means AG, go AG. If it means DME or LME, so be it.

The grain at my LHBS is of dubious age since they don't do very much business. The business they do is mainly kits, so their brewer's best kits go really fast (some of the basic LME cans have rust on them they're so old!). In that case, I'd stick with the kits that are fresh. The shop an hour away blows through inventory like gas through a beer drinker, and so you pretty much have the selection of whatever you want, including pouring your own LME.

My 2 cents, as a n00b, is KISS. If you're just getting started, and don't have tons of disposable income, focus on perfecting your brewing technique and rely on established recipes and/or kits to take the worry out of the ingredient assembly. When you can brew a good beer consistently, control the temperature well, and avoid doing silly things like dumping 2 pounds of corn sugar into your beer to "carbonate" it, then you can look to complicate matters more. I figure if you become a good brewer, then the equipment and effort spent on going AG will have better yields. I find if I have 20 things to pay attention to, I forget 5 of them, but if I only have 10 things to remember, I'll tend to remember them all (except tonight, I forgot the f*cking Irish Moss!!!)
 
I'm particularly keen to try PM but dont want to overreach.
Then do it!

None of this stuff is hard. If you read about it and know what you're trying to accomplish, when you actually do it, you'll realize, "Hey, this is easy. Why was I worried?" Obviously your first time doing something new won't be perfect, but it won't be perfect no matter how long you spend dithering about doing it.

Really, it's not a question of difficulty. When considering different approaches to brewing, the only things you need to ask are: Do I have the equipment I need? and Do I have the time required?

For extract, you need about an hour and really just one pot.
For partial mash, you need about two hours and probably two pots (depending on how you want to PM.)
For all-grain, you need more like three hours, and a mash tun as well.

A rough outline, but no approach to brewing is "difficult," and there are many ways to skin a cat, so you really just want to understand the philosophy behind the brewing technique and then figure out how to make it work with what you've got.
 
I'm going to say "brew with the freshest materials you have". If that means AG, go AG. If it means DME or LME, so be it.

The grain at my LHBS is of dubious age since they don't do very much business. The business they do is mainly kits, so their brewer's best kits go really fast (some of the basic LME cans have rust on them they're so old!). In that case, I'd stick with the kits that are fresh. The shop an hour away blows through inventory like gas through a beer drinker, and so you pretty much have the selection of whatever you want, including pouring your own LME.

My 2 cents, as a n00b, is KISS. If you're just getting started, and don't have tons of disposable income, focus on perfecting your brewing technique and rely on established recipes and/or kits to take the worry out of the ingredient assembly. When you can brew a good beer consistently, control the temperature well, and avoid doing silly things like dumping 2 pounds of corn sugar into your beer to "carbonate" it, then you can look to complicate matters more. I figure if you become a good brewer, then the equipment and effort spent on going AG will have better yields. I find if I have 20 things to pay attention to, I forget 5 of them, but if I only have 10 things to remember, I'll tend to remember them all (except tonight, I forgot the f*cking Irish Moss!!!)

+1 on this!!!

I'm not one of those elitist AG is the only way people...I brew all ways depending on the recipe, my mood, or the time I have, the weather, etc...I don't have a yard, so AG batches are done with friends, at their place and are more social...I can do PM and Extract in my kitchen...

Some of my favorite recipes taste better as extract with grain than as PM's or AG...So I don't bother going through all the stuff to do them the other way...My house Amber and Yooper's Dead Guy Clone, don't need to be done differently, I tried...they taste great as they are...

So like Flatline said, work with the freshest ingredients...and work on your process. Make the best beer whatever way you brew it.

:mug:
 
I've done 5 extract brews so far, and my first partial mash last week. For what it's worth, here are some things I'd consider:

Why are you brewing? Is it mostly to make the beer you want, or more because you enjoy geeking out and learning all the technicalities of how beer is made? I suspect for most of us it is a mixture of these two factors, but beware: there is ALWAYS more stuff to geek out about! It's easy to paralyse yourself worrying about all the different variables. Don't. You can pretty much ignore everything and still make good beer. It will only improve the more details you decide to pay attention to (and it seems pretty much impossible to ever run out of such details!) but even the simplest "dump it all in a bucket and wait" will still make perfectly drinkable beer.

It takes some time to learn how the various factors effect your beer. After five brews, I think I have a fairly good handle on the impact of different types of grains, varying hop flavors, aroma vs. bittering hops, etc, but I'm only just beginning to wrap my head around how different yeast strains can impact things, and I haven't even started to play with varying the fermentation temperature, water hardness, or mashing protocols yet. So many variables! My advice is to pick just one or two, make a few brews experimenting with those variables while leaving everything else alone, and see what changes. Once you understand factor A, move onto B. Otherwise there will just be too much stuff changing at the same time, and you'll never figure out which changes had what effect on your beer.

In terms of difficulty, I don't really see the point of kits with pre-hopped extract. Adding steeping grains and your own hops isn't difficult (just put them in the pan at the right time) so I don't see that you'd gain any worthwhile simplification from leaving these out. Extract + steeped specialty grains gives you WAY more ingredient flexibility than extract alone, so that just seems like the right thing to me.

The skills I found hardest to aquire so far are:

- Managing large volumes of liquid. Boiling it, cooling it, transferring to the carboy, siphoning to rack and into bottles, all without spilling, scalding myself, or letting anything get contaminated.

- Accurate temperature control.

You need the first skill for any brew, regardless of whether you use a kit, extract, extract + specialty grains, partial mash, or AG. But you can make things easier on yourself if you practice with a few smaller (concentrated extract, or perhaps late addition) boils before you try to handle a full 6+ gallons of boiling wort!

The second skill is only really important if you want to do your own partial or full mash. You can make good extract beer without worrying about exactly how hot everything is.

So that seem like a logical progression of skills to me:

Extract + steeping grains: learn how to manage a couple of gallons of wort without burning yourself or spilling everywhere.

Partial mash: learn how to manage a couple of gallons of wort with precise temperature control.

AG: scale up to larger volumes.
 
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