complete noob, dont know where to start

hi folks, as you can see im new to the forum. i have never made beer, and up until recently i didnt realy want to. i have always been a wine drinker, but a friend convinced me to start drinking beer and i wanted to see if i could manage to make some.
i have been making wine for about 3 years now, i enjoy it greatly. but the turnaround time for wine is quite high.
so what i want to know is,

(1) how much different is the process

(2) what different equipment is needed? i have glass carboys and a bottling bucket, and pretty much any peice of wine making equipment you could think of.

(3) can wine yeast be used to make beer? (i have alot on hand)

(4) how much sugar do you add for a 5 gallon batch?

(5) and most importantly, where might i find a site that will tell me the basics and get me rolling?

thank you all in advance for any help offered

How to Brew is about your best bet. It's got everything you need to know to get started and the 1st version is free.

To answer briefly

1 - quite a bit different
2 - you'll need a brew pot - that's probably the biggest thing
3 - Not sure, but I don't think so
4 - none
5 - how to brew

(1) how much different is the process.

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I'd say that it can be quite similar. Add water to concentrate pitch yeast ferment
You can make your own extract like with wine,

(2) what different equipment is needed? i have glass carboys and a bottling bucket, and pretty much any peice of wine making equipment you could think of.

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The Carboy will need to be large not a 1 gallon.
It depends if you are going All Grain or not.

(3) can wine yeast be used to make beer? (i have alot on hand)

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Yes but you'd probably not want to. Yeast has a lot to do with the outcome of the ale.

(4) how much sugar do you add for a 5 gallon batch?

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You can use as little or as much as you want , cheep beers lot. Good beers none.
I don't really think you can call it beer with over 50%.

(5) and most importantly, where might i find a site that will tell me the basics and get me rolling?

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Loads of them, lots of info on here.

thank you all in advance for any help offered

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What rdwj said and off the top of my head:

Chilling the wort after boil is a critical process.
You never (almost never, I cant think of an almost example) will need to kill off the yeast.
You don't stir or aireate the wort after fermentation has begun.
You'll find that you can get the ingredients to make a great beer probably easier than getting good grapes. Beer is more process dependant.
Bottling with caps (unless it's a Belgian) or kegging.

The major differences: you boil the wort while making hops additions & there is only one fermentation. So, you'll need a big kettle & a burner. A capper.

White wine yeasts can be used, but ale & lager yeasts have been selected to deal with the more complex sugars in malts. You'll get more complete fermentations and a cleaner product if you use the proper yeast. People do use white wine & champagne yeasts to finish high gravity beers.

And ales are much, much faster. You'll be drinking a finished ale before a wine would be ready for bottling.

well... im going to do a few things different than normal.... with wine, i never realy made a grape wine, many other fruits though, the list is long. with beer i intend to do something similar. the friend i mentioned talked me into beer by introducing me to "fruit" beer. i am not sure if this constitutes a real beer or not. i was hoping to make a chamomile beer first (have alot of that on hand)

no sugar? what does the yeast feed off of to make the alcohol? (like i said im new)

i have a capper, in the guise of an italian floor corker with an attatchment

any ideas on a chamomile beer? any fruit beer experts out there?

wizzard said:

no sugar? what does the yeast feed off of to make the alcohol? (like i said im new)

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Oh, there is still sugar, but it comes from the malt, not typically from adding sugar. You see the table sugar additions in bad beer kits, but not typically in good beer.

wizzard said:

well... im going to do a few things different than normal.... with wine, i never realy made a grape wine, many other fruits though, the list is long. with beer i intend to do something similar. the friend i mentioned talked me into beer by introducing me to "fruit" beer. i am not sure if this constitutes a real beer or not. i was hoping to make a chamomile beer first (have alot of that on hand)

no sugar? what does the yeast feed off of to make the alcohol? (like i said im new)

i have a capper, in the guise of an italian floor corker with an attatchment

any ideas on a chamomile beer? any fruit beer experts out there?

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You'll probably want to start out using malt extract. Basically someone else takes barley and uses temperature to get natural enzymes to turn the starches into sugars. So you shouldn't need to add any sugar except for malt extract.

In terms of malt extract, you have a choice between liquid or dried. There's not a big difference, but you can get better clarity and flavor with dried. It is, unfortunately, more expensive.

I've never made one, but fruit beers can be tricky I think. The problem is getting the fruit flavor into the finished beer, and there are two ways of doing it. Some people include fruit as part of their grain build, essentially, counting on sugars in the fruit to supplement the sugars from the malt. Others add the fruit after the malt fermentation is completed, which creates a second round of fermentation.

It's always good to do a couple of basic kits to learn then you can experiment.