MisterOJ
Well-Known Member
Hi guys. Really great forum you've got here. Glad to be a part of it now.
My brother and I have been talking about starting to brew for a long time and we finally made the plunge a little over two weeks ago. We got a basic kit (plus a few extras) from an online homebrew store and bought one of their ingredient kits to make an extra-hoppy IPA for our first homebrew.
It's in bottles now (we racked it Sunday evening) and I have a few questions.
The biggest one is the transferring from the fermenting bucket to the bottling bucket. We used extract and hop pellets and poured our beer through a really fine strainer (one of the extras we purchased up front) so there wasn't much "stuff" other than liquid in the fermenting bucket. My brother wanted to just pour the beer through the strainer again from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket. After reading on here for a while, I was under the impression that the beer had to be siphoned from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket.
I let him do it his way. We dumped our priming sugar into the bottom of the bottling bucket, poured in the beer, gave it a little stir to make sure the sugar was mixed and then just proceeded to bottle. Was this a really bad idea? Would it have been much better to siphon the beer from one bucket to the other?
Unrelated to that, how long should an IPA generally sit in a bottle before it's good to drink? I'm thinking two weeks, but would it be better to wait longer?
Also, since I am brand new on here, is it cool to talk about various homebrew supply companies? I didn't mention the one we used (it seemed pretty impressive to me) because I wasn't sure if it was cool to mention other websites on your forum. I know some message boards are kinda touchy about that sort of thing.
Thanks in advance guys!
My brother and I have been talking about starting to brew for a long time and we finally made the plunge a little over two weeks ago. We got a basic kit (plus a few extras) from an online homebrew store and bought one of their ingredient kits to make an extra-hoppy IPA for our first homebrew.
It's in bottles now (we racked it Sunday evening) and I have a few questions.
The biggest one is the transferring from the fermenting bucket to the bottling bucket. We used extract and hop pellets and poured our beer through a really fine strainer (one of the extras we purchased up front) so there wasn't much "stuff" other than liquid in the fermenting bucket. My brother wanted to just pour the beer through the strainer again from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket. After reading on here for a while, I was under the impression that the beer had to be siphoned from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket.
I let him do it his way. We dumped our priming sugar into the bottom of the bottling bucket, poured in the beer, gave it a little stir to make sure the sugar was mixed and then just proceeded to bottle. Was this a really bad idea? Would it have been much better to siphon the beer from one bucket to the other?
Unrelated to that, how long should an IPA generally sit in a bottle before it's good to drink? I'm thinking two weeks, but would it be better to wait longer?
Also, since I am brand new on here, is it cool to talk about various homebrew supply companies? I didn't mention the one we used (it seemed pretty impressive to me) because I wasn't sure if it was cool to mention other websites on your forum. I know some message boards are kinda touchy about that sort of thing.
Thanks in advance guys!