I broke pretty much every rule in the book...

Hello there!
I have never brewed beer before, and I'm skint, but decided to give it a go without reading up or learning pretty much anything.

Since this morning I have read up on it properly, and quickly realised that almost everything I've done was completely wrong; now I know you're all thinking 'why would we care? this guy is just an ignorant prat who didn't do his homework before trying his first batch and now wants to boast about it'. That is not what I'm trying to do - I basically figured that as I've done everything pretty much without any prior knowledge it should be a pretty fun experiment to see what happens when you don't follow the rules - So, without any further waffling, here's a summary of what I've done:

I bought 500gm of Wheat Barley
500gm Brupak's Fuggles hops
1 sachet Munton's brewing yeast.
1kg sugar.
6 1L flip-top bottles (like on grolsh bottles)

My first mistake was not knowing about sanitising. I figured that with fermentation it was probably a good idea to make sure that everything was clean, so I took everything I was about to use and boiled it in the pot that I would use for 'cooking' the beer.

I filled the pot with 7L of water and brought it to around 80 degrees Centigrade.

I then added the Wheat Barley and kept it at a pretty much steady temperature of 80*c for 20 minutes. I then let it cool for half an hour and emptied it into another pot that I had sterilised with boiling water. I then cleaned out the first pot with boiling water, and strained the liquid back into it using a collender with a clean tea towel in it to filter out the barley.
I brought this to the boil and added approx 400 grams of the hops, and boiled the mixture for 20 minutes. I then added 200 grams of sugar, and 100 grams of orange-bloom honey, and the zest and juice of two lemons mixed it all in and boiled for a further 20 minutes. By this time the house STANK of hops. I tasted the liquid and it actually tasted like a really nice darjeeling (can't spell that!) tea - it was pretty sweet but had a very bitter aftertaste. I let it cool down and then filtered it using the same collander/tea towel method as before, until I was left with a misty yellow liquid - it looked exactly like hoegarden.
I let it cool to blood temperature, and meanwhile activated the yeast in a bit of water before adding it. I then looked on the internet, and found that I couldn't just bottle it straight away (that seems very obvious now! ) - As I had no fermentation bucket and nothing with an airlock I left it in the same steel pot until it started to show signs of fermentation (a few small bubbles floating to the top) - then I realised that if I left it there, un-covered it would just rot, so I figured that I'd take the bottle-bomb chance, bottled it and put the bottles in a steel box in the shed just in case.

So, my question to you guys is what do you think will happen? We'll take bets on it and whoever gets it right gets to flame me for being such an 'ignorant n00b'!

- H

I bet the bottles explode.

after reading that I'm not so worried about my first home brew that I bottled last week.....

I may get a "rubbermade" container for the cases of beer....

One other question - Did I just unintentionally make a wheat beer?

an englishman I presume..

Best of luck.. I have no idea how that's going to turn out.. lol

"They don't call it a quarter-pounder?"

"No man, they got the metric system over there. The wouldn't know what the f*** a quarter pounder was."

Sorry, so much metric in that post I had a hard time reading it.

As for your early bottling... Did you add priming sugar? Either way, I'd be less concerned with bottle bombs and more concerned with the beer tasting like crap. You never know, you might have stumbled onto some one-in-a-million recipe here. I wouldn't hold out much hope for it though.

It'll probably be bad. Really bad. Oh well. Chalk this one up as a learning experience, read up on everything, get yourself some equipment, and try again. Better luck next time.

Wait, you pitched the yeast and then sealed the bottles and put them in the shed???

THEY ARE GOING TO EXPLODE. No ifs, ands, or butts about it. The bottles need airlocks. If it hasn't been too long, then I would go out and open them. Find a piece of hose, sterilize it, and put it over the tops of each bottle. Run it down below the bottles into a bucket of water, preferably sterile.

If it has been too long (a day or so more), then make sure they are sealed in that container you put them in and wait for them to blow up. I would not handle them. You would be surprised how much energy they can build up.

Signed,
Very Concerned.

Hahaa take lots of pictures, I want to see the outcome of this one!

Oh, forgot to make my guess. I think that the bottles won't explode, but that what is inside those bottles will not really be beer in any sense of the word. No, I don't think you unintentionally made a wheat beer. I think you basically skipped the drinking/processing phase of beer and went straight to the final product - urine.

Sorry

Edited: +1 on taking lots of pictures. I wanna see it too.

Your bottle will likely explode. If they don't explode, they will when you try to open them. You should go an uncap them.

You actually did OK for not reading anything.... welcome to the hobby and HBT.

bahahaha! Fantastic! Ok I'm going to go and make airlocks out of car washer hose and corks!
Could I not just make sure I open the beers every 2 hours or so?
This is fantastic fun!

Any bets on who this really is???

I'm thinking it's laughing gnome myself.

"One leg out" like to pull right?



If not wear a raincoat, or one of these when you open them.

onelegout said:

bahahaha! Fantastic! Ok I'm going to go and make airlocks out of car washer hose and corks!
Could I not just make sure I open the beers every 2 hours or so?
This is fantastic fun!

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I am not sure if two hours are often enough...

Another solution would be to wrap the tops of each bottle in saran wrap and then poke a bunch of holes with a needle. Not ideal, but better than nothing.

BTW: You did pretty good on your process for not having educated yourself first! Props.

Revvy said:

Any bets on who this really is???

I'm thinking it's laughing gnome myself.

"One leg out" like to pull right?

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I don't know, April fools is pretty far out, yet!

I would say store all of those bottles in your bedroom. Preferably under your bed. Trust me when I say from experience that no feeling in the world that quite compares to waking up to explosions.

llazy_llama said:

I would say store all of those bottles in your bedroom. Preferably under your bed. Trust me when I say from experience that no feeling in the world that quite compares to waking up to explosions.

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Kinda like sleeping with a homebrewer who likes to give dutch ovens, eh?

I also thought this may have been a gnome in disguise... time will tell. If not, we could be adding a new rockstar to our tribe of delinquents...

Ok what I've done is only half-secure the bottle caps - there's still an airtight seal but it won't explode now the tops will just pop open- What is the difference between what I've made, and wheat beer? It looks just like a wheat beer so if I haven't accidentally made one of them, then I've made the world's most cloudy beer! Does beer usually have to settle to become clear? would it be best if I waited until it had settled then rebottled it and removed the sediment?


It's cool to hear that I did ok on the process without knowing what I was doing! I actually just watched an episode of 'oz and james drink to britain' where they explained the very basics, but I thought it would be fun to give it a go without using a kit or doing it the proper way first!


Edit: By the way, my sink is now clogged with hops and barley. Doh.

This... thread... is... epic....

Come to think of it, the beer is actually the precise colour of baby poo.

Baby who eats a lot of spinach poo, or baby who eats a lot of carrots poo? I'm pretty sure that's in the BJCP style guidelines somewhere.

oKOKOKOK

Your beer is fermenting now. That means all the yeast you put in there are eating all the sugar which you may or may not have extracted from the malted barley. It is most definitely eating the sugar from the honey and the sugar (duh) and making alcohol. That is why it looks all cloudy.

It will likely look this way for about a week or so. Then it should start to clear up. I can't explain the whole process here, but start reading and you will figure it out.

onelegout said:

Come to think of it, the beer is actually the precise colour of baby poo.

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Lots of unfiltered grain material and hop material. Don't worry about it until fermentation is done, then poor the beers from one bottle to the next through a coffee filter or the like, add priming sugar, and cap. Wait at least 4-5 days before doing this.

Meanwhile, a little bit of Vodka rubbed on the tops of the bottles will aid in preventing infection with your current setup.

I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out rather tasty, all things considered!

I'm still wondering how long this beer was in the brew pot before it got bottled. Are we talking a few days, or a few hours?

Cool so I should be able to just store them in the bottles like they are for fermentation and then re-bottle them; that sounds much more optimistic!

I wasn't lying about the color!

Oh and by the way, I'm not an imposter - I actually am a new user, my name is Henry and I come from Chichester on the south coast of England.

llazy_llama said:

I'm still wondering how long this beer was in the brew pot before it got bottled. Are we talking a few days, or a few hours?

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Around 2 hours.

I agree on the bottle bombs, but i had one more thing to add.

400 grams of hops in 6 liters of beer!!!!!! Holy hoppy batman. This will put to shame even the hoppiest of hoppy beers that people make around here. For all you metrically challenged, thats almost a pound of hops in 1.5 gallons.

Ah, so we're talking baby who eats a lot of carrots. You know, if you take care of it from here on out, you could actually end up with a pretty decent beer. I hope you get lucky here. I really hope you don't get any bottle bombs because those swing-top bottles are hard to come by.

Within the next hour, someone will post here telling you not to use clear glass bottles. Just be prepared, that's all I'm saying.

Edited: Thank you, emoutal for doing the conversion that I couldn't be bothered with this late. That much hops in 1.5 gallons? Wowza, we might have a new recipe for a quintuple IPA.

llazy_llama said:

Ah, so we're talking baby who eats a lot of carrots. You know, if you take care of it from here on out, you could actually end up with a pretty decent beer. I hope you get lucky here. I really hope you don't get any bottle bombs because those swing-top bottles are hard to come by.

Within the next hour, someone will post here telling you not to use clear glass bottles. Just be prepared, that's all I'm saying.

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Ok cool Is the clear-glass thing due to excessive sunlight killing yeast or something? If so should I'll keep them in the dark?

I searched for the swing-top bottles for making chilli oil in, but could never find them; then last week a new IKEA opened near my city and they sell them for REALLY cheap - I'm not sure if IKEA sell them in the states but it's worth a try.
H

Edit: Yep it's very hoppy but I did want it to be (although not as much as I expect it is!) - I figure though that if I only boiled them in it for about 40 minutes it shouldn't be too overpowering? When I tasted it before adding the honey it was eyewateringly bitter so I added a load of honey and that balanced it out. I guess we'll have to just see how it turns out!

On another note - Hops smell remarkably like marijuana.

I'll just say this, then I'm going to bed... for real this time.

I would keep the beers in a dark place. Sunlight + hops = bad.

Also, Revvy has a very nice warning label about hops and marijuana that I hope he will post here, because I'm too tired to search for it.

onelegout said:

Cool so I should be able to just store them in the bottles like they are for fermentation and then re-bottle them; that sounds much more optimistic!

Oh and by the way, I'm not an imposter - I actually am a new user, my name is Henry and I come from Chichester on the south coast of England.

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Not Bad! I am re-thinking the coffee filter, though... It may be too fine and remove all of the yeast necessary for carbonation. You might have to find something a little coarser. Just remember to sterilize first.

One more thing. I just read you comment on the source of those bottles. They are, most likely, not pressure rated. Be sure before you add your priming sugar and close them up or you will be back to the bottle bomb situation.

I think you probably did better than the first beer makers! (10,000 years ago?)

The single best source of information IMHO is How To Brew (By John Palmer) followed by these forums (interactive can provide quick feedback/answers to specific questions).
I was almost going to suggest some balloons soaked in isoprophl alchohol with a hole (just because I am curious how they'd perform ).
Remember to leave the sediment in the bottom of the bottles rather than drinking it (trub is prolly not very tastey?).
They say it's almost impossible to mess up beer... I am curious how your science project will turn out. Let us know!

llazy_llama said:

"They don't call it a quarter-pounder?"

"No man, they got the metric system over there. The wouldn't know what the f*** a quarter pounder was."

Sorry, so much metric in that post I had a hard time reading it.

As for your early bottling... Did you add priming sugar? Either way, I'd be less concerned with bottle bombs and more concerned with the beer tasting like crap. You never know, you might have stumbled onto some one-in-a-million recipe here. I wouldn't hold out much hope for it though.

It'll probably be bad. Really bad. Oh well. Chalk this one up as a learning experience, read up on everything, get yourself some equipment, and try again. Better luck next time.

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It's a royale with cheese man!!!

Yeah I have made 10 gal of beer so far and read both of Charlie P's books and still somehow just read to not put the hops in the fermenter!

+1 on the balloons, I used them on two meads and they seem fine so far, lol...

I actually burst out laughing when I read how much hops! That is going to be gnarly! Hey makes sense though, equal parts hops and barley.

I got into brewing when my dad told me about their Blue Ribbon malt syrup beer recipe. I was probably 15.One can syrup (we never could find it so we used molasses I think, really smart huh) 5 lb sugar, cake of bread yeast, 5 gal water. (no hops, we hadn't heard of them) I fermented it in a really old crock pot with a wicker and cheesecloth lid I made. I then got a can of malt syrup and made some, much better, it got made into a bunch of carlo rossi underbed bottle bombs. Then my best friend and I decided to try to make "beer" after the local paper had an article about local prisoners getting busted making hooch in trash bags. We dug a secret fermentation spot in my friends shed and made some super sweet kool aid and threw in a pack of yeast, then buried the 5 gal bucket with a board on top. (we figured it had to be cool, this was in Texas) It was really bad. I don't know just felt like sharing my first brew stories. Let hope for the best, I still haven't tasted my first batch yet, a Belgian Wheat, it is still going very slowly at the 21 day mark... OK going ot...

Could he not pop open the tops of the bottles and put balloons on top of the bottles? Its old and corny I know, but it still works :rockin:

Runyank said:

It's a royale with cheese man!!!

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Les Big Mac?

Revvy said:

Any bets on who this really is???

I'm thinking it's laughing gnome myself.

"One leg out" like to pull right?

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Something's fishy here. LGI was offline when onelegout was online. Now LGI is online again and onelegout is not.

I think I smell a leg pulling. Could be wrong, though.

shecky said:

Something's fishy here. LGI was offline when onelegout was online. Now LGI is online again and onelegout is not.

I think I smell a leg pulling. Could be wrong, though.

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That's what I'm thinking...

A pound of hops in ~3 gallons of beer? That's got to be off the IBU scale.