Brewing in Honduras

[ObsidianOps]

Good Evening

I've been reading through posts and learning a lot from this forum for a short time, but this is my first actual post. I wanted to explain my situation a bit.

I'm currently living in a very rural part of Honduras (I'm a Peace Corps volunteer), and partially because of the very limited beer selection here, but also because of the interest which I think everyone can understand, me and a friend have decided to try to brew some of our own beer. I have a bit of homebrewing experience , just the basic stuff, but I'm not starting from scratch.

Unfortunately, coming up with equipment and supplies is a bit difficult here. As far as I can tell, Honduras has absolutely no Homebrew Supply Shops, nor any kind of homebrew community (If anyone knows otherwise, please tell me). Being volunteers, money is also tight, so we're trying to keep expensive shipments from the US to a bare minimum.

The plan I've come up with to get started is as follows. Fermentation will be done in one of the big blue plastic bottles that people here commonly get their water out of (~5 gal, I believe, and #1 PET, I checked), with an airlock I made myself. At this point there won't be a secondary fermenter. I've managed to come across a plastic bucket with a spigot, which I can use as a mixing and bottling bucket. Its probably around 4 gallons. With the size of these in mind, I think I'm best off doing 2.5 or 3 gallon batches. Eventually I would prefer to bottle in glass, but as I have no capper now, I think we'll be starting off with plastic pop bottles, of which there are tons readily available (out here there is no trash pickup, much less recycling programs. Trash tends to be burned or thrown in the street).

Basically, I wanted to share this with your community here to ask for any tips you might have as to how I can pull this off, and any recipes you might recommend that require basic sets of ingredients. I mention recipes because I think it'd be easier to get bulk amounts of some the common ingredients, to store and use in subsequent batches (again, a trip to the LHBS in between batches isn't an option). I've also shopped around a bit for where the cheapest ingredients can be found, and who might be willing to ship to an international P.O box, but my internet access is limited and slow, so if there were any recommendations on that as well, it could be useful.

Thank you very much, and I hope that I can be part of what appears to be a strong and vibrant community here. :-D

 

[Moonpile]

I would think your next concern should be fermentation temperature control. Can you rig up a swamp cooler to put your fermenter in and blow a fan on it? Is it too humid for that technique to even work?

Are you doing extract or all grain? If extract, I'd look for a big box of DME as your best bet shipping-wise.

If you plan out your order you should be able to get everything for several batches in one shipment: extract or grain, sanitizer, yeast (probably go with dry since you don't know how the package will be treated), hops, etc. Having worked for a sailboat racing supply shop that regularly sent things internationally, I know that shipping's going to be a big ticket item for you. The more you can get in one shipment the better.

 

[vegas20s]

Think local. Find out what you can use from a local source then think about shipping stuff in. The thing I'm thinking of is oats, you have to mash them to convert the starch but they are a cheap ABV boost as long as you can get some malt to use with them.

 

[ObsidianOps]

Thank you both for your replies

@Moonpile:
I'm at least starting off with extract brewing, due to my lack of experience and equipment. I hadn't ever thought about temperature regulation though, probably since the brewing I'd done before was during winter in a basement in New England. My region isn't quite as hot as other parts of the country, but during the day its usually 70-85 F. Is this too high to brew? I'm sure I can figure out something. The humidity isn't so bad, so maybe the fan method you mentioned could work?

I figured getting one bigger shipment would be the best, which is why I'm setting up as detailed a plan as I can now.

@vegas20s
Thank you very much for the tip. I'd done my research to see if I'd be able to find barley locally (unlikely, as Honduras produces none), but I'd totally forgotten about other grains.

Edit: Did some reading and a bit more research on what's available locally. Oatmeal is very popular, and I suspect I can probably find the oats themselves. Central America is also apparently one of the top sorghum producing regions in the world, but even more plentifully available is corn, corn starch, and about any other form of corn you could imagine. This of course immediately brings to mind the mass produced, flavorless beer that has motivated me to homebrew against the odds here.

But maybe there's hope. I'm sure somebody knows of a great recipe featuring a significant amount of cornstarch? Maybe there's some secret way to brew a sorghum-based stout? I of course will still be using malt extract, but the less of that I have to use and the more of these other things, the better.