I am new to the forum and homebrewing. Since I live in an apartment, I have started with extract brewing.
Since drinking wise, I really like fruit beers and sours, I’d like to know if they are able to be brewed with good results using extract techniques. I also like flavored porters so, the previous inquiry applies to porters as well.
Looking forward to your thoughts and suggestions. I’m starting out with pre-made recipes from the Mr. Beer kit but hope to advance to my own brews in the future.
Apartment doesn't preclude you from one things instead of another. You can easily brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) on your stove top using just one pot. You can also buy something like the Mash & Boil, Robobrew, or similar which is even more hands-off. Hell, you could do either in a
tiny home.
In regards to an extract sour, a lot of us started here (
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/training-wheels-berliner-good-intro-to-sours.579458/). Otherwise, continue reading through the extract sub-forum.
Sours are something of their own and from what I have gleaned they will take up to a year or so to produce. They also need to keep plastic equipment segregated from the rest of your equipment. So those might be something to put off for a while. I haven't yet tried one.
Traditional sours take months to years, and kettle sours are no different from regular brews (weeks). They add in a step of souring your wort; however, that's only adding a few days.
Can't agree with this more. Learn to make beer before you try to make a complex beer like a sour.
As for fruit beers, that can be as simple as brewing a basic beer to start and doing a secondary fermentation with mashed up fruit added later.
Souring wort is not complex assuming you have the right equipment to be able to maintain the souring temperature (for kettle sour). For traditional sour, you make your beer, ferment it off, and then add in the souring blend. There is nothing else to it, so no more complex...just needs time to age (traditional sour).
Fruiting is as easy as JPW says...ferment your beer out then add in fruit. Some people vote for sanitizing raw fruit, others don't. We all agree that you need to freeze the fruit first (breaks down cellular wall, does nothing for bacteria on the fruit) assuming you are using real fruit and not fruit extract.
Graduating from Mr. Beer only gets you better beer at a cheaper price; I don't know why anyone would want to move on from Mr. Beer!!!!
You can brew fine beers with extracts, and they actually lend them selves well to the styles you mentioned (sours, fruit, and Porters) because they do not need to be particularly dry. Extract has a tendency to finish a little sweeter than all-grain beers.
Graduating from Mr. Beer does much more than just giving you "better beer at a cheaper price." It also allows you to craft your own beer recipe (grains and quantity of grains); whereas, extract does not let you choose which grains went into the extract. Basically, you get to fine tune your recipe.
Making kettle sours (Berliners and goses) is actually super easy with extract.
A nice side effect of the kettle souring process is there's no need to keep any separate "sour equipment."
While not super hard, they are not super easy. There are precautions that you have to take when kettle souring that you do not have to take with
regular beer. For example, you need to maintain the kettle souring temperature (approx. 100f) throughout the souring process which is dependent on how sour you want your beer to be. If you want to have more control then you also need a good way of measuring pH. Also, oxygen ingress is a major concern during the souring process. See...not super easy...not super hard...just more precautions.
Also, the reason that DeadWolfBones says you do not need separate equipment for kettle souring is that you are boiling the bacteria BEFORE the liquid comes into contact with other equipment. In traditional souring you add the bacteria after fermentation, so anything that comes into it later in that pipeline must be dedicated to sours.
Thanks everyone! Your comments are well appreciated! I really want to do more with extract brewing and will definitely move up from Mr. Beer this summer. I was kinda nervous about starting with a 5 gallon kit first and wanted to make sure this was something I really wanted to do. I plan to investigate the sites kh54s10 recommended to find my next adventure.
I do have an interesting question outside of homebrewing, do any of you or anyone else that cares to answer knows of a nanobrewery that does only extract beers? I’ve been looking but can’t find any and have also heard that it would be more expensive than all grain beers to produce for a brewery or distribution.
Thanks again and really looking forward to engaging with everyone in this forum!
I will also add that
for me doing smaller batches (1 gallon, for example) is much easier with all-grain, brew-in-a-bag (now I'm on e-biab) process.
I don't know any brewery that using extract only...run the numbers; it's likely cost prohibitive. If you are trying to make a business out of it and you are conscious about your BOM you wouldn't be running extract batches though. You would be buying grain in bulk, milling yourself, and brewing with that.