dumb question

So the HBS arond here focus on wine, festa and brewhouse mostly. there is a full selection of muntons and morgans cans as well. The cans have a 'pop can' taste to them that i am not a fan of. The only HBS that has malt and hops is limited to muntons spraymalt and sazz pellets. huge seletion.

so, is there anything i can make at all out of just spray malt and hops and end up with something that is less poopy than the muntons/morgans cans? oh, i have harvested s-23 and notingham in my fridge.

 

You could make a simple but decent Pale Ale, though it would help to have a little crystal or something in for interest. Your best bet is to order from one of the vendors (Austin, Morebeer, etc). Particularly if you get more than one batch at a time, the price works out pretty well, and then you have almost unlimited choices. The only drawback is you can't brew on impulse (unless you keep some stock around).

 

yeah, it's the brew on impulse im working on. I just learned that i have 3 days off this weekend, so I want to make the best of it. I'm going to make a festa kit or two plus whatever i can do with that spraymalt and hop if it can end up drinkable.

 

Have you asked them if they can order what you want? You could make a drinkable beer with saaz & DME, check out some of the SMASH threads.

 

i've read up on the smash recepies, but im not any good at converting AG to extract. ordering would defeat the purpose of the impulse buy, but i bet they can once if figure out what i'm doing.

how does this sound:

5 gallon batch
2.5 kilos of muntons light spray malt
1oz saaz for 60min
1oz saaz for 15min

so if i did my math right, it should be:
OG: 1.050
Bitterness: 21 IBU
i think the hops at the store are 3.7ish%

not the best, but i'd imagine it would be better than some of the other thing's i've made.

now i gotta figure out what temperature i want this to boil at..

 

Well, unless you have a very tall house, your wort will boil close to 100C.

Being in Canada does restrict your sources.

 

k, just didn't know if i was aiming for a certian temp above 100. cool

 

alright, there is a kink in my plan. Their shipment didn't arrive this week due to the weather in ontario. He's setting aside what i wanted so i cna pick it up monday.

4x 25g packs of saaz pellets
5x bags of light spray malt

and to think that all this stemmed from me looking for a cheap frying pan. Zellers had a stock pot for less than $20 so i picked that up too. 2 day later, I was at the SuperStore and they have a bigger one for less. go figure.


If someone wants to talk me out of this, now's the time.

 

SO i jsut finished putting it in the bucket. 23Litres and at 1.042. Not too bad for a first attempt at this kind of thing.
only problem is the beer store only got 4 bags of 500g light spray malt, so i used one bag of medium.

 

Honestly, you will make far better beer from one of those FestaBrew or Brewhouse kits. They are amazing quality. You just have to make sure they are fresh -- i.e. less than 6 months old.

There are a bunch of threads on the topic of using these kits, including some 'hacks' to improve them. Here are a couple that came up right away:

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/brewhouse-kits-looking-opinions-reviews-83073/?highlight=brewhouse

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f37/brewhouse-kits-60574/?highlight=brewhouse

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/does-anyone-have-experience-festa-brew-67611/?highlight=brewhouse

 

<rant>
I've made about half the festa kits. 10ish in total. Yes, they are amazing. i've hacked the dry/low carb one until there is no tomorrow. I'm actually sipping on a continintial pilsner as i type this (and have a pale ale in primary). The reason i made this almost SMaSH is there is not much gratification from one of the wort bags. You slice the bag, add the yeast and you're done. You've brewed. This method, i can try boiling, that affect of hops (hopfully no shortage next fall) and experement more freely than i can with Festa. Mind you, there is a semi-constsant with fista wort, and the hacking from brew to brew is comparable, it just doesn't relax me as much as today has. It's a good stress reliever.
</rant>

sorry for the strong defence, but i can't learn unless i try. If it sucks, then i wasted $30. If it's good then well, i saved a few bucks.

back to the festa kits. the Dry/Low carb one has ALOT of headroom. it's low colour and bitterness makes it great to try with malts and sugars.
for example...
250g of corn sugar will give you a very dry beer...like molsen dry on crack while 250g of light DME will give you a lightly dry lager(temp permitting) that all my friends rave about - no realy, i only drank about 12 in total....both of these hacks are boiled into 500ml of well water. you end up with 23.5L brew.

 

If you are a seasoned 'kit hacker' then I certainly understand your desire to take more control over your beer. I take back my previous recommendation, and definitely think you should try building a recipe of your own.

For what its worth, you might consider a few things:
- If your LHBS is like a lot of the shops here in Calgary, I wouldn't trust their homebrew supplies (especially hops!) to be fresh.
- There are a number of online retailers in Canada that you might be better off purchasing from. There is a good discussion of them in the Canadian Brewers Group here:
BrewSpace - View Canadian Brewers's Messages
- If you want the most control over your beer, you should seriously consider moving directly to all grain brewing. This is especially true since fresh malt extract can be very expensive here in Canada. AG is a little more work, but based on your post above, it sounds like you would sincerely enjoy the challenge and be gratified by the reward.

Happy Holidays!

 

Thanks for the help FlyGuy. the local shops are far from the best for specefic ingerdients. But the festa/brewhouse kits are always fresh.

I was one step away from either throwing the bucket in a colloer colset or rigging a blowoff. It wenst nuts yesterday. I could actually see everything moving around inside it. most vigeroust rew i've watched yet. Great fun.

On the down side, I took the last 12 pack of the Festa Plisner i made a few months back out of the closet, and looks like i had a bottle bomb. A 2" chunck of glass was blown out from one of the bottles. It was in a plastic bag, so it didn't ruin the floor, and the other 11 beer survived.