1-Gallon Brewers UNITE!

[acarter5251]

Can't speak for OK - haven't lived there since I was a kid.

I will say that one of the major investments that I'm looking into getting sometime this summer is a small chest freezer (either 5cuft or 7cuft) and a temp controller so that I can have a dedicated fermentation chamber. So much of quality of the flavor of the beer can be affected by fermentation temps, I've read multiple times on here that it's the single greatest addition you can make to your beer. 160bucks or less is cheap enough to not worry about wild temp swings for my batches.

Maybe something to think about for the future?

Maybe when I get the space I'll look into that. I suppose I could use the same method as I currently am to warm up my fermentations if I needed to. It seems to be working pretty well at the moment. Yesterday it held steady about 15-20 degrees below the ambient temperature without having to do anything.

 

[beerlover87]

My basement gets fairly cold in the summer the temp seems to be fairly steady but I have a extra fridge that I am making into a fermentor chamber as well for the summer I have a small room off of my bedroom that I put a blanket over the doorway and it seems to keep a steady temp of around 65-70 degrees that's where I plan on starting my very first batch tomorrow when my fermentor comes in and to sumbrewindude I have had to leave my toilet running it's on the north side of my house and loves to freeze up

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[sumbrewindude]

Soooooo, I was doing some chatting in one of Sammy33's threads (the small batch induction thread over in Electrical if anyone's interested - and it IS interesting...) about a new series of table beers that I want to start working on. Full bodied and flavored milds or session beers, both English and German styles. That led to some cask ale talk which will undoubtedly rear it's head on here in a few weeks.

That led to me thinking, hey - if you're going to have a few carboys tied up with low ABV product, why not do a few monster beers before - so in addition to the Keptinis (which is a mandatory), looks like I'll be doing a variation of Surly's Furious (Code Named: Livid) and a Strong Scotch Ale (Code Named: The Bruce). I figure those two (7.7/8.2) ought to keep for a bit while working on the table beers.

Man I have WAY too many recipes to try, they are way too much fun to make on the computer...

 

[HomebrewCraig]

SBD: How full is your pipeline? How much do you have in bottle? Which bottle do you use, 12 oz, bomber, or something else? One thing I worry about is that my largest cash outlay will be in bottles.. I am partial to the Grolsch-style fliptop type.

 

[sammy33]

SBD - That Surly Furious sounds absolutely delish. Are you going by NB's recipe? I wonder what the "dry hop blend" is?

ETA: Found this reference dry hop blend for 5g batch:

5 oz simcoe
2.5 oz ahtanum
.5 oz warrior
.5 oz amarillo

HBC - I use Grolsch bottles all the time. Love 'em. :rockin:

 

[HomebrewCraig]

Sammy: How many of them do you own? And do you have a good web source for finding good quality ones on the cheap? I anticipate having our second fridge very full with a healthy representation of a majority of the recognized beer styles at the peak of my addicti... er.... hobby.

 

[sumbrewindude]

Craig - If you look in my sig you'll see all the experiments that are currently bottled. Doing a quick bottle count, it looks like 24 bottled to drink, not including the 3 big bottles (1L) of cider for the SWMBO or the 28 bottles that are conditioning (AZB will be done this weekend and ready to serve, OOA will be ready in two weeks). I usually try to keep 36 bottles of varying beers in the crate downstairs, then put six into a old sixpack carton and put it in the main fridge up stairs. When the carton gets low, I grab a new mix of beers.

On the pipeline side, I usually have 3 carboys running (this is an odd week, so only two running right now) and have bottling day on Sat to collect the yeast slurry, then brew on Sun and repitch that slurry into the new beer. Because of that, I try to time it out so a beer that uses US05 will be made after I bottle a beer made with US05. That allows me to not really worry about conditioning time in the carboy, and get a few uses out of my yeast.

Bottles I'm standardized on Sierra Nevada/Alaskan/Summit style bottles (shorties). I like the looks of them, no real reason. I did run into issues trying to put them into a milkcrate for storage, they don't fit well. If I was starting out, I'd choose a standard sized bottle (tall/skinny) with a good lip on it (like Sam Adams) for the bottler. Oh who am I kidding, I should have skipped the wing capper and gotten a bench capper right from the start. It's on my purchase list as soon as I find one of those oldschool metal bench cappers.

I'm not sure what the lifespan of a bottle is - like anything I figure there's got to be a limit to the number of times you can cap a glass bottle before it starts to develop issues. When that happens I'll like migrate over to the tall bottles. To get them I just bought a 12pack of SN or Alaskan while my pipeline was filling. Alaskan's were MUCH EASIER to delable and clean. If you go this route, pick a bottle that's got only one label on it, instead of a top/bottom/back labels. Less to clean off after an Oxyclean soak.

I've never used the Grolsch style bottles, so I'm of no help - I usually just buy the cheap gold caps (like 3 bucks for 144 caps) and have not had a problem one.

Eventually I want to get a couple cases of 16oz bottles (likely from Hinterland), so I can do bigger ABV beers in them for one and done nights. I'm not a fan of bombers - heresy I know, but I don't drink them fast enough to keep them nice and cold, and I don't like leaving an open bottle in the fridge.

 

[sumbrewindude]

SBD - That Surly Furious sounds absolutely delish. Are you going by NB's recipe? I wonder what the "dry hop blend" is?

ETA: Found this reference dry hop blend for 5g batch:


HBC - I use Grolsch bottles all the time. Love 'em. :rockin:

I'm going to mix it up a bit - I've got some Warrior that needs to be used, so I'll keep that for bittering as FWH, on the late addition side I'm going to use Nugget and Simco. Also adjusting some of the malts to ones I can get locally, so not quite true to the recipe but it'll still be very close. It'll have a mix of American/English grains but I haven't fully decided on the base malts yet. Hopefully the LHBS has Golden Promise, otherwise I'll sub in something else...

 

[sammy33]

Sammy: How many of them do you own? And do you have a good web source for finding good quality ones on the cheap? I anticipate having our second fridge very full with a healthy representation of a majority of the recognized beer styles at the peak of my addicti... er.... hobby.

I have like 50 of the Grolsch bottles. I just grab the 4 pack for $7.99 from the beer store at the corner. Comes with some decent beer in them too!

It takes 9 to bottle a 1 gallon batch and 20 for a 2.5g batch. This allows me to bottle a couple of 1 gallon brews and a couple of my big ole 2.5 gallon batches at any one time. Anything left in the bottling bucket I drink.

 

[doc8402]

Hey fellas I am brand new to brewing I just purchased a 1 gal brew starter kit and some boxed beer kits (Brown ale, IPA, Black IPA, Red, Bourbon Oak Porter) all from northern brewer. I was wondering if any of you had experience with these and any suggestions.

 

[sumbrewindude]

Welcome to the Small Batch Brewer thread, Doc!

That's a great collection of styles. The NB kits are either BIAB kits or partial mash kits (where you'll add in extract at the boil after steeping the grains). The two I looked up look like partial mash kits. Nothing wrong with those at all, you can definately get your feet wet with them.

The one thing I'd caution you about is that everyone's evaporation rate (which is what you're going for in the boil) is slightly different, so when they tell you to add 1.25gal of water and boil keep in mind that amount may not be correct! You might need more water than 1.25!

I'd recommend getting the pot that you intend to brew in, fill it with 2gal of water, and boil it for an hour. Once you're done, measure how much water is left - that'll tell you your evaporation rate. Once you know that, you can correctly guestimate how much water you'll need to reach your end volume. That way, if you're off you're only a little off.

Other than that, it's easy - have fun, read up on the process, and don't stress! Beer's as easy as you want to make it!

Have fun!

 

[sumbrewindude]

SBD - That Surly Furious sounds absolutely delish. Are you going by NB's recipe? I wonder what the "dry hop blend" is?

So got the hops for this last night, LHBS had Mosaic for the same price as the Nugget, so I went that route instead. Mosaic's a daughter of Simco so hopefully this change is for the better (I think it will be, anyway).

Nothing like changing up the menu at the last second... LOL. Three brews locked and loaded! Ready for the weekend!

 

[rave808]

Hey fellas I am brand new to brewing I just purchased a 1 gal brew starter kit and some boxed beer kits (Brown ale, IPA, Black IPA, Red, Bourbon Oak Porter) all from northern brewer. I was wondering if any of you had experience with these and any suggestions.

I bought a bunch of the northern brewer 1 gallon kits basically they r scaled down from their 5 gallon extract kits .....very fun to make


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[hehawbrew]

Yep, easy and fun! I just did their bomber barley wine. Def not the best barley wine, but for 12$ to yield a 10% BW, not too bad. Gonna let it sit a while, but it seems an affordable way to get my barley wine fix as I let my AG bakery wine age!


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[sumbrewindude]

Went and tried a new (for me) beer last night as part of a bottle swap with a couple guys at work (they got kits too for the holidays, so everyone made something different), a kolsch.

Holy cow that good. I almost had to pry the SWMBO's fingers off the glass. I know I've already got 3 recipes crushed and ready to go, but I think I'm going to have to make a trip to the LHBS for some pilsen malt and Wyeast 2565.

In other news - can I say how crazy it is (for a guy that usually doesn't do overly hoppy beers) to add 2.5+oz of hops to a 1.5gal batch? Brewing LIVID (Surly Furious adaptation) today.

 

[Owly055]

So got the hops for this last night, LHBS had Mosaic for the same price as the Nugget, so I went that route instead. Mosaic's a daughter of Simco so hopefully this change is for the better (I think it will be, anyway).

Nothing like changing up the menu at the last second... LOL. Three brews locked and loaded! Ready for the weekend!

I've recently begun all grain, after not having brewed anything for many years. What I want to do, is run a simple mash, perhaps just two row and nothing else, producing enough wort for 5 gallons. Then heat the wort to near boiling, and pour it into a brew bucket except for one gallon. Sap the lid on, and slosh the wort around in the bucket thoroughly to doubly sterilize, open the spigot to sterilize that, Then do a boil with a single hop...... Mosaic looks really great...... I've heard nothing but good about it. The next day, do a boil with a different hop, and so forth until I have 5 single hop beers. Use software to try to get the IBUs about the same, and then compare the results. Open 5 bottles of beer......... try each one, experiment with blending, etc.... Just to discover what works for me.


H.W.

 

[Danno77]

Just dropping in to post a pic of my setup. I've only done 1 gal brews with it so far, but I think I can get a half batch (2.5-2.75 gal) out of it depending on how much grain it takes.

The nice thing about what I have here is that the hardware on my Walmart pots and mini cooler can be moved to something bigger if I decide I want to! But, for now, everything can fit into a big Rubbermaid tub! I've even offered to lend the system to friends that are thinking about moving into AG brewing.

It's also fun pulling out the digital scale and separating the ingredients into fifths! who new that medicine containers would be good for hops? Good thing I'm a hoarder. (yogurt and coffee containers for grains)

I was considering a wort chiller, but I can drop temps for 1 gal in <10 minutes in the kitchen sink!


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[DoD_Ales]

Owly,

While I really like the idea of reserving a gallon of wort for experimentation, the idea of pouring "near boiling" hot wort and "sloshing" it around scares me. You might want to look up hot side oxidation.

I do know people who, during cooler times of the year, store hot wort in a completely full, no air, carboy overnight, or even for a couple of days, before doing whatever they want to it. Maybe you could try that with smaller containers, and then complete 3 or 4 small batches over a few days. This technique could be useful for comparing SMASH batches.

 

[DoD_Ales]

I assume most small batch, one gallon dudes, use the stove? I have been looking at upgrading to a canning element. A power boost and better support. What do you think?

Canning element vs. standard 8" element. More turns. Higher wattage. Quicker boils! :rockin:

I wanted to thank you for this idea. SWMBO was kicking me out of the kitchen for scorching the range. The canner element works like a charm. Just completed a 3 gal. New Albion clone BIAB with no problems.

 

[HomebrewCraig]

For those that mill their own grain... Which grain mill do you use? I am not sure if I will ever get my Monster Mill back from my friend, and if I do not, I want to buy a relatively inexpensive one that is adjustable, to tide me over til the day when hell freezes over and I get my Monster back...

 

[sumbrewindude]

Craig -

Do a cost/benefit analysis on the mill. If you've got a great LHBS that will mill it for you, or let you use the mill it might save you some money in the long run. I know I really wanted to get one, but when I broke it down it would take me well over 2 years (brewing as I do now) to see a return investment in a $100 mill vs using my LHBS and having them crush it for me.

Obviously your case may be different.

In the end, I may just get a cheap $30 Corona and make some "Ugly Junk". That way if I need to order in some specialty grain, or do something that would need less than an ounce of something (which is the smallest unit my LHBS will sell) for a recipe I'll be covered.

I do know that the Cereal Killer (http://www.homebrewing.org/Cereal-Killer-Grain-Mill_p_2310.html) has a very loyal following around here, and the price is right. The dude that got me into this mess has a MonsterMill, and it's awesome - but more than I'd need. He routinely does 15gal batches, so he's getting his money's worth out of it.

In other news - first runnings on LIVID went for 16.5P :rockin: Sparge cooked out 6.8P, this is gonna be a beast....

 

[HomebrewCraig]

Hiya SBD:

I figure that if I can find one ~$50 I would be content. My old Monster was over $200 and I don't want to shell that much out again, especially if there's a possibility that I may get it back. And since the three LHBS within a half hour drive are not on my route to work, I'd not want to commit an hour on brewday to have the grain milled. And in the sprit of freshness, I'd rather not have milled grain sitting around for more than a week.

I did find this on Amazon, but it has no reviews...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064OEV6A/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

LIVID sounds like it is going to be incredible? What's your ABV estimate? and IBUs?

 

[sumbrewindude]

Hiya SBD:

I figure that if I can find one ~$50 I would be content. My old Monster was over $200 and I don't want to shell that much out again, especially if there's a possibility that I may get it back. And since the three LHBS within a half hour drive are not on my route to work, I'd not want to commit an hour on brewday to have the grain milled. And in the sprit of freshness, I'd rather not have milled grain sitting around for more than a week.

I did find this on Amazon, but it has no reviews...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064OEV6A/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

LIVID sounds like it is going to be incredible? What's your ABV estimate? and IBUs?

Craig -

That mill is a Corona Mill, and is what I was refering to about the "Ugly Junk". Here's the thread on it: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/my-ugly-junk-corona-mill-station-90849/

It's a bit of a read, but if you can find Wilser Brewer's second try, you'll have the basis for a GREAT mill. Basically a mill in a bucket, nice and compact. Might be easiest to start at the end and work backward on that one - it's had a few versions as the group got better at it.

As for the mill, Discount Tommy's got the best deal going on them. On eBay you can find them for around 25$ with free shipping sometimes, otherwise amazon has them for around $30 under Discount Tommy's name - finally, if you have a Walmart close, you can get the same mill from Walmart and have it shipped to store free for around $30 also: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Weston-Cereal-and-Multi-Grain-Mill/14223932

LIVID finished up at 17.7P into the carboy, estimated ABV of 7.6/75IBU, pitched with a gen2 Notty slurry. Hope to dryhop it with 1oz of Simcoe/Mosaic.

 

[rockstarpotion]

Hey! I'm wondering where people get their 1-3gallon recipes from? Or do you just usually scale it down from a 5 gallon recipe? I want to start all-grain as well.

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[HomebrewCraig]

As I look for recipes that appeal to me, I find them mostly in 5 or 10 gallon sizes.. I use software (BeerSmith) which will scale the recipe down to whatever batch size I wish. BrewTarget is a free, open-source homebrew software which can do the same thing. If you want to scale the recipes yourself, divide the ingredient bill by 2 to make a 2.5 gallon batch, or by 4 to make a 1.25 gallon batch, or by 5 if you make a 1 gallon batch. Converting to grams may be helpful, especially for some of the more minute amounts of ingredients.

 

[HomebrewCraig]

SBD: Good to see that third fermenter get put to use! Revvy's Ugly Junk project looks interesting.. I managed my way through nearly 400 pages of this thread, I am sure that thread will go quicker.
I will look into the mill and maybe take my own set of pics.

 

[BigRock947]

SBD: Good to see that third fermenter get put to use! Revvy's Ugly Junk project looks interesting.. I managed my way through nearly 400 pages of this thread, I am sure that thread will go quicker.
I will look into the mill and maybe take my own set of pics.

I used my "Ugly Junk" mill to grind up 2.5# of grain for a brew yesterday. It works really well for BIAB and small batches...It only took me about 10-15 minutes to crush up the grain. Another place to look for them is Wal-Mart.com plus free delivery to the store.

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[sumbrewindude]

LIVID took off last night, airlocks rattling the top, bubbles at least twice a second. Looks like the Eye of Jupiter in there...

To any of the small batch brewers thinking about saving your yeast, do it! I started a few batches ago, just collecting the cake and leftover trub with a little bit of bottled water into a 1qt sanitized mason jar (it's easy enough to do on bottling day). Just label and toss in the fridge for a few days and it'll separate out.

When you're ready to pitch, just decant off the old liquid and carefully pour the top half of the slurry into the carboy. Every one of my pitches like this take off like a rocket. I'm trying to see how far I can go with each culture, so far I've been able to get into a 3rd generation...


The Corona Mill/Ugly Junk project will probably happen this summer for me - I still want to make one eventually, but it's lower on the priority list than things like a fermentation chamber or keezer.

 

[bleme]

Hey! I'm wondering where people get their 1-3gallon recipes from? Or do you just usually scale it down from a 5 gallon recipe? I want to start all-grain as well.

I use this spreadsheet most of the time:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsJukKCXJXsEdFNpNC1Wc3hMYkVReUhVS0tCaVplenc&usp=sharing

 

[sumbrewindude]

That spreadsheet Bleme linked to is great. I used that for a while until I figured out how to use BrewTarget. Now I use Brewtarget for everything so I can see what happens if I have to make a change immediately during brewing.