Acquiring Ingredients?

[betelgeuse4721]

Hey everyone,

I'm about to receive my third ingredient kit from the HomeBrewery (Holiday Ale).

These kits are really convenient and turn out a really damn good beer.

However, I want to get more personal with the batch after this, and pick and choose my own ingredients.

How do I know how much and what kind of malt extract, hops and other ingredients I need?

There is a large home brew shop downtown that has a lot of variety. I just need to know what I need to buy.

Thanks!
Brady

 

[dcp27]

The usual suggestion is reading Ray Daniel's "Designing Great Beers". In the meantime, I'd just peruse though the many many recipes here in the database and get a feel for how others are done. Then you can take existing ones and do small little tweaks to learn more about what they do. nibbling on some grains while at the LHBS helps get a feel for them too. I'd give this a look too: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/ingredient-guides-redux-107308/

 

[damnyankee]

Hey everyone,

I'm about to receive my third ingredient kit from the HomeBrewery (Holiday Ale).

These kits are really convenient and turn out a really damn good beer.

However, I want to get more personal with the batch after this, and pick and choose my own ingredients.

How do I know how much and what kind of malt extract, hops and other ingredients I need?

There is a large home brew shop downtown that has a lot of variety. I just need to know what I need to buy.

Thanks!
Brady

Trust me: your next investment has to be BeerSmith. I've just used it to create my Hefeweisen (it'll be the 3rd batch of beer I've ever brewed) and I just ordered all the German/Bavarian ingredients tonight from Northern Brewer.

It comes with numerous recipes and brewing directions for all kinds of beers/ales and on their site you can d/l hundreds more for free. It's cheap...something like $29 or so - and I guarantee you, you'll start playing around with it right away and create your own beer. It has every type of extract and grain, yeast, hops, etc that's on the market so you can try different combinations and it'll calculate your alcohol content, hops IBUs, etc. There's a free trial so try it out: http://www.beersmith.com/

No, I don't have any affiliation with Beersmith; I've read on this forum about it and it's everything these guys say it is.

DY

 

[logan3825]

In general price wise for extract brewing you are probably best off ordering a kit and tweaking it. Extract doesn't vary much in price from store to store. Yeast will be your biggest price savings in extract brewing, or specifically harvesting yeast or using dry yeast when the yeast doesn't drive the flavor in a style. Hops and steeping grains are used in such small quantities that you don't save much shopping around.

I agree, go around the internet and look at recipes on different sites and you will see what generally goes into certain styles. In my experience 6lbs of LME(liquid malt extract) puts you around typical gravity/abv for a session beer. Add 3 lbs and you are up around 6-7%, generally.

 

[passedpawn]

Hey everyone,

I'm about to receive my third ingredient kit from the HomeBrewery (Holiday Ale).

These kits are really convenient and turn out a really damn good beer.

However, I want to get more personal with the batch after this, and pick and choose my own ingredients.

How do I know how much and what kind of malt extract, hops and other ingredients I need?

There is a large home brew shop downtown that has a lot of variety. I just need to know what I need to buy.

Thanks!
Brady

Stick to recipes. There are a lot of beer styles you might try before you branch out and create your own.

After you've made a bunch of batches, you'll get a feel for the contribution each grain or extract provides. It's one of those things you need to experience in order to learn. Choose the recipes wisely and you'll come up to speed before you know it.