I've used K1-V1116 yeast once before in a SMaSH made with Belgian pilsner malt and Sterling hops. It's one of the best beers I've ever brewed.
Costs of ingredients
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I've used K1-V1116 yeast once before in a SMaSH made with Belgian pilsner malt and Sterling hops. It's one of the best beers I've ever brewed.
It looks like a pretty solid recipe except I'm not sure I would enjoy 49 IBU's in a 1.000 FG beer. Since I've never tried anything like that, I'll withhold judgement until I do though.
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Cheap doesn't mean bad. I make a hoegaarten clone that is 1.75 lbs of 2-row, 1.75 of 6-row, 2.25 flaked barley and hopped at 60 minutes with a pitching of a liquid ale yeast. It's cheap and it's good.
You can party gyle make a Belgian pale ale and Belgian dubbel. Both can be fairly cheap and not too time consuming.
We brew what we like and who cares nobody else likes it, all that matters that I do since I have to drink it.... LOLi'd have to disagree...this is what i'm brewing today...
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for 8.96, i get 8.88889888 twelve packs, of 9% alcohol beer, and doesn't that color look a lot better then a $9 twelver of milwaukee's best!
edit: and the reason my pale malt is now .29 a pound instead of .32, because @Schlenkerla good idea of wire screen roasting pans saves me a 12 hour kilning cycle... always ways to save a nickel on a twelve pack! if that's what your trying to do!
No news to you @bracconiere, say this for others reading this. I make rauchbier that's kinda "meh" to most people cause it's such an obscure beer. But it's my obscure beer from my grain bag and smoker. Truth be told I rarely make the same beer twice. The exception are these rauch biers as lately, but made with a different smoke. Pecan being the last.
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A beer like a triple or saison are close to that high IBU and dry. Triple being more bitter, saison being dry.
I don't ever brew the same thing twice....so your guess is as good as mine...
I find the dark grain makes up for the low FG....i'd say it's just a simple dark beer....
maybe not you but the OP is, he wanted to know how much sucrose he could get away with to cut costs, i've used about 75%, got a drinkable beer, then i thought better and started using 5lb bags of flour instead...
anoother good cost cutting measure would be to buy a 20lb bag of white rice for 8 bucks and do a cereal mash....
I've made a 100% rice beer with enzymes...and A LOT of rice hulls, from the garden center...a 20lb bag of rice will get you a 7% 10 gal batch...
I've made a 100% rice beer with enzymes...and A LOT of rice hulls, from the garden center...a 20lb bag of rice will get you a 7% 10 gal batch...
Soulshine2
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Thats fine but at that point you're not making "beer" anymore, you're making more like a sugar shine just not distilling it. which is why the moonshiners did that , it was prohibition , sugar was cheap ,a little corn ,corn meal ,rye ,barley, or rice was available and once mashed you could still feed the cattle with it ,easy disposal .Cheap and easy to turn around for a few bucks tax free. As long as the feds didn't find you first.
yes...That was the question though...And i've done 10 gal batches with 8-9 pounds of grain and like 10-12 lbs sucrose, and they came out, decent enough to drink...(by my standards anyway, which we know are low)
i'd have to disagree...this is what i'm brewing today...
for 8.96, i get 8.88889888 twelve packs, of 9% alcohol beer, and doesn't that color look a lot better then a $9 twelver of milwaukee's best!
edit: and the reason my pale malt is now .29 a pound instead of .32, because @Schlenkerla good idea of wire screen roasting pans saves me a 12 hour kilning cycle... always ways to save a nickel on a twelve pack! if that's what your trying to do!
Agreed. My last batches were under a buck a beer (despite being extract-based), and the minimum legal price for alcohol here are a little over a buck a beer. Were they perfect recipes? No, not quite. However, I did like them, and I'd add I liked them more than most beers I've bought, including when you go up to the 2, 3, or more bucks a beer cost.
Making good beer on the cheap is quite feasible when you don't have to cover the cost of rent, a huge array of stainless steel equipment, wages, and then a livable wage on top.
Plus, while I'd normally say that brewing your own has greater risk than buying, I'm not so convinced anymore, given all the posts I'm seeing of oxidized beers from all sorts of different breweries... Biggest asset for me is that I get to choose my own ingredients, namely the hops. I love hops, but not the current hop fads.
Got any tips or resources on how to use flour in brewing? Flour is fairly cheap, though I can't wrap my head around dumping a bunch of flour into the kettle.
My "target" sugar content, if we could put it that way... would be no greater than 40% of the final ABV. Rest would derive from gains.
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I tried using 20% flour once and got terrible efficiency. I will try it again someday at 30-40% in a witbier, but I will cook it first.
One of the questions I did not notice an answer to (apologies if it was said!), are we better off using darker malt to compensate when using a lot of sugar?
I'm hesitating between amber and dark extract, on the stats it doesn't seem to much much difference. Some peculiarities aside, I'm aiming for an EIPA-ish recipe.
I'm hesitating between amber and dark extract, on the stats it doesn't seem to much much difference. Some peculiarities aside, I'm aiming for an EIPA-ish recipe.
i just dumped in with the malt in the mash, used 7 lbs malt with 5 lbs flour...the sparge was tough and slow, but got it done...did that quite a few batches, many i'd have to blow back throw my drain hose to get flow again...got over 80% effec. myself, but if your using extract flour wouldn't work for you, need enzymes...
One of the questions I did not notice an answer to (apologies if it was said!), are we better off using darker malt to compensate when using a lot of sugar?
I'm hesitating between amber and dark extract, on the stats it doesn't seem to much much difference. Some peculiarities aside, I'm aiming for an EIPA-ish recipe.
For me personally looking at the color prediction on that brew, you're fine as far as flavor and body goes! i'm not familiar with marketing so don't know what a EIPA is or supposed to be....
If your spending 47.88(canadian)/36.12(US) on a 5 gal batch, yeah i think 'we', because even the quality boys would scoff at that number, can help get the price down for you...you can knock 18 off a batch just repitching your yeast...
i'd also say, try yakima valley hops for a hops source, i'm pretty sure they ship to canada...most of their hops are under a buck an oz at least...
(sorry i just got up, and can't type too good!
)I haven't shopped around, yet, really, I just took the prices from the Ontario Beer Keg website, since they've got a lot of diversity and the prices are all plain to see. Moût International has a lot of diversity too, but then you are crawling all over the site for PDFs, price lists, product descriptions, plus also googling a bunch of other sites for more details. The price list on MI suggests I could save a number of bucks relative to OBK (if the prices are up to date), plus being more local (Anjou, QC, vs Mitchell, ON).
I'm not keen on spending a ton of time to minimize the prices on ingredients, only to get killed by the shipping costs afterwards due to having a bunch of suppliers, though. Sure, a lb of Chinook (they don't have Nugget!?) would only cost 15$... but then one also tacks on 33$ shipping... all USD I presume. 1lb of YCH hops from OBK is 23,99$ CAD, for reference. 15$USD being almost 20$CAD, it's not a huge difference either to begin with, even before shipping.
Also, re-using yeast can definitely save a lot, given that the vials are 8.99$... that's like 20% of the cost, and I've got 2 vials in there! I don't actually have that strain yet, though, and I haven't brewed in a while, so I don't have anything fresh to re-use either. Making this recipe more... "standard", by re-using yeast, ditching out the MLB and the juice, would bring it back down to 23,59$, for what I'm assuming will give me about 48 beers, so roughly 49 cents a beer, compared to the minimum legal price of 1,11$ a beer. Even the current version, with the more fancy and costly ingredients, ends up at under a buck a beer (0,9975$), and well below the minimum of 1,11$ (which is for really cheap stuff I'd never buy anyways, stuff I'd actually buy starts more around 1,50$, when a deal's on).
But as stated in another thread, I'm feeling pretty tempted to toy around with MLF and various fruit additions in beer.
Base style is english IPA, but working towards something a little sour, more vividly red, and with more pine-y new world hop aromas. Hoping it will be palatable. XD
I could also add 8 oz of xylitol, which would bring my starting and final density within the style's guideline (not that following the style is a huge concern), to give it a bit more body/sweetness the sucrose might have taken away from it.
I'm not keen on spending a ton of time to minimize the prices on ingredients, only to get killed by the shipping costs afterwards due to having a bunch of suppliers, though. Sure, a lb of Chinook (they don't have Nugget!?) would only cost 15$... but then one also tacks on 33$ shipping... all USD I presume. 1lb of YCH hops from OBK is 23,99$ CAD, for reference. 15$USD being almost 20$CAD, it's not a huge difference either to begin with, even before shipping.
Also, re-using yeast can definitely save a lot, given that the vials are 8.99$... that's like 20% of the cost, and I've got 2 vials in there! I don't actually have that strain yet, though, and I haven't brewed in a while, so I don't have anything fresh to re-use either. Making this recipe more... "standard", by re-using yeast, ditching out the MLB and the juice, would bring it back down to 23,59$, for what I'm assuming will give me about 48 beers, so roughly 49 cents a beer, compared to the minimum legal price of 1,11$ a beer. Even the current version, with the more fancy and costly ingredients, ends up at under a buck a beer (0,9975$), and well below the minimum of 1,11$ (which is for really cheap stuff I'd never buy anyways, stuff I'd actually buy starts more around 1,50$, when a deal's on).
But as stated in another thread, I'm feeling pretty tempted to toy around with MLF and various fruit additions in beer.
Base style is english IPA, but working towards something a little sour, more vividly red, and with more pine-y new world hop aromas. Hoping it will be palatable. XD
I could also add 8 oz of xylitol, which would bring my starting and final density within the style's guideline (not that following the style is a huge concern), to give it a bit more body/sweetness the sucrose might have taken away from it.
lol, now your talking! fun, fun... i'd call that thinking outside the box! low cal too...perfect for 'all day drinking' Brüt IPA!
lol, now your talking! fun, fun... i'd call that thinking outside the box! low cal too...perfect for 'all day drinking' Brüt IPA!
Well, it's a non-fermentible that doesn't taste like crap (sucralose). I guess I could use lactose, but lumber's a huge part of the history here, and the mill in town is starting a big project to start converting some of that wood pulp into xylitol, so I figure, why not try that? "Wood sugar" has a certain appeal! A good match for pine-y hops, no?
Also low caloric (not that I really care), and apparently good for oral health. Wonderful!
But if you add xylitol you won't get "brut", which is meant to be dry, without residual sugars!
Keep xylitol away from your dogs. It's poison to them. (there's some strange-looking recipes in this thread)
Well, it's a non-fermentible that doesn't taste like crap (sucralose). I guess I could use lactose, but lumber's a huge part of the history here, and the mill in town is starting a big project to start converting some of that wood pulp into xylitol, so I figure, why not try that? "Wood sugar" has a certain appeal! A good match for pine-y hops, no?
Also low caloric (not that I really care), and apparently good for oral health. Wonderful!
But if you add xylitol you won't get "brut", which is meant to be dry, without residual sugars!
Wood sugar! why not, just don't drink wood alcohol! and as far as being dry, and not brüt...i guess i was thinking of the all day drinking part of their marketing pitch...
aren't there always in 'i'm trying to cut costs' threads! along with the cussing and nay sayers saying buying cheap beer is cheaper then making cheap beer...lol
I don't have a dog.
I know, woe is me.Haha, I don't think there's any risk of methanol. For the rest, I don't think I'm getting the reference! With a FG of 1.010, with the xylitol, wouldn't seem very dry at all, to me? But maybe that's just me that's used to meads finishing under 1.000.
aren't there always in 'i'm trying to cut costs' threads! along with the cussing and nay sayers saying buying cheap beer is cheaper then making cheap beer...lol
Haha, indeed! What a bunch of cheapskates can think of to save a few bucks!
Haha, well, seems like, despite myself, I ended up doing what I wanted to do but feared doing. "Go all the way!", right?
Due to some mix-ups with the volumes of my containers, I over-topped off my wort. So, instinctively, I corrected the OG with MORE sucrose. I just ran the numbers this morning, and about 51% of my ABV is expected to come from the sucrose now. Whoops. Was aiming more for 35% for the first test...
Haha, smells great, though! I have faith, I have faith!
Due to some mix-ups with the volumes of my containers, I over-topped off my wort. So, instinctively, I corrected the OG with MORE sucrose. I just ran the numbers this morning, and about 51% of my ABV is expected to come from the sucrose now. Whoops. Was aiming more for 35% for the first test...
Haha, smells great, though! I have faith, I have faith!
Well I did a red ale/english IPA -ish recipe, with water from my well (sulfurous), amber LME, crystal 60, Nugget hops for about 30 IBU and dry hopping, and... over 50% of it derived from white table sugar (I meant to do like 30%, but... oops).
To me, the statement that over 10% sugar leaves a tasteless bland product has been debunked. While the first times I sampled it, prior to dry hopping, I was quite worried and did consider it tasted watered down, the final product does not at all taste that way. I would even say it has more (malt?) character that I'm used to, than typical american-style IPAs I typically drink.
To me, the statement that over 10% sugar leaves a tasteless bland product has been debunked. While the first times I sampled it, prior to dry hopping, I was quite worried and did consider it tasted watered down, the final product does not at all taste that way. I would even say it has more (malt?) character that I'm used to, than typical american-style IPAs I typically drink.
