Deciding on my next batch...

[DyerNeedOfBeer]

I'm about to brew my SECOND batch tomorrow. Heading into town today to get my ingredients.

I am looking to make a beer which is a 'typical American style' (Bud, Coors, Michelob, Bush, Natural Light etc...) just to get my girlfriend and other 'standard' beer drinking friends interested. Any recommendations on a recipe (or at least the name of the style) that would give me something like this but just a step above... maybe if they just tasted a good home brew that was great due to its freshness but not too far from their norm, I could get them into the hobby I figure the more of them I get brewing, the more variety and expertise I could have at my fingertips

I have read through many 'styles' in books but it seems they describe every beer as 'full body', 'hoppy', 'bitter' etc... The only quality I can truly discern is 'dark' or 'light' at this stage of my experience.

Found this also... checking it out now.
Looking for a recipe for the wife....

 

[SwAMi75]

Do you have the equipment to do a lager? If not you're not going to get too close to Bud, et al.

I'd recommend an English bitter (just a standard ale, not really bitter as the name would imply), an American style pale ale, or a steam beer (a.k.a. California common).

The steam beer uses lager yeast, but is fermented at ale temps. You could cut back on some of the hops in the recipe to taste.

In any case, let it spend some time in secondary so it'll clarify nicely. Seems most American lager drinkers are put off by hazy beers.

Best of luck!

Sam

 

[Janx]

I agree with everything Sam said and would only add a wheat style as another possibility. It'll be hazy, but light, and you might open their eyes, since canned American beers really do in fact suck

My first choice would be a standard English Bitter I think. It's a very accessible beer. Cheers!

 

[George]

Ya know, Janx just recently agreed with me, so I think I'll do the same here.
First 2 warnings: I've been cleaning the garage all day and have had way too much beer (made by your's truly of course). And some following descriptions may be offensive to people who are fond of mega breweries' mass produced lagers.
Despite my consumption of alchohol in my younger years, I hated beer until the age of 21. Perhaps it's economical. Not many high school kids bought Sierra Nevada 1/2 barrels in the late 80's and early 90's. What was always at our parties was, what I have since learned, diabetic horse urine (credit for that goes to Charlie I think).
Then, in my early 20's, I went snowboarding with some friends and hesitantly purchased a pitcher of beer. It was Widmer's hefe. I've never looked back.
I'm not such a fan of hefeweizens now, but as a homebrewer , they posses advantages over other beers.
1-they are cloudy. Nobody who knows what they're talking about can find fault in the cloudiness of your home crafted wheat beer.
2-while a clovey-bannana hefeweizen is totally different from what the mainstream domestic lager drinker is accustomed to, it has been extremely successful at converting many swill drinkers to craft drinkers.

Janx is right. This is a successful conversion beer that, by it's nature, is cloudy. Cloudiness seems to be a concern with most newer homebrewers, myself included.

 

[DyerNeedOfBeer]

I went with a bitter today... this is my second batch of my new hobby and the first in which I used real hops. The recipe called for 3 oz. of hops (added at different times and two different types). I used hop leaves that came in two ounce vaccum packed bags. These hops SWELL like mad! I read that one of the advantages of the leaf / whole hop is that they are easy to strain out of the wort and make for less sediment in fermentation. Well, I am only using a 22 qt pot so I did a 3.5 gallon boil for my wort and... well, these things swell up and took up the bottom quarter of the pot!!! I am now concerned that they prevented me from getting all of the wort out of the pot and into the fermenter... I considered sparging them with the remaining water that I needed to make it up to the five gallon mark, but I decided to just go with what I could get out of the pot before bringing too much sediment over from the siphon. I did the 'vortex' swirl thing which I understood would bring all the sediments to the center and settle them at the bottom of the pot. Well, there was waaaay too much hop leaf to permit this. I tilted my brew pot to the side and with a stirrer, moved the hop leaves to the high side in order to get as much wort out as I could...

This was a complete suprise to me... did I do right or did I lose alot by not 'sparging' the hops to get the remaining sugar ladened wort out of the pot?

 

[BitterRat]

If youhad rinsed the hops, sure you would have gotten more of the sugars out,but also would have gotten more bitterness too. I wouldn't really worry to much, alot of people don't rinse the hops out!