You should be able to reuse the bottles multiple times, so your cost will drop on future batches. But unless you brew often enough to buy ingredients in bulk it won't drop much more.
Check Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, etc.
Many here find 2.5 gal batches (roughly 24 bottles0 to be the right balance between making, storing, and consuming the beer.
With a solid end of fermentation process and a solid bottling process, both bottle bombs (boom) and gushers when opening bottles are not a problem.
The first batch is costly. The second batch can be way less costly as you have already paid (in dollars for new bottles or time cleaning used) plus you do not need to use new yeast for each batch. When you brew a batch of beer the yeast multiply and you end up with about 4 times as much as you started with. Rack off the beer, stir up the yeast with some boiled and cooled water, then collect the yeast, dividing it into 4 sanitized jars which you refrigerate. Next brew day, pour off the excess water and pitch the yeast.
Yeah, I do save yeast from sour mash batches, I have a few jars in the fridge from this past summer. You can keep a strain going for several ferments, but after multiple generations, it tends to mutate away from its original properties. Most of the time I don't bother b/c Champagne yeast is so cheap to buy. Looking at the price of beer-making yeasts, I would definitely save it for multiple batches.
I've decided to do that this first batch. I'm going to open a bottle after 3 weeks, then wait longer...When I can't tell much improvement, I'll refrigerate the rest.
This is exactly what I was looking for- If people blindly follow the "months/years" aging b/c they read it somewhere, that is not scientific. If people say "I followed such-and-such recipe and it was definitely better after X weeks but I noticed no improvement after...Y weeks" then that is from experience. As I said, it isn't impatience, but the fact that I'm tying up all of my bottles aging it. I'm opening a bottle after 3 weeks to check flavor and carbonation, they go from there...If it is good than fine. If it is mediocre, then I'll age it longer checking each week to see how it's doing. It's my first batch and a crappy beer won't necessarily get better aging 2 years.
Of course, blindly following Palmer isn't necessarily scientific either. In fact, it's a lot more like people doing something because they read it somewhere. Beer ain't wine, and aging either one on wood (for example) isn't the same as just keeping it sitting around for a while for the hell of it. So I guess I should have mentioned that when I bulk age my big beers it's always on wood, or fruit, or something. And I bottle condition them longer because high alcohol, high gravity beers take longer to carbonate.
Correct. I was more impressed that he "experimented" with tasting along the aging process rather than saying "XYZ says Lager has to age for 2 years" without seeing if it is true. I know much of the "taste preference" is about how particular one is. I've had Stag's Leap $100/bottle Cabernet Sauvignon and I've had Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon wine for $7/bottle. Small subtle differences yes, but not $93 worth! I guess I'm not sophisticated enough. I think with all my brew experiments, I'll taste a bottle here and there to figure out for my palet where the point of no improvement is.
You can't get accurate readings using an alcohol hydrometer (proof/tralle hydrometer) with beer. They are only accurate when testing mixtures containing only water and ethanol. Finished beer contains water, ethanol, proteins, dextrins, and multiple other components that cause higher SGs than mixtures with the same amount of water and ethanol but nothing else.
Yeah, no big deal with beer...more important with distilled products.You can't get accurate readings using an alcohol hydrometer (proof/tralle hydrometer) with beer. They are only accurate when testing mixtures containing only water and ethanol. Finished beer contains water, ethanol, proteins, dextrins, and multiple other components that cause higher SGs than mixtures with the same amount of water and ethanol but nothing else.
Brew on
I understand, but I have a scientific mind so I always chase the science in a new project. I wasn't trying to clone a Guinness, after reading the recipes for Extra Stout with the expensive ingredients and having to have nitrogen, special equipment, etc. I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole. I just wanted a dark, full-bodied stout-like recipe b/c I'm not a huge fan of light, pale yellow beer.
I think that was a smart decision. My first beer was pretty awful, mainly due to fermenting it too warm since I didn't have any way to control the temperature and the ambient temperature went from something like 70F to 90F in the day after I brewed it. But that's the great thing about the whole process. You learn and improve. Even if this batch is sub-par, you're sure to be making a stout or porter that you really like in no time.
