Homebrewers in China

[FatDragon]

I got a couple of these to make double batches in this new fermentation chamber (nominally a birthday gift from my wife, but we would have bought it one way or the other), and in spite of all of the "food grade" promises and the fact that people buy them to store consumable liquids like cooking oil, spirits, vinegar, and soy sauce, they arrived smelling strongly of plastic. A sodium percarbonate soak and a baking soda soak after that, plus a bit of airing out, seem to have dissipated the smell, but I'm naturally a bit skeptical of using these to ferment beer. Does anybody here have suggestions for food-grade liners that might live up to the billing so I can use these jugs without the risk of leaching a bunch of toxic chemicals into my beer (or experience using these jugs as fermenters that might ease my worries)? If I can't do double batches in this freezer as planned, my wife will probably make me sleep in it instead...

 

[mongoose33]

I can't offer anything about those specific jugs, but when people use things like pickle buckets and the like, one solution to the pickle smell is to put them in the sun.

A little different with the small opening of the jugs, but it's a thought.

Looks like you have a pretty full repertoire of beer going there. BTW, that ferm chamber looks like it's going to be great....

A buddy of mine who's been to Wuhan several times was over on Wednesday night. We were remininscing about our times in Wuhan, and the Devil's Brewery. He'd never been, I set him on to that, and it's still great. Thank you for getting me there! We were making noises about getting to Wuhan next summer, we'll see. If so, you'll be the first guy I tell.

FYI: For those who don't know, I visited FatDragon back in January of 2017, he took me to a local micro brewery run by an American national. Very nice beer there, and I still have the glasses and growler from Devils' Brewery.

 

[FatDragon]

I haven't been to Devil's for a few months now - the endless cycle of working full time and parenting a toddler makes it hard to swing.

I like the idea of giving the jugs some sun - even with the small mouths it should do some good (they're translucent, after all). I'll have to give it a try the next time I see the sun - it's been a rainy couple weeks. Even if the smell is gone, though, I'm worried the chemicals in the plastic that produced that smell could still leach into my beer, especially over a few weeks of contact time. In that case, the beer being undrinkable from the plastic taste would probably be the best case scenario, since I'd know well enough to dump it rather than consume all of that stuff like I might if it's not as apparent. I'm sure they'll be fine in the long term, since you can hardly live in China without consuming stuff that's been stored in jugs like this from time to time, but proper food grade liners would provide some peace of mind that fermenting directly in these jugs can't really give me.

If you get back some time, definitely get in touch. We'll have another pint or three of Devil's newest concoctions.

 

[James Thomson]

Hi,
I'm moving to Qingdao later this summer. I used to live in the Middle East and normally made apple cider, using supermarket apple juice. Can anyone tell me whether or not it's easy to find apple juice without any preservatives in supermarkets over there? If so, can anyone make any suggestions as to brands?

 

[FatDragon]

Hi,
I'm moving to Qingdao later this summer. I used to live in the Middle East and normally made apple cider, using supermarket apple juice. Can anyone tell me whether or not it's easy to find apple juice without any preservatives in supermarkets over there? If so, can anyone make any suggestions as to brands?

I just did my first cider not long ago, just four liters of some imported German apple juice that was on sale, then primed with a bit of Great Lakes brand apple juice, which I believe contains zero preservatives but it's partially from concentrate.

 

[James86]

It's pretty hard to find good quality apple juice in the supermarkets here. You can get it off taobao but you normally end up buying in bulk. Someone I know has made his own apple juicer which works pretty well... Although the apples here suck!

Tsingtao beer is pretty good in Qingdao. You can buy it by the L in little plastic carrier bags and drink it with a straw. Also if you get the unfiltered one it's pretty nice as well.

 

[Carmelo bono]

Thread still active.

 

[FatDragon]

Thread still active.

Sure. We're chugging along at a rate of about 3 posts a month, but I'm not the only one who checks it whenever there's a new post.

 

[Texas]

Hi all, new here. I’m going to start a small batch here in the next week are so. I ordered some materials from taobao but the grains / yeast didn’t come with a recipe. I order a big 20L fermenter bucket but am going to use a 1 gallon glass jar / carboy my wife has that the stopper / airlock just happeneds to fit perfectly in.
I ordered the items off of Baopals — Amber monastery beer package and English Ale package
Set 1:
- MJ M54 California Lager yeast
— Cascade hops
— Gold Medal Hops (translation from Chinese)
Set 2:
— MJ M36 Liberty Bell yeast
— Gold medal Hops
— ??? Couldn’t read Chinese (local said the wrriting is too messy

The Grains that came with it:
— “Shallow coke” (translated from Chinese).
— Crystal
— Austrailia Wheat

Any help would be appreciated. These ingredients were for 20L. I’m making ~3.8L.
Thanks in Advance.

 

[FatDragon]

Hi all, new here. I’m going to start a small batch here in the next week are so. I ordered some materials from taobao but the grains / yeast didn’t come with a recipe. I order a big 20L fermenter bucket but am going to use a 1 gallon glass jar / carboy my wife has that the stopper / airlock just happeneds to fit perfectly in.
I ordered the items off of Baopals — Amber monastery beer package and English Ale package
Set 1:
- MJ M54 California Lager yeast
— Cascade hops
— Gold Medal Hops (translation from Chinese)
Set 2:
— MJ M36 Liberty Bell yeast
— Gold medal Hops
— ??? Couldn’t read Chinese (local said the wrriting is too messy

The Grains that came with it:
— “Shallow coke” (translated from Chinese).
— Crystal
— Austrailia Wheat

Any help would be appreciated. These ingredients were for 20L. I’m making ~3.8L.
Thanks in Advance.

Would you be able to send the original Chinese? That might be easier to work with than a translation.

 

[Texas]

Below are links to what I bought. And pictures of hop packages.
Thanks.



https://www.baopals.com/products/550094250306?skus=1627207:1867511472

https://www.baopals.com/products/550094250306?skus=1627207:1867511475

 

[FatDragon]

I had to track down the original taobao page to make much sense of that.

Gold medal is East Kent Goldings. The scribbled one is Cascade. Your base malt is Australian 2 row malt (4kg each), they both have ~50L crystal malt (.5 kg each), and the amber also has ~25L caramel malt (1.5kg).

I can help with the recipes later if you need it. Typing on my phone takes too long... I took a screenshot if you want to run them by someone who can help you read them in the meantime. The first is the amber, the latter is the English pale ale.

 

[FatDragon]

Alright, I've got a keyboard in front of me now.

Here's a checklist of the ingredients you should have, according to what I see here and on Taobao:

8kg Australian base malt (PPPG is ~1.031, which means a pound of malt in a gallon of water will give you 1.031 wort at 100% efficiency - this is compared to typically ~1.036 from better quality base malt), 1.5kg light caramel (~25L) malt, 1kg crystal (~50L) malt, 30g Saaz hops, 12g Cascade hops, 50g East Kent Goldings, 50g Cascade, M54 yeast, M36 yeast. From your pictures, it looks like you might be missing some hops and some hops might have been replaced or delivered wrong (I see two packs of Goldings and one of Cascade where you should have one of Goldings, two of Cascade, and one of Saaz).

And you're going to be brewing 1 gallon batches.

Here are the instructions if you want to follow the intended recipe as closely as you can:

They don't give mash instructions, so I'd say aim around 67C for a pretty standard mash temp.

They suggest 70 minute boils. You can do this, but make sure to use enough extra water to avoid boiling off too much volume. I'd suggest dropping it to 40 minutes as that's when the first hops go in for both recipes anyway. For the amber, they suggest 30g Saaz for their 40 minute bittering addition, and 12g Cascade at 5 minutes left in the boil. For the English pale ale, it's 50g of East Kent Goldings at 40 minutes and 50g of Cascade at 5 minutes.

So cutting each of them down to the one gallon size:

Amber
800g base malt
300g light crystal malt
100g caramel malt

Mash at 67C.
Boil for 40 minutes.
~6.5g Saaz at 40 minutes.
~2.5g Cascade at 5 minutes.
Chill and pitch M54 (I'd use ~1/4 of the pack) and ferment around 18C.

English Pale Ale
800g base malt
100g caramel malt

Mash at 67C.
Boil for 40 minutes.
10g Goldings at 40 minutes.
10g Cascade at 5 minutes.
Chill and pitch M36 (again, I'd use ~1/4 of the pack), ferment around 18C.

If everything goes as it should, they should both be perfectly serviceable beers.

How much do you know about brewing, by the way? If you're brand new to the hobby and haven't done much research, you're going to need to know more than what I've said in this post. If you need further guidance, don't be shy.

 

[Texas]

Alright, I've got a keyboard in front of me now.

Here's a checklist of the ingredients you should have, according to what I see here and on Taobao:

8kg Australian base malt (PPPG is ~1.031, which means a pound of malt in a gallon of water will give you 1.031 wort at 100% efficiency - this is compared to typically ~1.036 from better quality base malt), 1.5kg light caramel (~25L) malt, 1kg crystal (~50L) malt, 30g Saaz hops, 12g Cascade hops, 50g East Kent Goldings, 50g Cascade, M54 yeast, M36 yeast. From your pictures, it looks like you might be missing some hops and some hops might have been replaced or delivered wrong (I see two packs of Goldings and one of Cascade where you should have one of Goldings, two of Cascade, and one of Saaz).

And you're going to be brewing 1 gallon batches.

Here are the instructions if you want to follow the intended recipe as closely as you can:

They don't give mash instructions, so I'd say aim around 67C for a pretty standard mash temp.

They suggest 70 minute boils. You can do this, but make sure to use enough extra water to avoid boiling off too much volume. I'd suggest dropping it to 40 minutes as that's when the first hops go in for both recipes anyway. For the amber, they suggest 30g Saaz for their 40 minute bittering addition, and 12g Cascade at 5 minutes left in the boil. For the English pale ale, it's 50g of East Kent Goldings at 40 minutes and 50g of Cascade at 5 minutes.

So cutting each of them down to the one gallon size:

Amber
800g base malt
300g light crystal malt
100g caramel malt

Mash at 67C.
Boil for 40 minutes.
~6.5g Saaz at 40 minutes.
~2.5g Cascade at 5 minutes.
Chill and pitch M54 (I'd use ~1/4 of the pack) and ferment around 18C.

English Pale Ale
800g base malt
100g caramel malt

Mash at 67C.
Boil for 40 minutes.
10g Goldings at 40 minutes.
10g Cascade at 5 minutes.
Chill and pitch M36 (again, I'd use ~1/4 of the pack), ferment around 18C.

If everything goes as it should, they should both be perfectly serviceable beers.

How much do you know about brewing, by the way? If you're brand new to the hobby and haven't done much research, you're going to need to know more than what I've said in this post. If you need further guidance, don't be shy.

Thank You! That helps tremendously!

Yes I'm a newbie. I found some more yeast, hops, and grains in the brew kit. So I scaled everything down and found a typical recipe for a brown ale and tried the entire process. My OG was low but it’s fermenting now.
I watched soem videos, think I know what I did wrong and will try one of the recipes above hopefully before the week’s up!
Again thank yo so much!

 

[FatDragon]

Excellent! Tell us how it goes!

 

[Texas]

Well.....
I brewed Batch #1 a dark ale, I screwed up the wateer amount but still ened up with a drinkable 3.2% abv beer.
The second batch tried the amber lager — jack up wateer again so tried it again.
Batch #1 was using mangrove jack new World Strong ale yeast... wrok great. Took maybe 12 hrs to get rocking and went on for 3 days if IIRC.
Batch #2 & #3 were similar... however I checked them and FG was 1.016 and 1.022 respectively and starting was 1.034 and 1.068.
Batch 3 was pretty sweet. We noticed it was bubbling after moving it for bottling, so we put the stoppers back on.
Any thoughts? I noticed the temp range for the lager was 18 - 20C and we’ve had some temp swings here in Chengdu so I wondered if it got too cold in the room I had it... maybe got down to 16C.
Any ideas?

 

[FatDragon]

16C is no problem for almost any yeast, though it may slow things down a bit. What I'm most interested in is how you went from an OG of 1.034 in batch 2 to 1.068 in batch 3. That's a huge difference. A higher FG is no surprise with that much higher an OG.

 

[Texas]

16C is no problem for almost any yeast, though it may slow things down a bit. What I'm most interested in is how you went from an OG of 1.034 in batch 2 to 1.068 in batch 3. That's a huge difference. A higher FG is no surprise with that much higher an OG.

Oh it’s because I’m an idiot. The OG on Batch #2 was originally 1.086 which was higher than expected and the volume was low so I add some RO water... too much though.

 

[Texas]

I put a heater in the room to bring up the temp from 16 to 19C last night. I swirled both bottles and batch #2 just looks like muddy water. Batch #3 though starting foaming quite a bit. Not sure if I should have done that, but I figured what the heck, they weren’t really drinkable at this point.

 

[Alex413]

Hi, everyone, I'm new here, but I really enjoy the process of brewing and already did 7 batches. Does anyone brew in Shanghai or nearby? It would be nice to find some brewing pals to brew together.
I'm also interested in beer swapping with anyone within China to try more different beers and get feedback for mine.
Here's my stuff:
California common
Koelsch (s-33 yeast)
Schwarzbier
Chinese Nugget IPA(going to bottle is this weekend, but it's too bitter for me now)

Let me know if you are into swapping.

 

[FatDragon]

The are definitely a lot of homebrewers in Shanghai. Look up Mike Sherretz @msherretz . I'm not sure if he's active here at all and I guess I can't even guarantee he's still in Shanghai since I haven't talked to him in years, but he's sort of a godfather of expat homebrewing here so he'd be a good resource for introductions and brew clubs, and he runs a Homebrew shop as well.

Unfortunately, my own brewing has taken a back seat to work and family, only three brew days in the last twelve months. I could send a couple porters and maybe the split batch Vienna lagers with S33 and T58 in a tasting swap, but I don't think I'll have anything new to offer for a while.

 

[Great Hop Forward]

The are definitely a lot of homebrewers in Shanghai. Look up Mike Sherretz @msherretz . I'm not sure if he's active here at all and I guess I can't even guarantee he's still in Shanghai since I haven't talked to him in years, but he's sort of a godfather of expat homebrewing here so he'd be a good resource for introductions and brew clubs, and he runs a Homebrew shop as well.

Mike is still in Shanghai, active in homebrewing, and running his shop.

 

[Alex413]

The are definitely a lot of homebrewers in Shanghai. Look up Mike Sherretz @msherretz . I'm not sure if he's active here at all and I guess I can't even guarantee he's still in Shanghai since I haven't talked to him in years, but he's sort of a godfather of expat homebrewing here so he'd be a good resource for introductions and brew clubs, and he runs a Homebrew shop as well.

Unfortunately, my own brewing has taken a back seat to work and family, only three brew days in the last twelve months. I could send a couple porters and maybe the split batch Vienna lagers with S33 and T58 in a tasting swap, but I don't think I'll have anything new to offer for a while.

I've got a styrofoam container for the bottles today, my brews are already packed and ready to be sent, just tell me where to send it.

 

[FatDragon]

I've got a styrofoam container for the bottles today, my brews are already packed and ready to be sent, just tell me where to send it.

Cool. I'll send a PM with my address and get some bottles together to send your way as well.

 

[tusabez]

Hi guys. Well it's been about a year since moving to Chongqing China and I've been brewing about one beer every couple of months. @FatDragon thanks for the initial pointers last year. Just saw your post about fermenters. It's probably a bit late now but I've been using glass ones like the ones you would use to ferment kimchee and they seem to work well. As a matter of fact, they are the same style of Big Mouth bubblers you can get back in the states. I purchased 4 8L ones on Taobao. I need to invest in a small refrigerator since not having any temperature control is tampering with the quality of beer I can produce.

 

[Rastavich88]

Great idea starting a thread. I'm based in Hainan and only been brewing half a year, the taobao links have been priceless for sourcing stuff so cheers for that. Is there a homebrew wechat group anyone could add me to? More interested in brewing groups rather than just homebrew pub groups.

 

[tusabez]

Don't really have an official wechat homebrew group in Chongqing but I am involved in a group that occasionally shares pics on brews we are doing. I can add you if you'd like. What's your wechat ID?

Great idea starting a thread. I'm based in Hainan and only been brewing half a year, the taobao links have been priceless for sourcing stuff so cheers for that. Is there a homebrew wechat group anyone could add me to? More interested in brewing groups rather than just homebrew pub groups.

 

[Rastavich88]

Thanks a lot, I sent you a PM

 

[FatDragon]

I used to be active in a Wuhan homebrewers group on QQ, but I haven't used QQ in a long while, and unfortunately I'm not involved in any homebrew groups on wechat.

 

[Alex413]

Thanks a lot, I sent you a PM

PM me, so I can add you into Shanghai group