What would you tell yourself?

[AaronBeers]

Hello All

Im very new to homebrew and the idea of the hobby in general - My first brew is currently bubbling away and its all very exciting! I've done a lot of readin and research and think ie got a reasonable understanding of the basic but ...

I just wondered - If you could talk to yourself at the start of your home brew hobby / life what advice would you give yourself? What the one thing you wished you knew when you first started?

 

[iijakii]

I just wondered - If you could talk to yourself at the start of your home brew hobby / life what advice would you give yourself? What the one thing you wished you knew when you first started?

How hard it is to make bad beer. I really think that besides fermentation temperature control most things won't really impact your beer as much as you think. Small stuff will add up to change an OK beer to fantastic, sure, but it likely wont make bad beer.

There's like 90 threads a day of "is my beer ruined?" -- you'll quickly learn the importance of RDWHAHB. All will be fine.

 

[m00ps]

To me, lessons learned
#1: Sanitation. Get acquainted with a sanitizer (i use starsan since its no rinse and I cant be sure its sanitized). Anything that touches your beer post boil needs to be sanitized
#2: temperature control, look into cheap methods of doing it or invest in a fermentation chamber

aside from that, most of everything else you do is just dialing in your process

 

[Homercidal]

Current Me: Hey, man, how's it going? So, uh, I know you are *really* into this new hobby, and there's lots of cool things to learn and make and do, but you should really think about toning it down a bit. You know, especially around the family. I heard through the grapevine that they're getting all about beer stuff. You know, how you keep going on and on about this and that? Maybe just try to hold that inside a little bit more?

Previous Me: What? I can't hear you over how AWESOME this hobby is!

 

[bobeer]

I think to take my time and not rush anything is a big one. I've been brewing for about 4 years now and I still get excited when a beer is about to get packaged. Sometimes I cut the dry hopping short or drink the beer before it's totally conditioned and ready to be drunk.

Another, like others have said above, is the temp control for fermenting beer. It's the main part of making good beer. You can do everyone perfectly, take your mash ph, build your water to style, hit all your numbers, etc... but if your fermenting temps are off then all that doesn't matter.

Learning your equipment is priceless too. Knowing your boil-off rate, how much volume you lose to grain absorption if you're doing all grain recipes, how long it takes for your burner/stove to get to a boil, etc... all will help your brew day go as smoothly as possible.

 

[TasunkaWitko]

The main advice that I would give is to avoid "twiddling with the knobs" and make sure you do not get overly OCD about the process. This is brewing beer, not genetic engineering of a supervirus. Monks were doing it a thousand years ago, and peasants were doing it thousands of years before that. Follow the recipe, follow the procedure and clean/sanitise as appropriate, but do not obsess over details so much that you end up creating situations that either don't exist or were created by your fiddling around.

As for what I would tell my first-time-brewing self, The only thing I can think of is that enameled cast iron holds and retains heat a lot better than thin stainless steel....oh, and I would also tell myself not to worry about the beer being over-bitter.

 

[BrewerBrad82]

No drinking until the sparge or start of the boil...

 

[treacheroustexan]

In my opinion, start out with a basic recipe or two and get a process down before experimenting. A lot of new homebrewers (including myself when I was new) didn't want to do a wheat or a pale ale, and want to go way overboard...I wanted to do a cherry russian imperial stout with vanilla beans and pumpkin aged in bourbon barrels with a hint of ginger, and I want it to taste exactly like that. Okay I didn't really, but you get the idea. Take the time to learn about what ingredients you put into your beer. SMASH beers are a good way to learn. (Single Malt Single Hop, for example a beer with only 10 pounds of maris otter malt and nothing but citra hops) I wish I would have learned this earlier on. It's always good to know the characteristics of what ingredients you're actually using in case you would need to substitute a different grain or hop, and you will need to know when you start creating your own recipes later on down the road.

 

[soccerdad]

3 things I was told early on and that I stick to .. 1) take good notes 2) clean and sanitize everything - every time 3) don't worry about oxygen on brew day, but worry about after the yeast is pitched

1 thing I learned along the way that has helped me immensely .. control your ferm temps

 

[AaronBeers]

In my opinion, start out with a basic recipe or two and get a process down before experimenting. A lot of new homebrewers (including myself when I was new) didn't want to do a wheat or a pale ale, and want to go way overboard...I wanted to do a cherry russian imperial stout with vanilla beans and pumpkin aged in bourbon barrels with a hint of ginger, and I want it to taste exactly like that. Okay I didn't really, but you get the idea. Take the time to learn about what ingredients you put into your beer. SMASH beers are a good way to learn. (Single Malt Single Hop, for example a beer with only 10 pounds of maris otter malt and nothing but citra hops) I wish I would have learned this earlier on. It's always good to know the characteristics of what ingredients you're actually using in case you would need to substitute a different grain or hop, and you will need to know when you start creating your own recipes later on down the road.

Im certainly following this - Im going to experiment with just basic beer kits and partial extracts for a while - while not a perfectionist im the kind of person who has to understand whats going on and how everything effects everything else so going complex would upset me even if the beer turned out good - id need to understand why it turned out that way!

 

[AQUILAS]

Aside from what's been said about notes, sanitation, and relaxing, I'll add that at the time I spent money on buying equipment, I would have told myself to fork up the few more extra to get an immersion chiller, ferm chamber with temp control, and flask/stir plate/stir bar for yeast starters. The quality of my beer would have been much better.

If I could go back to a few months ago when I did my first all-grain brew, I would tell myself that when you're scaling up for your batch size, don't just increase the water volume, adjust the grain bill also. Not a terrible mistake, but my session belgian wit is just a bit watery.

 

[Sailingeric]

Avoid the shiny expensive things to start with. Plastic buckets will make beer just as well as a $500 stainless steel fermenter.

 

[unionrdr]

I stuck to AE beers for a couple years, to what I then called " recombinent extract". Recombining Cooper's cans with other extracts & hops to create something new. Not bad at all, unto itself. But I wish I'd have experimented with partial mash earlier. Learning what goes with what, which grains, extracts & hops go well together, etc. Then more classic styles earlier on too.
It was revvy who started to break me out of the usual rut with Burton ales. That led me up to the point where recombining what extracts were then available to it's conclusion. It was then that I started reading & learning about partial mash, this new brew in a bag thing, & how to use that in a partial boil situation. I was then to learn how easy mashing is, & how much more creativity it allows for.
So if I had it to do, I'd tell my " other" self to try pb/pn biab earlier on. It could've been interesting now...

 

[TexasDroughtBrewery]

Hello All

Im very new to homebrew and the idea of the hobby in general - My first brew is currently bubbling away and its all very exciting! I've done a lot of readin and research and think ie got a reasonable understanding of the basic but ...

I just wondered - If you could talk to yourself at the start of your home brew hobby / life what advice would you give yourself? What the one thing you wished you knew when you first started?

Get ready to be addicted, and possibly spend a lot more money than you might expect. This hobby is NOT a way to save money on beer. No matter how much you told your significant other it is so that you can buy all the equipment lol.

 

[Clonefan94]

Room temperature is not fermenting temperature.

Pe patient, let it carb up. Tasting it every day is only gonna make you have less when the beer is finally ready to drink.

 

[alphaomega]

If you could talk to yourself at the start of your home brew hobby / life what advice would you give yourself?

Don't do it! Seriously you think it might be fun to try and also save some money on beer. In truth, you don't drink all that much beer and it will end up being the most expensive beers on earth. You'll have a blast though...

What the one thing you wished you knew when you first started?

Everyone says whirlpooling is good to make the trub pile up nicely in the middle of the pot, making spihoning easier. What they won't tell you is that you need to wait half an hour after whirlpooling for this to happen.
Also, you need some good neodymium magnets and a sturdy box to built a stirplate, so you can skip the first 4 builds or so.
Never make any permanent installations, you will change your mind or just need to tweak it anyway.

 

[andy6026]

Don't screw around with recipes that you have no real idea if they're good or not, because then you don't know if your process is bad or the recipes themselves.

Pick a few from here instead:

http://www.alternativecommutepueblo.com/2011/10/ahanhc-gold-medal-winning-recipes-for.html

 

[FloppyKnockers]

If you could talk to yourself at the start of your home brew hobby / life what advice would you give yourself? What the one thing you wished you knew when you first started?

1) Don't put your penis in that.
2) The intersection Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy and Griffith has a red light camera.
3) Buy stock in Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo!, and Oracle...trust me
4) Don't have everybody "watch this" during Thanksgiving 1996.
5) Stay in school.
6) Cut your hair after the 90's are over.
7) The Ford Ranger is going to be a bad choice.
8) When you go to Vegas...that's a dude dressed like a hooker. Don't talk to him.

 

[Zekk]

Buy kegging equipment. Don't ask your wife, just do it.

 

[drainbamage]

Don't overcomplicate the process too early. Start basic, don't obsess over the details, and once you're comfortable with that, try experimenting with one thing at a time.

 

[McGarnigle]

Concentrate on temperature controls and healthy yeast pitching.

And don't be intimidated by sanitation requirements. I actually resisted homebrewing for a while because I'm a kitchen slob and everything I read made it sound like I was performing surgery. Turns out, a bit of slobbery won't kill your beer.

 

[Mrin]

Instead of buying the second carboy - buy an oxygen aeration system. You'll hardly ever rack to a secondary. I live at 8,885 feet up!

 

[j1n]

importance of fermentation temps. learned real fast though, first two batches had off flavors. had a chest freezer with temp control by my third batch.

 

[Remmy]

Pretty much what I would have told myself.

 

[drainbamage]

Instead of buying the second carboy - buy an oxygen aeration system. You'll hardly ever rack to a secondary. I live at 8,885 feet up!

You're doing it wrong. The 2nd carboy isn't for secondaries...it's for more primaries!

 

[mattv21]

Be more patient; you can make OK beer in a hurry, but good/great beer takes time so don't rush things. Trust the things you read on HBT (or in those books you spent all that money on) more than the directions that come with the box. When in doubt, Google it; any question you can think of has already been answered somewhere on the internet, and people in the home brewing community are more than happy to help.

 

[AaronBeers]

importance of fermentation temps. learned real fast though, first two batches had off flavors. had a chest freezer with temp control by my third batch.

Seen a lot of this mentioned - i think im okay for most beers - where i have my fermentor is amazingly consistent at a steady 20C which i think it reasonable for most beers?

 

[unionrdr]

20C = 68F, so yeah, that's a pretty good temp to hold steady at.

 

[iijakii]

Ferm temps cant get a lot warmer than ambient, however. Do some research on water baths and a couple frozen litre bottles.

 

[HarborTownBrewing]

1) Clean your bottles really well
2) Watch your temps
3) Pitch enough yeast (I wish I would have started making starters toward the beginning)

But you've got to be patient, and like others said take great notes and learn your equipment.

OH, MOST IMPORTANTLY: Start planning batch number 2 right now!

 

[AaronBeers]

Thanks ill certainly do that - I'm no stranger too or anything vs doing my own research but it hard to research what you dont know you need to research in the first place! Ive got sevral other hobbies where equipment could be useful in someway to brewing and thing i could set something up to regulate temp of the FV fairly easily

With the oxeygen systems is it something you set running just as the beginning and does it have to be o2? would say 50% o2 be okay?

 

[unionrdr]

Yeah, the temp I replied about is internal fermenter temp, not ambient.

 

[AaronBeers]

Will have to look a lot more into the temps but ive a few ideas all ready of how i could regulate it it!

OH, MOST IMPORTANTLY: Start planning batch number 2 right now!

Batch two already planned and going to pick up supplies on Friday!

 

[Queequeg]

take out another mortage

 

[BrewingTravisty]

Current Me: Hey, man, how's it going? So, uh, I know you are *really* into this new hobby, and there's lots of cool things to learn and make and do, but you should really think about toning it down a bit. You know, especially around the family. I heard through the grapevine that they're getting all about beer stuff. You know, how you keep going on and on about this and that? Maybe just try to hold that inside a little bit more?


Previous Me: What? I can't hear you over how AWESOME this hobby is!

This is a good one lol I'm constantly telling myself before talking to anyone "don't tell them what you learned today about brewing... They just don't realize how amazing it is!"

And then I fail because 5 minutes in I'm like "so I heard about this new wild yeast they found that blah blablah blah, blah blah, blah." and I watch in wonder as their eyes glaze over... And then I continue for the next 30 minutes to talk about the new recipe I'm going to brew this weekend.


And then they realize that I've got 20 gallons of alcohol in some stage of fermentation/aging and another 20 ready to drink and I'm probably going to get at least 3 AA books for Christmas.

 

[Schol-R-LEA]

Don't let the dangly bits fool you, you are a woman after all. Deal with it.

Seeing how I am only just dealing with it now, and still not entirely sure if I am making a mistake or not yet, I think that some early notice would have helped.

 

[unionrdr]

Too late, to turn back now!...So many beers, so little cash...

 

[bucfan1234]

I would tell go back and tell myself:

1. Get a burner, any burner and move the whole operation outside, away from the kitchen. There is less to clean up, your wife will be so much happier and you can smoke cigars while you brew.

2. All grain brewing with full volume boils is really not difficult. You can do it with next to no additional equipment. Its cheaper, and so far, the beer tastes better.

3. You can make a 50' immersion chiller for about $35 or 40 with soft copper from the plumbing supply house, a couple of hose clamps, some cheap vinyl tube and a hose adapter. That means no more buying bags of ice and trying to chill in the kitchen sink for hours on end (which I hated).

4. Just go ahead and buy a cheap used keg, a co bottle, regulator and a picnic tap. You hate bottling and waiting for the bottles to carb, so just forget the whole mess and move on. PS... Northern Brewer has the whole set up for $99 right now. http://www.northernbrewer.com/promotional-categories/keg-systems-for-just-99

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

Hello All

I just wondered - If you could talk to yourself at the start of your home brew hobby / life what advice would you give yourself? What the one thing you wished you knew when you first started?

I'd say "Self, do you REALLY think having 6 taps is a good choice when you are the only beer drinker?"

But that is only to save me the embarrassment of proving my wife right.

 

[UndeadFred]

I'd say "Self, do you REALLY think having 6 taps is a good choice when you are the only beer drinker?"

But that is only to save me the embarrassment of proving my wife right.

Heh.. I have two now, with the ability to quickly expand to four (I have three gas manifold positions and four keg positions all full now)... and I'm the only drinker in the house.

I really want to brew again over Christmas break.. but I'll have to bottle and age!

The problem with buying one keg, is that a year later you have seven...

Fred