Home Brew Questions
- Thread starter Voley
- Start date
aqua
made of cheese and gin
brewing needs consistant temp - kitchens have a tendency to go colder than other rooms over night and get really hot when you're cooking
I used to have mine in the spare room where the extremes didn't happen in the same way
Voley
🐀
Don't think so, no. is it like the one doggy does with Lidl apple juice?
badseed
Mighty but thin.
tommers said:
That white foam is called Krausen and is a sign that the yeast is working. Condensation on the inside of the lid is another sign that all is well.
I have on old fridge with one of these attached for temp control. http://mashmaster.com.au/p/365439/fridgemate-mkii-digital-temperature-controller-kit.html
It makes the fridge operate at higher temperatures so I set it to the temperature I need and tape the probe onto the side of the fermenter.
When fridges break and start to freeze everything then it is a perfect way to recycle them.
I am a homebrew geek
psycherelic
I'm not an old hippy!
I was drinking some woodford's werry in the pub yesterday and it was bloody lovely, makes me really want to give this kit a go, people saying not to use the kit yeast, where do you get your fancy yeast from? I can't find any homebrew shops in vaguely central london and I don't really fancy travelling miles just to get yeast.
Voley
🐀
The online shop I bought my kit from sells a few, psycherelic.
http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Beer_Yeast.html
http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Beer_Yeast.html
psycherelic
I'm not an old hippy!
If you just want to go one step up from the kits, then you can do worse than sticking with the Safale brand - it's a dried yeast, but very good quality. Alongside Safale S.04, there's the Saflager S.23 for lager brewing (warning, that latter stuff makes a very traditionally lagery sulphurous stink while fermenting - I was brewing a California Common in the room here, and it was rank for about a fortnight...)
If you want to be truly hardcore about it, consider getting the "smack packs" of yeast, which you activate by, er, smacking them (it crushes some kind of vial inside), and then use to start a yeast culture which you then pitch.
There's as many different yeasts as there are types of hop, types of grain, and styles of brewing - it's one of the things that makes the whole business so fascinating and varied.
Generally, I'd say that trying to exactly reproduce a commercial brew is pretty close to impossible - especially to do it consistently - but that's not to say it isn't great fun and well worth trying. Chances are that the result, even if it isn't identical, will still be an excellent drink...
Voley
🐀
I've just bought some chocolate malt after Stig's glowing description earlier in the thread. I'd intended it to be for a later brew but was wondering whether it might be a good idea to give it a go on the Wherry I've currently got going.
That thread of badseed's reckons malt over sugar every time. Is this right?
That thread of badseed's reckons malt over sugar every time. Is this right?
I'd start out not messing around too much. That Wherry is a good kit, so get a feel for what your technique can do with a kit "as is" before you start getting too creative!
After that, try out a kit and kilo one - and yes, badseed is 110% correct - use malt over sugar any day of the week, it'll make a huge difference.
Then you may want to start doing some extract brewing, but mashing a few adjuncts (like your chocolate malt) and doing your own hops.
Then, finally, the big one is to go for the all-grain brew. You'll need a fair bit of kit to do that, so it's not one to rush into...
psycherelic
I'm not an old hippy!
Do you think it would be worth replacing the yeast in that kit with the Safale or just do it exactly as it comes?
Well, my experience of Woodforde's yeasts has been that they haven't been too bad at all. I think they pick them well, and I've never had one that's been slow to start or misbehaved yet.
You want yeast that works fast, because all the time the brew is sitting there not fermenting, it's running the risk of infection. I've tried various techniques to get a fast kickoff with Woodforde's kits - eg making up a yeast "batter" with nutrient and a bit of diluted wort, but my experience has been that there really isn't any better way of doing it than making sure the wort's at the higher end of the brewing temperature range (so about 18-20C), scattering the dry yeast over the surface, putting the lid on, and letting it cool down to ambient while the yeast gets going. It's good lively yeast. And the chances are, especially if you're buying it from a reasonably well-used provider, that the kit hasn't sat around for months going stale, anyway. Be a bit more careful with corner-shop brewing outfits, especially with the kit-and-kilo brands - often they'll only stock one or two of the full kit brews, which means they (probably) go out of the door that bit faster. But when you go to Wilkos, where there'll be four or five different k&k tins on the shelf, ask yourself how long they've been hanging around for - I usually use Safales for them. I've never bothered with the smackpack yeasts, yet, because I've not got a decent full grain setup going yet, and it seems a bit of a waste to be spending the money on them just to chuck into a kit...
Voley
🐀
Yeah that sounds sensible. I'll stick with sugar for the first one, then. Sorry to keep bugging you with questions but does it matter what sort of sugar you use?
Erm, the Wherry kit is complete! You get two tins of concentrate. To which you need to add enough water to make it up to 40 pints. Plus yeast. That's yer lot. You don't need to add any sugar, or starch!
ETA: a tip. do warm your concentrate tins by standing them in hot water (open them first!). Also worth putting a few pints of 50:50 boiling and cold water into the fermentation vessel to pour the concentrate into - that way it won't stick implacably to the bottom of the FV and be murder to dissolve. Stir it in (use a bit more hot water to rinse out the tins, too), then make the brew up with cold water.
But - and this is quite important - when you're working with hot water and concentrate, don't splash it around too much. The one thing you can do to really screw up a kit brew is "hot side aeration" (HSA), which will give you all kinds of unwelcome oxidised flavours in your brew when you're done. So don't splash it around while it's hot. If you're not confident of avoiding doing this, don't bother warming the concentrate - you'll just have to do a bit more stirring to get it all to dissolve, is all.
Demerara's fine - as I say, the amounts involved are going to have a trivial effect on the end product - all you're doing really here is to "use" the yeast to carbonate your beer instead of installing a massive CO2 plant to do it industrial-style!Demerara OK? I take it I shouldn't be replacing this with malt, then? (I was going to, tbf.)
Heh, definitely. And the easiest way to hop is to "dry-hop" - get the Mrs to give you a pair of laddered tights, and cut the foot off one. Wash it (!), and remember to sterilise and rinse it when you clean your FV, then stick a handful of hops in the toe, make a little noose from some (sterilised) string, and drop it into the brew.
A word of warning - you will probably want to let your brew mature much longer than you usually do, as the dry-hopping will give the brew quite a "grassy" flavour (think Shepherd Neame Spitfire) for quite a while until it blends. And that kind of in yer face hoppiness isn't something we usually associate with a 7% brew - it's usually something we do with lighter brews, like Spitfire or maybe Young's Ordinary...
You told me about it, too. Or at least pointed me to the website it was on...yes because I TOLD HIM ABOUT IThe goes around claiming it as his
