Home Brewing Tips and Techniques
Hops drop alpha with time. Normaly, whats stated on the package is time of harvest alpha and thats not what you really get when you get it home. Storing hops in you fridge is a real good idea. Vac pac is better and frozen is even better. Even with this, 6 months down the road and you can figure if you started with a 5% alpha you now have closer to 4%. I've spent 25 years processing and packaging hops and the alpha loss rate is pretty large for some varieties and a little less for others but still a good amount of loss in 6 months for any variety and type of storage.
I have done that many of times and it has made my secondary taste so much better than when I didn't do it. So that statement is very true.
This thread is a great idea, and there have been lots of good suggestions on actual brewing. For those of you who may be like me and have a spouse who is not into beer and doesn't appreciate brewing, I would recommend trying to move your brewing operation from the kitchen to outside or maybe the garage. This has made my brewing life much easier, as I don't get hasseled about clean up or the smells (which I love and she hates).
Here are some suggestions I have given to new brewers who want to save money buying supplies.
Ask bakeries or delis for their plastic buckets. Obviously they are food grade. Stay away from pickle buckets though. They are just about impossible to get rid of the smell. Also, almost any bucket with HDPE 2 stamped on it should be food grade, including paint buckets! Just because you found it in the paint section doesn't mean you can't use it for other things.
Reuse your yeast. If you spent around $7 on a smack pack, you will definitely save money this way. You will need some DME, which typically costs around $5 for a pound (maybe less), but you only need a cup or so to make a starter. Buy a dozen or so mason jars. Don't get them used unless you know exactly what was in them. You can find jars at second hand stores, but there is no way to tell what they were used for. Could have been chemicals. So buy new unless you know.
If you make a fruit beer, using extract is considerably cheaper, unless you have free fruit. Be aware that not all extracts are equal. Cellar Pro makes a good extract. I've had off brands that taste absolutely horrible. Nothing beats real fruit if you can afford it though.
Buy scales or cooking pots second hand if possible. Stainless steel is really hard to find used.
That's all I have right now.
Extra Fermentors (5 gallon food grade plastic buckets) can be found in bulk from restaurants.
Harvested Yeast can be stored in the freezer IF you mix it up as a 15% glycol solution.
College Campuses, especially the recycle centers, are a great place to find lots and lots of beer bottles.
This thread died about 2 months ago, but I wanted to add more tips that I came up with.
- Blow off tubes get gunked up pretty easily. I use to let mine sit in the cleaning bucket overnight, but the crap inside rarely disolves. I now use my bottle brush! My blow off tubes are 1" in diameter, and the bottle brush fits inside perfectly to clean the crap out. Works like a charm.
- After you clean out your carboy OR fermenting bucket, stuff some cotton or take some clean tissue paper and tape it over the top. That will keep anything out of it and you can store it for months, then open it up, and immediately use it.
- Never leave stored hops out in the open. Refridgerate or freeze them. They will loose some of their flavor over a number of months, but keep them in a cool dry place.
- This should be obvious, but always feel free to hack up and modify recipes. Too often I see people use an exact recipe and say "it this sucks", well, there was never a law passed saying you can't change it to your liking. Change the hops, or the amount, switch a grain or two. My best amber ale was a copy of another, but I didn't like the crystal malt or hops, so I bumped up the lovibond of the crystal and swapped most of the hops. I loved the end result, and so did about a dozen others.
- Search craigslist, garage sales, or otherwise for used brewing equipment. I am amazed at how cheap people sell their equipment for. Last year I saw some great hardware sold on craigslist for CHEAP! The guy was getting out of brewing and had hundreds of dollars worth of parts, and was selling it for half price or less. Another thing, check for carboys! Every homebrew shop I have gone to wants at least $20 (usually more) for these. Check craigslist (or anywhere) for glass water jugs. It doesn't matter how old it is. I have seen these sold for under $10.
A few more tips:
- I covered this before, and someone else repeated what I said, but I will say it again: TAKES NOTES ON EVERY YOU DO! You can get a cheap 80 page notebook at Walmart (or such) for $1 or so. Come to think of it, the Dollar Stores carry these too. Whether you use extract or all grain, take good notes! What were the EXACT ingredients? How much did you use? What amount of water? Hops? Temperatures? OG? FG? Yeast? I guarantee that if you DON'T take good solid notes, at some point you will make a recipe that turns out excellent, but you will have no notes, so you can't duplicate it. This is a critical step. Easy to keep and maintain. In fact, my brew log doubles as a mouse pad!
- Don't be afraid to try a non-standard yeast with your beer. Just because the recipe called for an English ale, try an ESB or yeast instead. As a prime example, Widmer Brothers in Portland uses an altbier yeast for their flagship hefeweizen ale. It has no banana glove like the original Bavarian or German version. Yet this is their most popular beer. Always experiment.
- Nylons (new obviously) bought in a pack for 99 cents can be great for hops. After the boil, just throw it away! I have seen quite a few people do this. Personally, I just throw mine loosely into the kettle. But with nylons, there is no worry of contamination since your wort is boiling, and there is no grain bag to clean afterwards, you just throw it away! Be warned: you might not want to buy dozens of packs of nylons if your a guy, as you might appear to be a cross dresser at the store. But then again, what you do in your private life is your business.
- For those of you having difficulty with siphoning beer like I did, seriously look into the Auto Siphon. Most homebrew shops have or can get this. Mine cost about $12. I LOVE IT! The device is roughly 2 ft long, with an inside racking cane. You usually have to buy 3/8" tube additional, but my homebrew shop only charged 40 cents a foot. I needed 4' worth. For roughly $15 I got the siphon and 4' of food grade tubing. These are excellent! You can start a siphon immediately.
- Don't waste your time buying bottles (assuming you don't keg). Ask friends, family, or neighbors for their bottles. Sure, some might be nasty, but I doubt all are. I used to ask people at work for a 6 pack or 12 pack of empty bottles in exchange for FREE BEER, but I get to keep the bottles. One guy gave me 2 cases worth!! They were mostly twist off, which is not the best, but they are free! In fact, 90% of my bottles were given to me in exchange for some free beer. You get the bottles back and can keep reusing them. What a deal!
- Invest in a backup hydrometer. They are made of very thin glass and can break easily. I have already done that once. They tend to cost about $7.
- If you are using blow off tubes, you need something to put the end of the tube in, which contains water (nothing else) to seal the fermenter. You can use a bucket, measuring cup, really just about anything. What I did was went to a second hand store and bought a small bathroom style plastic garbage can. Cleaned it out real well. I dump about 2 gallons of water in it, and I have had 4 or more fermenters all using it at once. Cost me about $2. Works like a champ!
- Don't be afraid to try new spices in beer. Some of the best I've ever had were those that sounded the most disgusting. Ever heard of PEPPER BEER? I have it once. Ok I hated it, but it was popular at the brewery. Ginger, cinnamon, orange, lemon, pumpkin, corrinder, lime, licorice, and so forth. Just because it sounds nasty doesn't mean it will be.
- This has been stated before, but let your hydrometer be your guide for fermentation! Some yeasts can be done in 3 days, others still ferment after 10 days. So the recipe said it should be done in 5 days but it appears to be done in 2? Use your hydrometer to check. Just because there is no activity in the airlock (or blow off tube) does not mean it is done. Also, a recipe is a general guide. My OG and FG never match up exactly. As long as you are close, that is fine.
Brewbie wrote:
Extra Fermentors (5 gallon food grade plastic buckets) can be found in bulk from restaurants.
Harvested Yeast can be stored in the freezer IF you mix it up as a 15% glycol solution.
College Campuses, especially the recycle centers, are a great place to find lots and lots of beer bottles.
Actually, it is 15% glycerine, not glycol. The most common type of glycol, ethylene, is toxic to the human body and should never be ingested.
If you take 15% of glycerine and 85% yeast, you can freeze that, but not regular glycol.
Well, I don't know about the rest of you, I learned something.
Has anyone frozen their trub without mixing it with glycerine? Does this kill the yeast? After my first batch I dumped the trub into a sanitized mason jar and popped it into the freezer as I knew it woul dbe weeks mefore my next brew. Just wondering if I should purchase more yeast when I get supplies for my next brew, there are no close brew stores to me, and I don't want to get caught with dead yeast.