Home brew for beginners

[leen...]

Hi All,

I have bought some home brew equipment with the hope of initially making some beer and then maybe going on to some wine. I plan to buy a lager kit from Wilko as a starter and if successful will move on from there.

I have looked around the web and am struggling to find a good source of information for beginners. I guess I am thinking of things a step by step guide of what to do and top tips on type of sugar, cleaning technique/ chemicals, bottling etc etc. The ones I have found tend to be websites selling the kits so tend to recommend all their stuff.

Anyone found any good websites or youtube channels etc. which may help?

thanks

Lee.

[Jethro_uk]

If you post here, I'm sure there's a wealth of knowledge. I've brewed loads of beers and wines.

1Kg granulated sugar is fine. You can arse around with glucose if you like but personally I never tasted the difference.

Cleaning ? Well just rinse the barrel out, and fill with hot water and sanitiser (techincally incorrect to call it steriliser).

If you are largering, I'd suggest getting bottles (which will also need sanitising and that's a bit of PITA unless you get some no-rinse stuff from the states and use it with a bottle rinse pump). You can add a teaspoon of sugar before capping for refridgeration.

Once you've had a few successful runs, you can look into a "kegerator" which is a very DIT project :)

Cheers !

(Remember, brewing is one of mankinds oldest skills - there's a lot going on, but nature *wants* to do it ....)

[Martin Brown]

It should come with instructions but the main thing is scrupulous cleanliness and getting the fermentation going right. Things can and will go wrong sometimes even so. The most spectacular I ever had was elderberry wine than went berserk and foamed up out of the airlock.

It sprayed a great red stain on the wall. I wasn't popular...

This is perhaps one instance where you might be better off with a traditional book. Follow recipes or use kits until you really know what you are doing or you may be disappointed with the results. You may be disappointed the first couple of times anyway depending on how good you are at following the instructions and whether the fermentation takes off properly first time and is maintained at the right temperature. eg

My flat mates at university got pretty good at it after while.

[John Rumm]

Long time ago - so details may be a bit fuzzy!

Yup kits are easy enough - although I found some produced beer that was a somewhat acquired taste. (but drinkable certainly!)

Wine I had success with and was able to get some quite decent results with a variety of fruits[1] (I was after a nice drinkable wine, I was not trying to create something that tastes like a commercial bottle - in fact I think after a couple of experiments with grape juice concentrate wine kits, I never bothered with grape wines again).

[1] ISTR recall that apple made a very good wine, and Victoria plum was quite interesting as well!

Ordinary granulated silver spoon / Tate & Lyle etc seems to work fine.

You can get sterilising solutions which work ok, or an old school approach is Sodium Metabisulfite and Citric Acid disolved in water - which I seem to recall evolves fairly strong fumes (not nice to breathe!) that will also sterilise on exposure.

For beer I found it often easier to just keep in a pressure barrel rather than bottling - although you probably get a better result with bottles.

Not looked to be fair. There used to be a number of good books on it though.

[NY]

And if you use a keg, make damn sure the spigot tap is *fully* screwed into the barrel so the washer makes a liquid-tight seal. This afternoon I discovered that my home brew started leaking from this tap after being in the keg for few days - probably as the CO2 produced by the secondary fermentation forced the liquid past what had initially *seemed* to be a liquid-tight seal. I'm assuming the over-pressure valve in the top (where a CO2 sparklet can be screwed) *has* been doing its job and venting excess CO2 as it is designed to.

Luckily I'd stood the keg on a sheet of bubble-wrap with cloths on top, on a chair in the spare room. The cloths were sopping wet and there were a couple of small patches of beer on the carpet, but it could have been a *lot* worse. Luckily we have a carpet shampoo cleaner so I used that to suck up all the beer on the carpet and then shampooed that area several times. Hopefully there won't be a lingering smell of beer. Looks as if I've lost about a pint (out of a nominal 36). I now need to find somewhere else to keep the beer until it has finished its regulation 14 days "in a cool place" after the initial 2 days in the warm.

[NY]

The keg and pressure valve that I have come with a big warning not to use sodium metabisulphate as a sanitiser because it will cause damage. They supply something else as the sanitiser: disodium metasilicate/sodium carbonate/troclosene sodium.

Interesting that all the info I received with my fermentation bucket and keg, and with the beer kits, uses the term "sterilise" rather than "sanitise". According to Wikipedia, the difference in those terms is that sterilisation kills all "germs" whereas sanitisation reduces the level considerably (but isn't 100% effective).

[Jethro_uk]

I've always found red wines energetic. Advice from more seasoned brewers was simply to use a 10L bucket with a loose lid. The CO2 from fermetation sits on top of the liquid keeping it free from bugs.

[Martin Brown]

Yebbut - I didn't know that then! You learn by your mistakes.

Elderflower champagne was the most exotic home brew I ever made and that was very good but it was so much work separating all the flowers from the stems that we never did it again...

[leen...]

Thanks for all your replies. I have watched a load of YouTube videos but most of the ones I could find focused on making different types from scratch rather than the basics. At my stage in the journey, I will be happy enough to get something that resembles beer/ lager bottled, fizzy and drinkable :)

The kit I bought off eBay has the following

- 2 x plastic buckets with a lids. One lid with air lock

- a plastic barrel with a screw thread on top

- various bits like spoon, syphon tube, hydrometer

- a load of 1L clear plastic bottles

- a few what look like 5L clear square bottles (like the ones you get water in the supermarkets) with tops that look like will take an airlock

I have a couple of questions which hoping you all could point me in the right direction :)

1. The whole sterilise vs sanitise thing seems a bit of a mine field. As I understand it, I only need to sterilise if the equipment is dirty otherwise just need sanitising. Is that correct? The kit I have is second hand but looks clean, should I sterilise first then sanitise?
2. The various solutions to sterilise /sanitise vary massively in price and some seem to be no rinse (which sounds good). Also some videos suggest that you should not use washing up liquid etc. Any suggestions on a cost effective easily sourced way of doing this? E.g. was thinking of Milton or other baby sterilising chemicals?

This site seems to have fairly cost effective options (say £4) and for no rinse - although it says steriliser rather than sanitiser

whereas Chemsan (seems to be popular with the online youtubers) are much more expensive (£18)

1. Looks like sugar seems to be another contested topic but looks from above suggestion is that normal granulated sugar should be fine?

1. Online they seem to use brown plastic bottles. With my clear bottles does that mean I should keep them in a dark place or does it not matter?

2. Given the equipment above, it feels like I could probably set up some sort of system whereby I start one then at some point start another and maybe put in the barrel before bottling or something. TBH I can't figure out the process to optimise what to do when. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance all

Lee.

[Lee Nowell]

" [e-mail]" [e-mail]> Wrote in message:r

Just checked the cupboard and we seem to have a bottle of Milton but it expired in 2015!!!