1st brew today help please :)

Hi all,

I'm doing my 1st batch today with a basic kit I ordered last week. It came with brewferm ambiorix. The instructions say to warm the can in hot water for 10 mins to turn it to liquid. This is then to be poured into the fermentor, the can washed out with 1ltr hot water and added to fermentor along with two more litres of hot water, in which 750g of sugar has been dissolved . 13ltr of cold water is then added to the mix before the yeast is added and the magic commences.

I am a seasoned beer drinker, but a virgin brewer. I have been reading this forum for a week or so and my question is should I not make the wort on the stove for an hour? The instructions I have seem a bit simple, and I want to make the beer as tasty as possible any tips are appreciated. In the mean time I'll get sterilising.

budwhite5 said:

Hi all,

I'm doing my 1st batch today with a basic kit I ordered last week. It came with brewferm ambiorix. The instructions say to warm the can in hot water for 10 mins to turn it to liquid. This is then to be poured into the fermentor, the can washed out with 1ltr hot water and added to fermentor along with two more litres of hot water, in which 750g of sugar has been dissolved . 13ltr of cold water is then added to the mix before the yeast is added and the magic commences.

I am a seasoned beer drinker, but a virgin brewer. I have been reading this forum for a week or so and my question is should I not make the wort on the stove for an hour? The instructions I have seem a bit simple, and I want to make the beer as tasty as possible any tips are appreciated. In the mean time I'll get sterilising.

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It sounds like you have a no boil kit. This will be REALLY easy to make. Basically you just mix everything up and you're done. The extract has already been prehopped. It will work just fine for your first brew. I would probably sanitize the outside of the cans before you start just in case.

For your next brew I would try to find an extract with specialty grains kit that comes with its own hops. That'll be a huge step up in the different flavors you can create.

Thanks sounds like a plan easy does it 1st!

it sounds like you have a pre-hopped/no-boil kit.

make it the way the instructions say.

Well it's now in the fermentor fingers crossed in a few weeks I'll be drinking it!

budwhite5 said:

Well it's now in the fermentor fingers crossed in a few weeks I'll be drinking it!

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Now is the hardest part. Don't touch it!!! Haha

Just seen the first bubble, happy days

Give it two weeks before you take a hydrometer sample. Test it to see how close to FG you are. The instructions should have OG/FG listed. Did you take a OG hydrometer test?

Yep took a measurement before I air locked it and taking one at the end, thanks

unionrdr said:

Give it two weeks before you take a hydrometer sample. Test it to see how close to FG you are. The instructions should have OG/FG listed. Did you take a OG hydrometer test?

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Ditto on what uniondr is recommending.

Well got up this morning went to the basement to get something and thought a heard the tap dripping into the sink. Turned the light on to find the airlock bubbling away. Made Monday morning seem not too bad!

I decided to have a go at brewing beer as I moved from England to Switzerland where the Lager is fine, but dark beer/ale isn't the best, it's basically a dark coloured lager, fizzy with not much flavour. I love real Ale and it's about the only thing I'm missing from home. I am and knew I would be excited about tasting the end product, but didn't think I would enjoy the process much. I'm surprised at how interesting/fun it is, I am now worried it's going to become a major part of my life

Thanks for the help guys much appreciated!

You might be a bit disappointed with the no boil kit, but moving up to an extract kit isn't hard at all and gives some great results!

budwhite5 said:

Well got up this morning went to the basement to get something and thought a heard the tap dripping into the sink. Turned the light on to find the airlock bubbling away. Made Monday morning seem not too bad!

I decided to have a go at brewing beer as I moved from England to Switzerland where the Lager is fine, but dark beer/ale isn't the best, it's basically a dark coloured lager, fizzy with not much flavour. I love real Ale and it's about the only thing I'm missing from home. I am and knew I would be excited about tasting the end product, but didn't think I would enjoy the process much. I'm surprised at how interesting/fun it is, I am now worried it's going to become a major part of my life

Thanks for the help guys much appreciated!

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Couldn't agree more. "Dark Euro lagers" are pretty dreadful for the most part. I started brewing for a similar reason. I moved from the town where I went to college that had a store with beer from all over the world to a tiny town where I had to drive 30 minutes to get crappy American lager.

Welcome to the addiction! :-D I think you'll find the process more and more enjoyable the more advanced your brewing process becomes.

So the 1st brew is still bubbling away and I'm starting to plan my 2nd brew. I want to do an extract next. The kit I'm looking at is in the picture below. It's a Brewferm 'Dark' beer 1.5KG malt extract kit. What tips have you got for me please? What speciality grains should I look at using? What/how much Hops should I use and when should I add the? Will a 1.5kg kit yield 5gallons of beer? As you can tell still really fresh to this, but I'm currently reading How To Brew by John Palmer to help me get up to speed but the main source of info is this forum

I'd use a 3lb bag of plain DME with some earthy hops to brew it. I use half a 3lb bag of DME in the 2.5-3.5 gallon boil for hop additions. In this case,it looks like pre-hopped LME. So do hop flavor additions at 20 & 10 minutes left in the boil. Then add the remaining extracts at the end.

Cheers for that much appreciated 30ltr aluminium pan is on it's way so time to start gathering the ingredients. It's a bit hard as my German is a work in progress as well so sourcing the equipment, ingredients etc. is interesting to say the least, but I've found a pretty good website in the last couple of days so fingers crossed won't be long before I've got a couple more batches under my belt and more importantly a better understanding of the processes involved!

The Brewferm kits are designed to make smaller volumes of better beer, e.g. 12 L. But with 3lbs of DME (or 1-2kg) as uniondr suggested you can bring it up to 5 Gallons no bother. I used Brewferm Gold last September with roughly that amount of DME and ended up with a 4-5% beer that I'm desperate to make again.
You can also get the Thomas Coopers 1.5kg LME (no yeast etc, just LME) for £7 odds (a bit cheaper unless you get a large order of DME) but I've yet to try that out - My current brew is going under the theory that light LME + steeping grains added to a kit should be a bit nicer than just DME added to the kit.

Re: steeping grains, you could start with a light kit and light or medium DME and then use the steeping grains the provide colour and greater body, as the darker kits will already have darker malts in their original grist. You could always double up on the dark, but it's not needed.

Thanks much appreciated

Well the 1st brew was a success tasty and strong! The ones in the grolsch type bottles are better than the ones in normal capped bottles. The ones in the capped bottles are a bit flat.

I bought another beer kit to do yesterday while I wait for my new big pan to be delivered so I can make wort etc. It's fermenting in the new glass fermentor I've got. I have however made a school boy error. I nearly pushed the rubber cork all the way in, and I can't pull it out :-( I've covered the hole for the airlock with sticky tape in the hope that the pressure from the co2 will push it out. Any tips/advice on this?

Sanitize a piece of wire and you should be able to use it to hook your stopper.

^^^This. Before you get enough pressure to push that stopper out your carboy will explode. They aren't made to withstand that kind of pressure.

Here is a pic of the problem. I've tried assorts with no luck :-( think I may have to resort to pushing it into the carboy and ditching the batch.

Take a bolt that is larger than the hole and thread it in then try to work the plug out.

Don't dump it!

You should be able to get it out with something like the bar from a bar-and-ring necklace fastener... just attach some chain or wire, push it all the way through, then pull up.

Here is an image of the type of fastener I'm talking about... available at any craft store, bead store, or jewelry supply.



You could probably even find a wall anchor at the hardware store that you could use to pull it out with...

Cheers I'll keep at it!

A drill, channel locks, and one of these ought to do it (probably the one to the far right):

budwhite5 said:

Here is a pic of the problem. I've tried assorts with no luck :-( think I may have to resort to pushing it into the carboy and ditching the batch.

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sanitize the crap out of it, push it into the carboy, use a tin-foil airlok until you can get another stopper.

deal with it after the batch it transfered.