Good to know … I’ll drop that down and stick with the rest.
Thought about making a hop tea, then I looked into dip hopping which is similar to a hop tea but has different effects, less bittering and more overall hop aroma. there are a few threads on the board that cover this but the basic idea is: Take 1.5 L of water that is between 150-180 and pour it over your desired amount of hops in your fermenter and cover and leave for 60min (generally your boil). So for this brew, I will start with that and then adjust time accordingly to meet the time requirement. Considering I have to heat the 3L of water for the HME, as well as heat the water for the "enhancer" I think I should be good to go.
Newbie here, I received my kits last week. I've never brewed beer before and I'll outline my experience so far.
I started the draught lager kit on Saturday. I'll report back again throughout the process.
I'm following the directions as they exist in the kit. I'm making no changes and following no conventional beer
making strategy. What's on the paper is how I'm doing it (except the one that says to leave your fermenter
bucket lid half cracked, I decided not to follow that one).
I ordered draught lager, wheat beer, red ale, and brown ale. In the package I received a letter from the company
that said something to the effect of "the yeast in the kit isn't right, so we sent you more yeast". Alongside my kits
there was four 11g pouches of LalBrew Premium Series Nottingham high performance ale yeast. I discarded the
yeast in the kit and pitched a whole 11g pouch of this into my draught lager.
I ordered a jug of dextrose from Amazon and used the full recommended amount of 1kg.
The bucket is happily fermenting in my pantry, quite aggressively in fact. The airlock is bubbling wildly. The bucket lid
does start to distend a little with gas so every 8 hours I burp the brew by pushing on the lid a little and let it bubble out
of the airlock. I don't know if this is bad or not, but it's fun.
So the next question may be:
I’ll know sooner then later. It’s fermenting now with the Voss and it’s already down 28 pts and I pitched just about 12 hours ago. I expect to be racking sooner then later
If you are curious what everyone's motivation is you could read the thread. I have already stated that I expect this to be inferior to my all grain batches, but at this price point thought it would be fun to try. If you just want the best beer possible why even both with homebrewing, there are many great breweries today and the only way homebrew is cheeper is if you're time is worthless. I homebrew because like to be creative trying different ingredients and methods. Also I just wanted to see if these have improved since I started out 12 years ago.
I decided against buying any of these for exactly this reason. It never really was $8.46 for 6 gallons of beer, it was $8.46 for 3.3 lbs of hopped LME. You can get 7 lbs of LME on Amazon for $21 and I don't really like working with LME anyway, so it's just not for me. But to each his own.
The gist of Bobby's question is about the true price point as brewed. Fluketamer's recipe in the post just above Bobby's is pretty obviously not "at this price point" and not really any easier than a standard extract brew day. Most of the other recipes in this thread also involve additional ingredients, time and effort. Even brewing as directed is at least twice the price of the kit because dextrose ain't free either, but it seems that few people actually went that route to get ~6 gallons of beer for about ~20 bucks anyway.
I'll be expecting royalty checks.
I'm usually surprised at how high the total is, but I guess that's because I usually make big batches of big beers.
First off... I all-grain brew twice a month... but for me personally, it's about the experimentation of the "Craft". I like trying all different methods (tried the shake N brew (failure) and Double Fermentation of an all-grain saison/lager (Success)), it's a creative outlet. if it works great if it doesn't oh well. This goes for every brew I make regardless of method.
I did the shake and brew ... mine crashed and burned .. it was beer but the hop burn was outrageous ... i may have rushed it so it may have been user error. Yeah, let's go with user error ... it was a fun experiment though.
I've done extract, partial mash and all grain. I brew in cheap pots and ferment in cheap buckets. I just sprang for a "major" upgrade - a $60 propane burner and an $80 ten gallon kettle. So with respect, you're nowhere near the low end and it's not necessary to spend $1000 on equipment to brew all grain.
Point taken, but where I live I can't have propane so I had to go electric (which comes at a cost) but ROI is there too.
For those who brew with un-hopped 'extract' on a regular basis, it's well known that one doesn't attempt to evaluate color until it's in the glass. And 'advanced' un-hopped extract brewers, working with un-hopped 'extract' of an unknown age, will often measure the color of the 'extract' before adding it to the kettle. If it's "red" at the start of the boil, it's not going to be lighter by the end of the boil.
As I've mentioned recently (and previously, and probably a couple of times before 'prevously'), if color darkens, but those "ball point pen" off flavors don't occur, there may be something interesting here.
So, assuming no "ball point pen" off-flavors, whenhttps://help.mangrovejacks.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002784477-Why-is-there-a-variance-in-colour-between-my-two-brews-#:~:text=This%20is%20due%20to%20Maillard%20reactions%2C%20a%20type said:
