Wow ! You guys have been amazingly helpful. I’ve learned so much from this thread
. Thank you !
If y’all don’t mind - I’d love to keep picking your brains and experience …
Are there any little tips and tricks to do or avoid ? Adding yeast nutrients to the fermenter or using a flocculant like whirlfloc ? I plan on washing and sanitizing everything 3 times !
I Don't use either addition. Not really needed. For myself, not needed at all.
One thing that I personally find indispensable is a grain mill. The Corona mill is a classic and is cheaper then roller type crushers.
https://www.amazon.com/Corona-Corn-..._1?keywords=corona+mill&qid=1636465265&sr=8-1There are Chinese knockoffs that are pretty much as good. Be careful about bolting it down. The cast iron "feet" are easily cracked if you apply too much torque to the bolts. Grain stores better when you buy it whole, and grind it as you need it. If you buy a batch worth at a time you can just order it already milled but sometimes buying in quantity saves a lot of money. I buy most of my malt from MoreBeer and they have pretty good prices and FREE SHIPPING on orders over $59 I think it is. Buy 10 5 lb bags of your base malt and whatever specialty malts will make a whole number of batches, and you will be way over the free shipping threshhold.
IF you will make a starter, always make slightly more wort than needed, and reserve a quart or so for the next batch's starter. If you have a pressure cooker you can can it in a quart mason jar and store it at room temp. Otherwise you can keep it in the fridge, if the jar is sterilized and you collect it after it has boiled, and it should keep for quite a long time, a month easy. Cover it or put the jar in a box. Check it once a week for signs of infection. Maybe you could freeze it in a heavy duty zip lock. A mason jar would probably break. A tupperware might work. Anyway simply saving wort for the same recipe that you will be making, gives you an ideal starter base. Bring it up (or down) to the yeast's pitching temp and pitch a pack, or else a scoop of reasonably fresh trub from your fermenter and next day you have a starter that is ready to rock and roll. That's my big trick though to be honest I usually just sprinkle one pack of dry yeast on the wort in the fermenter and close it up, or pour fresh wort right on the trub of a just emptied fermenter. Be advised, if you do the latter there is an elevated risk of infection, especially if you allow air into the fermenter as you empty it. More on that below. Also you then have a double thick trub layer which can build up higher than your spigot. To fight that, I just tilt the fermenter back about 10 or 12 degrees, or transfer to a PURGED secondary after the initial heavy fermentation action.
One nice thing about kegging is the CO2 is also handy for purging containers such as kegs, fermenters, and bottles. Oxygen is not a good thing to allow in contact with your beer, with the possible exception of just before or jsut after pitching yeast. Most transfers, such as transfer to secondary, (normally not required except for lagers but sometimes indicated if you want to use the spigot instead of siphoning) or transfer to keg, can be done with a closed loop. Container A has the beer in it and is higher than empty container B. Beer runs from spigot through sanitized tubing into container B through a stopper hole or a beer post. CO2 displaced by the beer coming in to container B passes through tubing to the stopper of container A to fill the vacuum left by the beer exiting through the spigot. Air never comes in contact with the beer.
Purging a keg is simple. Clean it good, add an ounce of star san and fill up with water, then put the lid on. Sit down. Lay the keg across your knee and tilt it back and forth to slosh it around good. Open the lid and fill all the way to the top.with water and put the lid back on. Let it stand an hour or overnight whatever. Then hook up the gas line to the keg and connect just a beer connector to the beer post. Open the regulator up to about 2 psi. There is no air in the keg because it was displaced by the star san solution. Now you are displacing the solution with CO2. End result is a perfectly purged keg. Remove the beer line connector from the beer post and pressurize to about 10psi, then close the valve on the CO2 tank and disconnect the gas line. There. Perfectly purged keg, sanitized, with enough pressure that no air can get sucked in. Relieve the pressure before doing a closed loop transfer.
A beer gun is nice for bottling but you can get by without it. Still a good idea to give each bottle a shot of CO2 immediately before filling. maybe doing a six pack at a time. Don't forget to sanitize bottles and caps. Place a cap immediately after filling. Crimp the caps on with your capper in batches of maybe a half dozen.
A large washtub is handy when bottling. Do all the filling in the washtub. You WILL make a big mess your first time bottling. It is a law of physics.
Make sure fermentation is complete before bottling. Otherwise the normal amount of priming sugar will actually be too much. There are two approaches to priming. Transfer beer to a bottling bucket, and add priming sugar in sterile solution to the beer and mix gently (to not oxygenate) and then bottle. Or add a measured amount of sugar to each bottle, and bottle straight from the fermenter. There are pros and cons to both. Plenty of time to read up on all that while beer is fermenting.
Everything that touches beer after the boil needs to be very clean and sanitized. Before the boil, just basic kitchen food prep level cleanliness is fine.
If you ferment in a bucket, make sure you have a good seal with the lid! Otherwise, air WILL get in after fermentation slows to a crawl, and possibly infect or oxidize your beer.
Take your time. No rush. If you aren't sure fermentation is finished, leave it another week. Or two. Generally it won't hurt a thing if you took all standard precautions. When bottle conditioning, likewise don't be in a hurry. Let it work a month or so, then refrigerate for a week or two before drinking the first one. Leave it in the fridge for a month and you can then consider it ready for general consumption or long term storage. The initial month at room temp gives the yeast time to build up the proper level of CO2 pressure. Then the refrigeration puts the yeast to sleep and settles it out, and more time will allow the sediment to firm up a bit so you can get a full pour without sediment in the glass, or even drink straight from the bottle if you are gentle with it.
Immediately after emptying a bottle, give it a thorough rinse and leave it full of water until you have time to clean it properly. Use a bottle brush. Dishwasher is okay, use soap and drying agent for first pass through dishwasher, then no soap at all for a second pass, including hot air drying. Store neck down in a bottle crate or rack. Before bottling you can sanitize with hot water or with a star san solution. Drain in bottle rack. You can wipe the mouths of the bottles with paper towel soaked with everclear. Caps should be hot water sanitized immediately before bottling and kept in a weak star san solution.
StarSan, properly mixed, is non toxic and a little residue won't hurt your beer. Don't mix it too strong, and drain it well, and you are good. A tiny bit of foam or a bubble or two won't hurt anything.
Again, while fermenting, do some reading on both types of packaging, bottle and keg. Mentally run through the process. Do a dry run, make sure you will have everything you need for a successful final transfer and conditioning. You can put a lot of money and work into making a batch of beer, and then mess it up at the end, when kegging or bottling, or storing.
Anything you haven't read about up til now in this thread that you read about between now and first brew day, is probably not needed at all. Don't keep looking for more stuff to buy. Save your money for ingredients, for now. Next batch, consider buying a second keg and a backup CO2 tank. Usually you will do an exchange so don't necessarily buy a brand new one. If you will only be bottling, maybe get an extra case of bottles if you haven't scrounged enough to keep two batches in the pipeline. And if your first batch was fermented in a bucket, I would urge you to upgrade to a better fermenter at this time. If you start with a BMB or Fermonster or similar, consider getting a second unit.
Scrounged bottles need to be scrupulously clean. Check the mouth for chips, cracks, and irregularities that might prevent a good seal. Brown glass is preferred. Clear or green glass don't block UV light. If you do use them then be vERY careful not to let light get on the beer. Brown bottles are easy to come by so I would save only those.
Store bottled beer in a dark and preferably cool location.
Label your beer and keep a record of your batches with their recipes and bottle numbers or at least batch numbers. You might think you wouldn't forget, but you will. One day you will get a beer that isn't up to your standards, or maybe you will get one that is fantastic. You need to know ingredient by ingredient, step by step, how you got that result, so you will or won't get the same thing again, whichever the case may be. I have 5 kegs and 4 of them look exactly alike. I had to really get medieval on labeling and record keeping when all I wanted to do was drink my beer.
