Attention Homebrewers!

[SimplePagan]

Hello all!

I have been brewing my own beer for about 6 or 7 years now and I've always done extract brews. Well, I just finished building my first Mash/Lauter Tun (MLT) to start doing single infusion all grain brewing.

I'm curious how many other brewers are a part of this little community, and of those who has ventured into the world of all grain brewing. Please let me know what your experiences with brewing have been and whether you've done an all grain recipe, and what recipe you recommend for a first try with my new MLT.

Of course I have grand dreams of building my own RIMS system ... so if you have any experience or suggestions there, I'd love to hear them.

[DON]

Re: Attention Homebrewers!

Congratulations on making the step! You will definitely be rewarded but I must warn you that it is a deep rabbit hole :-)

I have a long term project on the go around scratch brewing. This is where grain brewers eventually end up before the event horizon lol!

Scratch brewing is the practice of making great beer where you make all the ingredients from scratch.
This means growing, harvesting, and processing the hops.
It means growing the barley, malting it and crushing it.
It means ultimately capturing and raising wild yeast strains.

I am actively acquiring barley varieties that existed in Victorian times, and even pre-industrial era. I started two varieties last summer, and have acquired a third from a gene bank.

Since I'm doing that, I decided to accompany the growing activities with ancient grains and have 5 old wheat varieties under resurrection.

As far as all grain brewing goes, I would highly recommend two books:
The New, Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian
Brewing Great Beers by Ray Daniels.

The first one is a great read and will inspire and educate you on technique.

The second one is more of a formal text book and goes into the details of beer style definitions, taste and colour profiles, history of style development etc, so you can formulate your own recipes correctly.

If you are going to get into European style ales and lagers then a RIMS or HERMS system is absolutely the way to go. They don't have to be super complicated. My first one just immersed the entire mash tun in a water bath and I heated the water with an electric heating element. It got the job done and I made awesome beer.

[volcaniclastic]

Re: Attention Homebrewers!

I'm a brewer, but not of beer. I make mead, cider, and currently, port. We do have a few beer-and-mead brewers on the forum though, and you might find some interesting reading material here:

http://www.paganforum.com/showthread.php?6434-Home-Brewin&highlight=homebrew

http://www.paganforum.com/showthread.php?884-For-anyone-who-wants-to-make-their-own-mead&highlight=mead

http://www.paganforum.com/showthread.php?3123-On-the-acquisition-of-mead&highlight=mead

http://www.paganforum.com/showthread.php?2048-Mead!&highlight=mead

What's been your best brew?

[DON]

Re: Attention Homebrewers!

I'm very much an experimenter. I spend most of my time brewing looking to improve technique or exploring flavours. As a result most of what I brew is pale and light so I can distinguish subtle differences or off flavours.

An example is that I'll make a pale malt wort and then break it up into 4 or 5 containers, then add the same amount of hops to each one, but at different times in the boil. I'll then brew it out using the same yeast and conditions so the resulting beers are all slightly different.

I do like dark beer and probably my favourite recipe is a porter I developed over about 3 or 4 iterations.

My favourite commercial beer would be a wheat doppelbock called Aventinus, which is strange because I'm not a big fan of wheat beers. And then there's Rochefort 10, which is a Trappist ale. I've never had the balls to make a trappist style ale but one day I shall :-)

[SimplePagan]

Re: Attention Homebrewers!

Scratch brewing is the practice of making great beer where you make all the ingredients from scratch.
This means growing, harvesting, and processing the hops.
It means growing the barley, malting it and crushing it.
It means ultimately capturing and raising wild yeast strains.

Oh my, I have already had dreams of doing this!

As far as all grain brewing goes, I would highly recommend two books:
The New, Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian
Brewing Great Beers by Ray Daniels.

Fantastic, I will look these up!

I'm a brewer, but not of beer. I make mead, cider, and currently, port. We do have a few beer-and-mead brewers on the forum though, and you might find some interesting reading material here:

What's been your best brew?

Great, I'll read through these when I'm not so tired.

My best brew is one I like to call "Arbitrary Cherry" and it's a sweet cherry stout. It's actually one of the first extract recipes I've brewed, and I have converted it to an all grain brew (with some tweaks) so I can make it as my first all grain batch.

The name came to be after we (my brewing partners) started cracking them open to drink. When we charged the yeast for bottling, we didn't let the mixture mix all the way. So ... some bottles were flat and others were explosive LOL. So we called it Arbitrary Cherry. My second go at it was much more successful and it really is a great beer.