home brewing equipment?

[sunandshadow]

I had some wonderful locally home-brewed cider and mead and it got me excited to try it myself. I'm hesitating at the price tags of some of the equipment though - apple juicers and carbonating systems both seem to be a lot of $$$. And I'm also not sure what I need immediately and what I could wait on. So what would you all recommend as a shopping list for someone getting started with homebrewing?

[Al Stevens]

Homebrew Brandy: No equipment needed.

Two fifths of inexpensive vodka
Two pounds of rock candy
Two pounds of dried apricots or peaches
Put it all in a glass jug
Close the jug tightly
Put the jug in a dark closet for two months
Strain through a piece of cheesecloth
Discard the sediment

[sunandshadow]

Originally Posted by Al Stevens

Homebrew Brandy: No equipment needed.

Two fifths of inexpensive vodka
Two pounds of rock candy
Two pounds of dried apricots or peaches
Put it all in a glass jug
Close the jug tightly
Put the jug in a dark closet for two months
Strain through a piece of cheesecloth
Discard the sediment

I don't think that technically qualifies as brandy, but it sounds tasty.

[alleycat]

I looked at cider making a couple of years ago. The equipment costs didn't seem so bad (I think there were kits on Amazon). It was a little more if someone wanted to use glass instead of plastic containers (I didn't really want to use plastic buckets).

I got a couple of books from the library, and also found a couple of websites that seemed to have good information. I'll see if I still have them bookmarked.

[Al Stevens]

Originally Posted by sunandshadow

I don't think that technically qualifies as brandy, but it sounds tasty.

I think you're right. And it is good stuff.

[sailor]

Here's a link to a forum that might help.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/

[GeorgeK]

Originally Posted by sunandshadow

apple juicers and carbonating systems both seem to be a lot of $$$. And I'm also not sure what I need immediately and what I could wait on. So what would you all recommend as a shopping list for someone getting started with homebrewing?

Glass is a better reuseable fermentation vessel than plastic. If you can find gallon sized glass jars of say cranberry juice, when you've finished the juice you have 1-gallon glass carbouys. 6 one gallon fermenters are easier to move than one 6 gallon and you have the option of adding different levels of hops or other flavorings to each now one gallon batch.

You will need an airlock (a 69 cent variety is fine) and stopper (1-2 bucks). If you are very good at decanting you can pour off the fermented beverage into a secondary vessel rather than needing siphoning equipment. Carbonators are for force carbonating and completely unecessary if you bottle your product.

Don't bother with an apple juicer unless you have a surplus of apples every year. Just buy a good organic apple juice/cider, add a cup of corn syrup per gallon. Give it a good shake, sprinkle some dry champagne yeast from your local brewing store (about 2 bucks for enough for 6 gallons), attach the airlock and wait about 3 days minimum in a cool dark place. It might take a week or two more for all the yeast to settle to the bottom. Well, you don't have to wait there, just the cider as it turns to jack. There are additives like Irish Moss you can use to speed it up, but time is cheaper. Carefully decant it so as to not stir up the yeast at the bottom of the jug into either a secondary fermentation vessel or into bottles.

You can bottle in plastic soft drink bottles. Rinse them thoroughly. put a cap ful of clorox and a cup of water it it, seal it, shake it all around, pour that into the next bottle and repeat. Next rinse the bottles very thoroughly until you can't smell any bleach. Decant your cider or beer into the bottles, add a half teaspoon of sugar to each, seal and place the bottles in that cool dark place. 3 months is about the right aging time...if you can bear the wait.

A reasonable starting point for newbies is Charlie Papazian's book, I think I't called, "The Beginner's Guide to Brewing," if I remember correctly. He tries to talk people into too many products that aren't really necessary and doesn't quite grasp the chemistry of what's going on but it's a starting point.

[Eldrich]

I've never brewed beer, but I do make my own wine. From what I understand of the process, beer is a little more complicated. Especially if you buy wine grape juice concentrate online, its ridiculously easy. Literally, if you put a bunch of fruit in a barrel, eventually you will get wine. But obviously when you do it now, you use additives and preservatives and commercial yeasts so the results are more consistent, but it's really easy. So if you like wine, that might be a way to 'ease' into it. And it's really not that expensive. For the first wine I made from a kit I bought this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Home-Brewe...415540&sr=8-10

and a $40 thing of juice concentrate. So for like $150, you get 30 bottles of wine, $5 per bottle not too shabby. But then once you have the equipment you can get 30 bottles for $40, $1.33 per bottle! I'd say it comes out tasting like a $5 bottle, not going to blow you away, but definitely drinkable. And if it really comes out crappy there's always risotto, beef burgundy, wine coolers, and sangria!

But of course there are always more gadgets to make things easier and you can buy more expensive concentrates or use hand picked strawberries etc and all of those things can drive the price up. But if you wanted to keep it simple and cheap, making wine is much cheaper than buying it.

Though I'm not sure if the economics are the same for beer. I think there are similar equipment kits for beer.

[BunnyMaz]

I've made meade very cheaply.

All you need equipment wise is something sterile that you can seal up to brew it in, and one of those rubber stoppers with the wiggly pipe coming out for controlled release of gases. I've managed it with an old cider demijon and with a food safe plastic bucket with a lid. In both instances I sterilised the container with camden tablets, and with the bucket I drilled a hole in the lid to allow me to insert the cork. Save up old wine bottles and sterilise them for decanting the booze into.

Ingredients-wise, you really only need honey, water and brewers yeast, but you can also add other ingredients to improve it.

Meade is the cheapest and easiest thing to brew if you're starting out. I recommend it! These guys have a lot of useful info.

[AndreaGS]

Make mead! It's cheap and delicious!

I bought a 5 gallon glass carboy from amazon for ~$30. You need a 5 gallon fermentation bucket, stoppers and airlocks for both. We bottled ours in beer bottles, so we bought a capper as well ($15. $5 for a bag of a bunch of caps). You can easily make bubbly mead this way as well. And, of course, some tubing to transfer the mead from one fermenter to another, and into the bottles.

We bought the honey from Costco ($30 to make a 5-gallon batch).

And you'll need some yeast - different varieties will give you different dryness/sweetness.

Just google "making mead" and you'll find a bunch of step-by-step instructions.

I've brewed beer and sake, and mead, IMHO, is the easiest and most tasty. You pretty much mix honey, water, and yeast, and let it ferment.

[Eldrich]

Originally Posted by AndreaGS

I've brewed beer and sake, and mead, IMHO, is the easiest and most tasty. You pretty much mix honey, water, and yeast, and let it ferment.

Sake!! I've wondered if you can do that yourself. Is it difficult? I love sake! And i've pretty much tasted the ones that the grand old state of pennsylvania deigns to allow us to taste...(urgh)...do you have to polish the rice?

and where do you guys buy your honey in bulk for mead?

thanks

[BunnyMaz]

I'm in the UK, so my shopping sources probably aren't any use to you. Just google for bulk honey and you should find some.

[dirtsider]

I picked up a recipe for elderberry mead. It has the yeast (and flavorings). All I needed to get was a gallon of water and two pounds of honey. While I could've just used regular tap water, the reason why the bottled water was suggested is because you put everything back into the bottle to ferment. I'll tell you how it goes.

FYI - I picked the kit at my local Renn Fair. It's a 'short mead kit' from Ambrosia Farm (www.ambrosiafarm.com). It says that you get 4 bottles of mead in the end.

[AndreaGS]

Originally Posted by Eldrich

Sake!! I've wondered if you can do that yourself. Is it difficult? I love sake! And i've pretty much tasted the ones that the grand old state of pennsylvania deigns to allow us to taste...(urgh)...do you have to polish the rice?

and where do you guys buy your honey in bulk for mead?

thanks

Brewing sake is definitely difficult. There are a lot of steps. You have to stir it at certain times, keep it at certain temperatures... We bought a fridge and attached a thermostat to it so we could adjust appropriately. You don't have to polish the rice, but you do have to rinse it. A lot.

Here's the guide that we used:
http://www.taylor-madeak.org/index.php

We buy our honey from Costco. But you can check craigslist too. People with honeybees will often sell honey in bulk on there. They do in our area, at least. Barring that, check your local farmers' markets.

[GeorgeK]

Originally Posted by BunnyMaz

In both instances I sterilised the container with camden tablets, and with the bucket I drilled a hole in the lid to allow me to insert the cork. Save up old wine bottles and sterilise them for decanting the booze into..

Technically that is sanitizing, not sterilizing, but sanitizing normally works just fine. Also camden tablets should be avoided by people who are allergic to sulfa, just so you know. It depends upon how severe their allergic reaction is. If they have severe reactions, avoid it entirely and just swamp the fermentation process with activated (pre-pitched) double yeast to crowd out the wild strains. If it's a mild reaction, they might get by by condensing the fermentables down to one fifth volume, using 1/5 the amount of camden until sanitization in complete then rehydrating the must with boiled and then cooled sterilized water.

To do true sterilization requires baking your bottles after thorough washing and boiling your fermentables. In the case of beer and mead that's fine, but if you are using fruit for wine you run the risk of activating the pectin in fruit and winding up with a bottle full of jello.

If you do wish to bake your bottles, do it slowly or they will chip and shatter! After washing them thoroughly, stack them in the oven and raise the temperature in the oven by 25 degrees F every half hour until you reach 250F and then turn off the oven and do not open it until the next day.

[Eldrich]

So you can essentially use grocery store honey as long as you can find it at a good price? I didn't know if there were any stipulations on what kind of honey to use.

mmm, i think some strawberry mead is in my near future.

[BunnyMaz]

Oh you can totally just pick up honey from the supermarket and use it. Just make sure it's actually honey you're buying. I tend to go for the set honey with the waxy top for that exact reason.

[quicklime]

Originally Posted by sunandshadow

I had some wonderful locally home-brewed cider and mead and it got me excited to try it myself. I'm hesitating at the price tags of some of the equipment though - apple juicers and carbonating systems both seem to be a lot of $$$. And I'm also not sure what I need immediately and what I could wait on. So what would you all recommend as a shopping list for someone getting started with homebrewing?

Sun,

Do NOT buy a kit. Most of them offer about half the shit you need, and half the shit in the kit is stuff you do not. So, let's look at what you want to do:

you want to make mead and/or cider....wine too? still or sparkling? Sweet or dry?

The cheapest, easiest are dry and still....you ferment all the sugar out until there's nothing left, and bottle. If you want it sweet you have to tinker a bit, and if you want it sparkline, you tinker a bit more, BUT there are multiple ways to do so....

the bare minimum, and where/how to get it:


a fermenting bucket or three--size matters, but you can buy, or you can get 3 and 5-gallon food-service buckets from bakeries and restaurants. They use them for stuff like frosting. Or buy an 8-gallon from the homebrew store.

Glass for secondary fermentation--carlo rossi or apple juice or other jugs (gallon) or carboys (typically 3, 5, or 6 gallons). 1 gallon is about 5 bottles of wine, so a couple gallon jugs can be fine for "testing" but if you figure at least 3 months, and probably ideally closer to a year, you may want to be making more than 5 bottles at a shot....

Siphon--don't waste on an auto-siphon, they're a breakable PITA. Splurge, ideally, on a metal barrel siphon. You will later, if not sooner--faster than plastic, less breakable, and less likely to hold nasties in scratches. Also get the siphon tubing, and a clamp to control flow.

Airlocks and bungs for your glass carboys--you'll have to choose bung by carboy mouth size but these run about a buck for the airlock, buck for the bung. Cheap enough you should skip the fucking "balloon over the mough" bit for a more certain method. There's places to skimp, but at $2, a balloon here is not one of them, imho.

Bottles (of course)--buy them, save them, ask a restaurant (nicely) to save for you and pick up, DAILY (you don't want to ask a favor and become a pain in their ass in return). I got mine through a combination, mostly of stuff we drank and bottles scrounged from relatives, restaurants, etc......

Corks or screw-tops depending on the bottle type (though you can even experiment on the cheap, early on, recycling screw-top wine bottles and even PET pepsi bottles and the like)....if you go corks, you need a corker, and I would NOT go less fancy than a cheap floor corker....the hand corkers can be a pisser

Chemicals--at a minimum (chemicals are cheap) some One-Step cleanser and potassium metabisulfite and stabilizer and yeast nutrient....ten bucks to start for all of them

yeast--if you do it, do it right. No bread yeast, use actual wine yeasts. Learn their characteristics and tolerances, pick the right one, and go.


all totalled, for a broke-ass starting venture:

Free bottles
free frosting buckets
Free glass cider/wine jugs
2x Airlock and bung $4
Siphon $30 or so
yeast (dry, 71B for example) $2
chemicals $10
1 gallon of cider $4?
3 lbs honey $12?

62 dollars for your first 10 bottles of cider and mead, roughly, or around $6.20 per bottle, but you also get to keep and re-use most of the shit listed. Your next batch you are only paying $2 for a yeast pack and $16 for ingredients, or $18 for 10 bottles....


the math is not exact, but ruling out my startup costs (and a few other toys I own) and just counting materials, my cheapest wines are about $2 per bottle, half that being the cork, and the most expensive were maybe $6 a bottle.

pm me if you want more info on things like doing wines that finish sweet, and sparkling wines.

quick

[sunandshadow]

I picked up my equipment today ^_^ Didn't get the fruit ingredients yet, I have to do a bit of investigation what's currently available locally - not sure if it's still to early for apples.

[Eldrich]

Originally Posted by sunandshadow

I picked up my equipment today ^_^ Didn't get the fruit ingredients yet, I have to do a bit of investigation what's currently available locally - not sure if it's still to early for apples.

Let us know how it turns out!

[sunandshadow]

Started two mini batches today just to the recipes and yeast without committing a lot of expensive ingredients. 3 quarts each of what will hopefully become sweet mead and cider-style peach wine. I thought it was interesting that ale yeast smelled quite different from bread yeast, it smelled like beer.

[quicklime]

bread yeast makes "bready" alcohol.....your ale yeast will likely fo to dryness with the cider or the wine unless you have more sugar than the yeast can tolerate converting to alcohol....

for ciders I usually do say 5 gallons to dry, then stabilize and add a sixth gallon that won't ferment then, age a bit to make sure it doesn't, and bottle

[sunandshadow]

I keep hearing people say bready alcohol is a bad thing, but it puzzles me since I like the smell and taste of bread WAAAY better than that of beer. I really don't care for beer at all. I pretty much only like the sweetest wines, ciders, and mixed drinks (haven't actually had a sweet mead yet).

With my current experiments I picked a yeast with a fairly low alcohol tolerance (for an ale yeast) and hopefully the recipe I used insured the sugar content to be high enough that fermentation will stop while there's still some sugar in there. Three lbs. of honey in less than a gallon of water is a scaled down version of a standard 5 gallon sweet mead recipe that calls for 15-18 lbs. of honey. If the mead turns out dry I'll backsweeten with more honey. The peach, eh, if it turns out dry I'll give it to my friend who likes dry alcohols. I'll count it a success if someone considers it pleasant to drink.

[quicklime]

Originally Posted by sunandshadow

I keep hearing people say bready alcohol is a bad thing, but it puzzles me since I like the smell and taste of bread WAAAY better than that of beer. I really don't care for beer at all. I pretty much only like the sweetest wines, ciders, and mixed drinks (haven't actually had a sweet mead yet). the "problem" is several-fold:
1. bread alcohol is not as sulfite-resistant, making it a poor choice for traditional winemaking where your fruit is sulfited to kill wild yeast, bacteria, etc. as well as as a reducing agent.
2. presumably you want to taste your fruit, not bread, or you'd just add cheap booze to bread. Obviously this isn't always the case, but generally speaking people want blackberry wine, for example, not blackberry-bakery wine. Wine yeasts are generally selected for being very clean, or for adding fruity esters or occasionally yeasty (champagne yeast) but esp. for ciders and the like, not usually for a doughy, bready character.
3. Bread yeast tends to shit out at about 10% alcohol. If you want to make a dry, 12% wine, it is a bad choice. If you want to make a 12%, fruity, sweet wine it is a bad choice.


bread yeast isn't the end of the world, people have been doing it for ages......but if you have a homebrew shop near you, it makes sense. More control, more robust, better able to minimize oxidation.....
With my current experiments I picked a yeast with a fairly low alcohol tolerance (for an ale yeast) and hopefully the recipe I used insured the sugar content to be high enough that fermentation will stop while there's still some sugar in there. Three lbs. of honey in less than a gallon of water is a scaled down version of a standard 5 gallon sweet mead recipe that calls for 15-18 lbs. of honey. 3 lbs should give a semi-sweet mead with 71B or D47, the most common sweet mead yeasts, I'm not sure about your ale yeast but I would suspect it should be similar If the mead turns out dry I'll backsweeten with more honey. The peach, eh, if it turns out dry I'll give it to my friend who likes dry alcohols. you can...or you can stabilize and back-sweeten, which many people do anytime they make anything sweet, because a "stopped" fermentation with residual sugar is not guaranteed to stay stopped (I had a mead explode once....lots of glass and stickiness all over the basement floor). So you can simply ferment it all the way out, let it sit a month, stabilize with sorbate and sulfite, back-sweeten, sit another month, and then bottle I'll count it a success if someone considers it pleasant to drink.

it will probably be pleasant under any circumstances to someone. the big question is how good you want it to be. There's no way in hell I'm buying $600 oak barrels and napa grapes, so I'm not saying do that, but for another 10% or so time and expense you can easily double or triple the quality of your wine/cider/ale


just food for thought, good luck in either/any case, and do try it, no matter what you think is happening. Sometimes people think a batch is ruined, toss all of it but a bottle or two as "examples", and later open them to find a very nice wine

[sunandshadow]

Thanks quicklime, I'm enjoying hearing your thoughts on the topic. I can see from your description why one would not want to use bread yeast with a fruit base, but what about an oatmeal, rye, corn, or wheat base? A drink that tastes like Swedish rye bread (has molasses in) sounds absolutely mouth-watering to me, as does one like a bowl of maple oatmeal or one like fresh-baked sourdough bread... I personally prefer wines and ciders that are 10% or less alcohol, as higher percentages burn my stomach and spoil the sweet taste (IHMO). I've got a bottle of chocovine (whipped cream variety) right now that would be delicious if only the alcohol % were lower. And I had a bottle of 8% blueberry cider-style wine that was just a perfect balance of sweet and alcohol.

Similarly I'm curious what a sweet beer without hops would taste like; I know I hate the taste of hops, but I'm not really fond of malt balls or barley bread, so maybe I wouldn't like beer no matter what, but then again maybe I would like it if it were hopless, sweet, and a low alcohol %.

This is the yeast I used for this first go-round if you're curious:
http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/strains_wlp023.html