First time brewing... looking for a little help in getting started, recipe picking

Are you wanting to get into it because you hope it will save you money or because you think you will enjoy the hobby, or both? You really have to enjoy it as a hobby, forget about the money (although it is somewhat cheaper once you acquire all the equipment, especially when you switch to all-grain). Everyone here loves brewing and the fact that we can enjoy doing something that will produce really great beer at a fraction of the cost of decent commercial beer, both microbrew and imported, is very satisfying. You can make as good or even better brew than you can buy in the stores.

Extract kits will run you between $20-40, depending on style and place and those are for 5 gallon batches. Personally I wouldn't attempt all- grain until you have at least 10 good extract batches under your belt. Just don't give up if you get a bad brew, learn from your mistakes and strive to avoid them next time. Don't think of homebrewing as a chore, to me it's an obsession and a great hobby. Plus you get rewarded for the hard work you put into it.

You're in the right place for any questions. Welcome to the community.......

For your first go, I'd stick with a nice simple extract recipe. If you have a local homebrew store (abbreviated in this group as LHBS) just go in, explain your situation and they'll probably have a bunch of recipes they can put together for you depending on your taste.

A really simple recipe for an American Ale would be somthing like:

7 lbs of pale malt extract 2 oz Cascade hops Wyeast 1056 or WLP001 yeast (if you want to save some money on yeast, ask your LHBS about dry yeast) 2/3 cup of corn sugar (for priming the bottles)

Bring your pot to boil (about 3/4 full) and turn off the heat. Pour in the extract and stir until it's completely dissolved. Make sure none is hiding on the bottom of the pot. Bring it back up to a boil. (Keep an eye on it, it's going to want to boil over at this point). Once it's boiling (just a nice slow boil) throw in 1 oz of the hops and mark the time. 30 minutes later throw in another 1/2 oz. of the hops. 25 minutes after that (55 minutes since the first hops) put in the last 1/2 oz of hops. Five minutes after that, turn off the heat.

Put the whole pot in in a sink full of ice water to cool. Put the lid on the pot to keep anything from getting in your wort. When the temperature of your wort is below 75 degrees, pour the whole pot into your sanitized fermenting bucket (your LHBS can tell you how to sanitize). Top up the bucket to five gallons using clean water (some people will boil the water the night before to make sure it's sterile). Agitate this really well with a spoon to mix it and to get a lot of air into the beer (the yeast need Oxygen when they first start working). Take a small sample for your hydrometer if you choose and record the reading (this will let you calculate how much alcohol is in your beer after fermenting). Then simply add your yeast, put the lid on, put a little water in your airlock and put this in a nice cool dark corner of your house.

In about 3 weeks fermentation should be complete. (you can verify this by taking hydrometer readings on consecutive days. If the readings stay the same the fermentation's done. If they continue to go down, the yeast is still active.) The recipe I gave you should have a final gravity of approximately (1.013). At this point carefully transfer this to your bottling bucket using a siphon (we don't want any oxygen in our beer at this point), stir in the priming sugar, and bottle into your sanitized bottles. Let this sit for another week or two, and voila! - your first homebrew.

Once you get the basics under your belt you can start to complicate things by adding specialty grains (which will give your beer more character) and different hop additions as well. Then, if the homebrew disease really takes over, you'll be building mash tuns, wort chillers, and a three-tiered brewing sculpture by this time next year!

I glossed over a ton of stuff so read this article:

I can't help you with supplies in Western NY, but

is a pretty good online vendor if you don't have an LHBS. If you do have an LHBS, by all means patronize them.

Good luck,

Steve

I would highly recommend reading

if you have not already done so. IMO, it's probably the best source of information for how to make your own beer.

As far as a particular recipe to start off with, I usually recommend that a beginner start with a dark beer. Something like a porter or a stout, if you like those styles. The darker, stronger flavor, of a stout will really help to hide any mistakes that you make while you are still learning and will be "more forgiving". If your wife likes dark beers and you want somthing that is relatively easy to make without messing it up, I'd go that route.

John.

I suggest you buy a cheap, glass lab thermometer. It can help you to prevent shocking your yeast when pitching it into your wort. This is especially important if you don't have a wort cooler. I prefer to keep

5F max difference between yeast and wort. If there is a bigger difference, you can add small amounts of wort to the yeast cream until it gets closer. This pertains to rehydrated yeast, but some seasoned members of this group will recomend you just sprinkle dry yeast onto the wort. I prefer to rehydrate, but don't dispute the claims of those who pitch dry.

Before I had a wort cooler, I boiled in smaller volumes (~3 gal) and used chilled water to bring down the wort temp. A wort cooler was the best thing I ever did to improve the quality of my beer, since smaller boil volumes affect hop utilization (inversely proportional to SG). Also, smaller boil volumes can lead to caramelized (unfermentable) sugars. I found it helps to dissolve the extract in hot water, off of the burner, and keep it stirred frequently during the boil.

Regards, Tom

Hi,

When people ask me for advice on their first beer I usually recomend buying two of the cheapest kits (cans) of malt extract (for the weight). Throw away the yeast that came with it and buy a liquid yeast. Probably something that is neutral, that is, like american lager. Use both kits to make 1 - 5 gal batch, no sugar, no nothing, you don't even have to boil it. Just make sure is thoroughly dissolved.

Helpful tips

1 - SANITIZE EVERYTHING, pretend you are doing open heart surgery so anything that touches, or gets near your beer has been sanitized. I use 'diversol' which I buy at a place that sells eqip/supplies for dairys. But it has fairly universal applications. I suspect 'sani- clean' is the same. Even cheaper is some bleach in water, it just doesn't have the detergent part. This is the MOST IMPORTANT RULE and is why your girlfriend prob. made swill (unless you're Belgian, they like that taste lol) 2 - Use a glass carboy for both primary and secondary. 3 - If you like what you made and are interested in the hobby (there's some kind of primal satisfaction in making booze) I would start shopping around for a corneleus keg system. You can buy these new, but lordy, there must be a zillion pop systems that are used and unused out there. For the bottling part is the part that makes a lot of people quit, and the sediment in the bottles turn their friends off. 4 - The lower the temp. it fermants at, the cleaner the taste. If you are really blessed and can keep it from 45 - 50*F a lager yeast is your choice (45*F=lager 50-55*F=Steam or common beer) 55*F and above use ale yeast, preferred for ale is 60*F

hope this helps

also welcome from moi

cheers

3 lbs of dried malt extract a package of corn sugar(about the same size 2 ounces of cascade hops(1 boil for 30 minutes) (1 boil for 12 minutes) 1 brew pot, 1 hydrometer, 1 bottle capper, 1 big brewing pail, 1 gas trap, 3 cases of old beer bottles(with lip not screwtop), 1 bottle of bleach, 1 package of caps, 1 bottle scrubber 1 very big sink lot's of warm water 4 feet of vinyl tubing and a clamp for it (it actually adds up to cheaper after four brews) 1 compendium of charlie papzani's "the new complete guide to the joy of homebrewing" for when your waiting for it to pay off 3 sanitary skill point 1 speechcraft skill point 1 patience skill point 1 reading skill point 1 graphics art skill point

soak beer bottles in a tub of lukewarm water with half a liter of bleach for

1 hour fill 2.5 gallons of tap water in brewpot heat, wait till boil, add 3lbs of light dry(unhopped) malt extract add cornsugar, add 1 ounce hops boil 20 minutes add 1 ounce of hops boil 10 minutes remove from heat quench with well aerated Cold water pour in bucket top off bucket short one gallon from top( how your supposed to know is about two inches) put lid on, put cork in, run blow-off tube through cork put down bowl of water for blow-off tube to bubble through wait one week remove blow-off tube, put airlock into cork wait two weeks, check with clean hydrometer wait one day, check with clean hydrometer wait one day, check with clean hydrometer when it stops changing specific density 1. scrub labels off bottles(easier the 2nd, third, fourth) 2. bottle scrub it inside half-full of basin water a bit 3. empty bottle, fill with clean water, shake violently, drain 4. keep your bottles unexposed 5. place bucket on top of case of beer 6. get racking cane or whatever, but try not to suck up too much sediment however with four feet of vinyl hose trimmed to taste 7.fill bottles up nearly full 8.cap as many as possible 9.wait 10 days 10.drink

-yours truly from mazitlan dreams, G_cowboy_is_that_a_gnu_hurd?

If U can link up with a local homebrew club,U'll probably be able to tag along and learn and even brew by sharing materials/equipment NEW YORK Endicott: Brewers In the Endicott Region New York City: Malted Barley Appreciation Society New York City: New York City Homebrewers Guild Orange County/Washingtonville: NY FOAM (North Yeast Fellowship Of Ale and Mead) Poughkeepsie: Hudson Valley Home Brewers Rochester: Upstate New York Homebrewers Association Staten Island: Grumpy Old Brewers of Staten Island Staten Island: Homebrewers of Staten Island Syracuse: Salt City Brew Club

...i perfected my technique in my early years with an excellent brew shop and this GREAT newsgroup...I have never personally met any of them but consider this the most focused,helpful, non-political,non-foul mouthed group on the 'net

three things.

-save 3/4 cup of corn sugar per five gallons of beer for addition when your going to bottle

-use your graphic arts skill to make labels on your computer printer and glue to clean bottle after bottle with a glue stick or starch glue

-add one gallon of frozen berries for any one week the beer sits in your fermenter, preferably the second week when it has become resistant to infection which you then remove from fermentor after one week before they really begin to rot

-try to sanitize everything before and after you use it, with bleach and lots of water

"G_Cowboy_Is_That_A_Gnu_Hurd?" wrote in message news:1JudnW4AJv2NRYvbnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

I would suggest going with a extract kit recipe the first time around. The necessary knowledge is all in the brochure! :) You're probably not going to come in under $30 but the cost goes down significantly once you have all of your equipment. And for about the same price you'll have something infinitely better than "drinkable"

"True Brew" makes kits that mimic most styles so there is a freedom of choice.

Warning!!!! There is a reason that the greeting for most new brewers from a veteran is "welcome to the obsession.... uh hobby!

I started out two years ago with extract kits and now have a five tap kegerator! My wife won't drink commercial beer anymore unless it's something I haven't perfected the clone of yet!