Beer making is fun... at the moment.
Beer #2 is bubbling away. The local home brew store kind of oversold their stock. Went back with a recipe and there wasn't really any volume of DME or LME to be had. Hops variety was less varied. The extract shortage was the kicker. In the end though, I'm glad they didn't really have what I needed.
The first batch just taught me that following a kit exactly is stupid easy. The second kit however taught me a few things a mead maker wouldn't know. And learning new things has me very excited today. I wish ingredients, bottles, fermenters and storage space were unlimited so I could just keep trying more.
For this batch I went kit modding as a result. The first mod wasn't a mod at all. I just switched from dextrose to a medium malt extract. 1kg worth. The wort already smells drastically different, and should taste and look quite different when done (I hope). The "real hack" was the hops, and also where the learning came in. I got 1oz of Cascade hops and tossed it in a boil with some extract and threw a bit in every 5 minutes for 15 minutes.
First thing I learned. If I tried to follow most recipes, I don't have the kitchen equipment for even the simplest. But more on that shortly.
Not a huge hack. But, one of my complaints with the first kit was the aroma and the flavor. While I could certainly taste the bitterness of the IPA there wasn't really anything leftover from the hops in the other 2 areas.
Then, I finished up as per the prior batch. and things are going along well, currently have a much more vigorous ferment going than batch #1 had. Though, this time I started by moving the fermenter near the heater and wrapping a shirt around it. Turns out my office temps get just a tad too cool for ideal beer yeast temps and last batch was running long as a result (more things learned).
Last night I decided to do some more research on how my efforts might have affected the brew. Another thing that happens over time is you learn more and better questions to search out. This time I learned I may have wasted my hops to a large degree. Mead making didn't use hops. And holy crap, hops are versatile little buggers. Turns out, to get the most out of your hops you want a specific gravity during the boil. One post pegged it at around 100g/L of water to get a gravity of 1040. I had 1kg in a few liters, so WAY overkill. I should still get something from my hops, but not nearly as much as I could have.
This lead me to my next question. Do I really need to invest in a bigger pot? This second batch was still a kit. But would I be screwed if I went up to a dry extract recipe? What if there were grains to steep? Turns out I should probably be fine, though a larger pot would certainly help.
My biggest concern was whether or not I really needed to boil everything. If so, that meant a roughly 6 gallon pot just to do a 5 gallon batch. I'm not sure my current pot is even 1 gallon. A few good articles later confirmed what I would have arrived at in time on my own. Boiling isn't necessary for extracts and basically, if the water is drinkable, it probably doesn't need to be boiled. Some people don't trust the DME, but then, my kit told me just to add it to hot tap water as an option and it turned out fine.
[note]
If you have the capacity, yeah, you should probably boil or pasteurize the DME in water. Beer is cheaper and quicker than mead and while I've never had a mead batch spoil and don't expect to have a beer batch spoil either it would still be a pain in the butt if you were the rare person to lose a batch this way. On the flipside, if you don't have the equipment, don't bother doing it just for the boil. I have yet to read about anyone who had DME or other ingredients spoil a batch.
[/note]
If you're doing hops (which I would be) you would need to boil some DME in water to get the gravity to a good point to get the most of the hops, but that would be MUCH less than the several gallons people are talking about.
Next question was steeping grains. Since all of these recipes assumed you had a full 6.25 gallon pot to steep the grains in, I wanted to know if that was really necessary as well. I had read earlier that you need to have enough water to get the most out of it, but couldn't wrap my head around why they were using the volumes of water they were.
So I looked up how much water was needed for grain steeping. Ended up with suggestions between 1/2 to 1 gallon per pound. That is a pretty wide range. And confirmed my suspicions. While quite a bit of water is needed, it is nowhere near the full batch amount for an extract. All-grain would be different and likely partial mash as well. But for now, I'm fine this way.
So, the night's conclusion was that eventually I should try and get MAYBE a 2 gallon pot if I plan to continue doing extracts. That would give me more than enough room for grain steeping. Didn't see (m)any recipes go over 1.5lbs of steeping grains, and even at a gallon per pound I would still have room to spare. But I feel good having confirmed that I can fudge some numbers a bit and still get away with it.
To wrap up; One article said that everything in beer making is both incredibly important and unimportant. And the meaning for him was that there was almost no single thing that would ruin a batch (aside from bad sanitation maybe) but that some things had next to no effect (despite throngs of people swearing by them) and others had a much bigger effect.
I think there is another layer as well. For a person like me, just getting started, I don't even know how things are affected by variations. I only care that I get something of roughly the same class of beer as I was aiming for. I don't have any of my own batches under my belt yet, and it will be a while before I'm able to notice the more subtle changes. But, once I get there, the things that seemed little today may become big in the future. But, chances are, by the time I get to that point I'll have also invested enough time, money and energy in this and bought the equipment to do it in a more controlled fashion.
So, also paradoxically, beer making has become both more and less like mead making. I've learned new things that differentiate it. But also discovered that despite the hype, it is also much more forgiving than a lot would want to admit.
The first batch just taught me that following a kit exactly is stupid easy. The second kit however taught me a few things a mead maker wouldn't know. And learning new things has me very excited today. I wish ingredients, bottles, fermenters and storage space were unlimited so I could just keep trying more.
For this batch I went kit modding as a result. The first mod wasn't a mod at all. I just switched from dextrose to a medium malt extract. 1kg worth. The wort already smells drastically different, and should taste and look quite different when done (I hope). The "real hack" was the hops, and also where the learning came in. I got 1oz of Cascade hops and tossed it in a boil with some extract and threw a bit in every 5 minutes for 15 minutes.
First thing I learned. If I tried to follow most recipes, I don't have the kitchen equipment for even the simplest. But more on that shortly.
Not a huge hack. But, one of my complaints with the first kit was the aroma and the flavor. While I could certainly taste the bitterness of the IPA there wasn't really anything leftover from the hops in the other 2 areas.
Then, I finished up as per the prior batch. and things are going along well, currently have a much more vigorous ferment going than batch #1 had. Though, this time I started by moving the fermenter near the heater and wrapping a shirt around it. Turns out my office temps get just a tad too cool for ideal beer yeast temps and last batch was running long as a result (more things learned).
Last night I decided to do some more research on how my efforts might have affected the brew. Another thing that happens over time is you learn more and better questions to search out. This time I learned I may have wasted my hops to a large degree. Mead making didn't use hops. And holy crap, hops are versatile little buggers. Turns out, to get the most out of your hops you want a specific gravity during the boil. One post pegged it at around 100g/L of water to get a gravity of 1040. I had 1kg in a few liters, so WAY overkill. I should still get something from my hops, but not nearly as much as I could have.
This lead me to my next question. Do I really need to invest in a bigger pot? This second batch was still a kit. But would I be screwed if I went up to a dry extract recipe? What if there were grains to steep? Turns out I should probably be fine, though a larger pot would certainly help.
My biggest concern was whether or not I really needed to boil everything. If so, that meant a roughly 6 gallon pot just to do a 5 gallon batch. I'm not sure my current pot is even 1 gallon. A few good articles later confirmed what I would have arrived at in time on my own. Boiling isn't necessary for extracts and basically, if the water is drinkable, it probably doesn't need to be boiled. Some people don't trust the DME, but then, my kit told me just to add it to hot tap water as an option and it turned out fine.
[note]
If you have the capacity, yeah, you should probably boil or pasteurize the DME in water. Beer is cheaper and quicker than mead and while I've never had a mead batch spoil and don't expect to have a beer batch spoil either it would still be a pain in the butt if you were the rare person to lose a batch this way. On the flipside, if you don't have the equipment, don't bother doing it just for the boil. I have yet to read about anyone who had DME or other ingredients spoil a batch.
[/note]
If you're doing hops (which I would be) you would need to boil some DME in water to get the gravity to a good point to get the most of the hops, but that would be MUCH less than the several gallons people are talking about.
Next question was steeping grains. Since all of these recipes assumed you had a full 6.25 gallon pot to steep the grains in, I wanted to know if that was really necessary as well. I had read earlier that you need to have enough water to get the most out of it, but couldn't wrap my head around why they were using the volumes of water they were.
So I looked up how much water was needed for grain steeping. Ended up with suggestions between 1/2 to 1 gallon per pound. That is a pretty wide range. And confirmed my suspicions. While quite a bit of water is needed, it is nowhere near the full batch amount for an extract. All-grain would be different and likely partial mash as well. But for now, I'm fine this way.
So, the night's conclusion was that eventually I should try and get MAYBE a 2 gallon pot if I plan to continue doing extracts. That would give me more than enough room for grain steeping. Didn't see (m)any recipes go over 1.5lbs of steeping grains, and even at a gallon per pound I would still have room to spare. But I feel good having confirmed that I can fudge some numbers a bit and still get away with it.
To wrap up; One article said that everything in beer making is both incredibly important and unimportant. And the meaning for him was that there was almost no single thing that would ruin a batch (aside from bad sanitation maybe) but that some things had next to no effect (despite throngs of people swearing by them) and others had a much bigger effect.
I think there is another layer as well. For a person like me, just getting started, I don't even know how things are affected by variations. I only care that I get something of roughly the same class of beer as I was aiming for. I don't have any of my own batches under my belt yet, and it will be a while before I'm able to notice the more subtle changes. But, once I get there, the things that seemed little today may become big in the future. But, chances are, by the time I get to that point I'll have also invested enough time, money and energy in this and bought the equipment to do it in a more controlled fashion.
So, also paradoxically, beer making has become both more and less like mead making. I've learned new things that differentiate it. But also discovered that despite the hype, it is also much more forgiving than a lot would want to admit.
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