What's your setup /diy ?
10gal bayou
Custom stainless steel basket
Chugger pump
7gal SS conical
Hops growing in my backyard
4 corney kegs
>>966223
any hints at growing those hops?
>>966532
This, sounds kl as fuck, where can I learn?
Where did you get the equipment?
fuck off
Anyone have a Brutus?
I jerry-rig saw horses and a single keggle. Getting tired of that.
I found a bunch of ferile apple trees innawoods last summer, so for this year I was thinking of harvesting them and trying my hand at making some cider with the little cunts. Most of them are small and not great for eating, but they're typical cider apples. One variety is crab apples (pictured) but most of them ar ejust ferile apples from a farm that's long gone (also pictured). Anyone here make cider and wanna talk shop with a n00b?
I'm still in the "temp controlled freezer and too many fucking carboys stage".
Freezer holds 4 6gal Glass Carboys and 4 1gallon.
>>967039
I've made cider a couple times but always from pasteurized juice. I heard something about needing to kill off wild yeast from pressed apples before fermenting but don't remember it very well.
>>966223
I dont get that. Ball valves, no cooling jacket nor insulation and wont hold pressure. Why would anyone want that expencive bucket?
Can you CIP wash it? Would be hilarious...
The back of the local beer shop.
>>968923
I grew up on a farm with about 100 apple trees of various types.
All we ever did to make cider was grind the apples, press the juice, and bottle it up. our air lock was the bottle cap twisted on just light enough to seal the bottle at atmosphere pressure. As the pressure built up you could just barely hear the bottle hiss occasionally. Once fermentation slowed the cap was tightened all the way to build up carbonation.
It keeps just fine until the nights start freezing, which is when you start leaving them outside to make applejack.
Some batches will taste better than others, and some you just mark with an 'X' to distill later.
You cant do this with store bought apples, they're washed and waxed and never ferment well. Fresh picked apples work great. Especially those from established orchards that leave fallen apples on the ground to sit.
We would even save the yeast from particularly good batches of cider for next year to jump start fermentation in a bunch of bottles.
>>969213
Ok, I was wrong. So it can be chilled easily and you can order it with butterfly valves. But I cant find any info about the pressure it can handle. Kegging would be so easy of it could.
>>966223
a bucket with a lid.
>>969541
oh with a wet towel wrapped around it to help it stay cool
>>969540
Update. 5psi, so you cant carb in it. Blah.
>>966532
I'm thinking of trying to start home brewing myself. I just bought a Northern Brewer Kit.
>>969803
Get a fridge, heat belt and a stc 1000 if you want to have quality brew.
>>967035
Didn't we get enough of you on /g/ spamming this in every damn thread?
Do you do all grain or are you still an extract can pleb?
Here I thought we had some potential homebrew guys to build a nuce thread.
Can anyone help with what I need to start a small rig? I'm pretty clueless and haven't been able to find too much good designs online
>>969803
Be careful with the glass carboys, you pop one of them and it'll cut the shit out of you. Swap those out for plastic big mouth bubblers for fermentation vessel.
>>971492
absolute minimum to make cider:
1 gallon jug of apple juice
plastic air lock
rubber bung
yeast
I have 11 empty two liters and a five gallon water jug.
Question- I want to make beer in the water jug, I need recipe help please. I want to make an all grain beer and I don't know how many pounds of grains I need for each gallon. Can I make it without hops, also? I can't be arsed to get hops each time and I'm sure beer has brewed without hops before. And I only have wine yeast in those little packets. Will that work?
>>972316
I just made 4 gallons of apple wine. I used three 12 oz cans of concentrate, two gallons of apple cider, six pounds of sugar, and a packet of wine yeast. After a month it was basically rocket fuel.
I've got 2 two liters I'm making wine in, and 9 empty two liters for later use and for racking a 5 gallon water jug.
I'm now considering using the 5 gallon jug for beer and the two liters for wine.
>>972576
>I want to make beer but I couldn't be arsed doing it properly, what's the least effort I can put in?
What's the point of making it if you're going to get something that doesn't taste good in the end?
>>972582
It'll taste fucking fine, shit.
Not everyone has the cash for a heavy and breakable glass carboy and hammered copper still.
It just has to be the right plastic and cleaned well.
>>972663
>cleaned well.
Hoh.
If you're serious about brewing you'll need to get a henway
>>972666
I just used three more of the two liters. Finished five minutes ago. One can of grape concentrate and one cup of sugar, and a gallon of leftover apple cider from the last batch five weeks ago in the two liters with a cup of sugar in each.
The plastic can retain smell from the previous batch, it seems.
The two jugs I already have fermenting are grape and mixed berry from concentrate, with a cup of sugar in each.
I usually use a balloon with a few holes poked in it as an airlock, but this time I just left the caps on loose enough so when I squeezed them with about the same force I'd use to pick them up, a little air squeaked out of the lid. I think it'll be fine, really.
>>972666
Oh, I mentioned the retaining smell part because that's why you have to clean particularly well.
I use bleach and water to get the smell out, then rinse well.
>>966532
Don't hops grow like a weed? They like to climb.
Question
I accidentally bought just about double the amount that i should have because i use a small kit fermenter that is used for hme brewing - where the instructions require you to put roughly half of the total final volume with cold clean water so that the hot wort won't melt the fermenter tank.
So I'm wondering if it would be an okay idea to cool down the full brewed volume that could fill up the fermenter tank, and then ferment it. Would have to get an icebox setup to do this. And after the ferment I could double the volume with water if I wanted to.
Isnt this how aussies make beer? Their shit tastes like syrup compared to a typical ipa here, its badass
Just brewed an ESB today on the Grainfather. I love it. Got two beers i made with it on tap in my kegerator. A Rye Stout and Pale Ale. Both delicious.
>>972858
Why not just let it cool off naturally over a couple of hours?
>>972858
>the instructions require you to put roughly half of the total final volume with cold clean water so that the hot wort won't melt the fermenter tank.
Mixing half wort with half cold water is mainly a technique used if you don't have a big enough pot. If you can boil the full volume then that's kinda the better way to go. It will give you better hop utilization & It's also sort of a requirement for all-grain brewing if you want to do that. But yeah it's harder to cool down quickly - the wort is more vulnerable to infection if you just leave it alone for hours before pitching the yeast.
I use a copper immersion chiller like the pic to cool it down after the boil. Stick it in the last 5 min of the boil to sanitize it, turn the flame off, then run cold water through it and stir.
>>972858
oh and
>And after the ferment I could double the volume with water if I wanted to.
noooo don't do that. That would just make things unnecessarily difficult on the yeast.
If you mean you have ingredients for a 5gal recipe but you only have a 2.5gal fermenter, you got a few better options:
- Get a bigger bucket so that you can follow the instructions properly
- Use half the ingredients and make 2 batches
- Use all/most of the ingredients and plan to make 2.5gal of high-gravity beer. Since you'd be making a totally different style of beer in this case, you may want to find another recipe or see how it will turn out beforehand using a calculator like brewtoad.
>>969803
That's all you need for your first few dozen batches.
Yeast, sugar, fermenter tank & a reflux still
>>966532
Plant in the sun. Run lines(hemp twine) from rhizome to top string supported by poles. Cut back in spring after 12" growth to 3 per rope. Eat the 12" you trimmed (they are a delicacy cook them like asparagus). Water if needed no wet foot otherwise very minimal maintenance harvest before first frost. Mulch in fall after harvest.
>>972858
Brew the full amount if you have a big enough pot and fill your sink with ice and put the entire pot in the ice bath to cool it down. Add salt to the ice bath to get it colder. Stir the wort until down to temp. it's the next best thing to an immersion chiller.
>>972663
>leaving out half the ingredients and half assing the rest
>taste fine
Yeah I forgot that real brewers just like wasting time and money by putting shit in that doesn't matter. Because it tastes fine without it.
Can you tell if the sourness of your brew was caused by lactic acid or acetic acid?
Also are carboys and airlocks terribly necessary? I'm making sake and it seems people just brew in buckets without even a tight seal.
>>973079
Alcohol has been around a lot longer than carboys and airlocks... It just tastes a bit better now.
>>973074
If you have a mild interest your not going to spend a lot of money on all the intricate tech.
>>973093
It's frustrating since my last two batches have come out sour as shit and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
>>973074
You know that beer has been brewed for millennia, right?
You know that hops and mixed grains are the most recent additions to beer, right?
You know all wheat beer exists, right?
>>970460
All grain aussie style until I can afford stainless mashtuns and in reference to "expensive bucket etc etc" I tend to try to avoid plastic touchin anything I ingest as a rule. Nothing against bucket brew just buy new buckets every couple years or don't be surprized when they discover something in it gives you cancer...
>>972663
Carboys are not a huge investment and we are not making spirits here...
>>973101
Probably infected due to improper cleaning techniques.
Assuming you're using an SO-4 or SO-5 yeast I'd imagine
>>973079
alot of cheap plastic fermenters have caps that do not create a tight seal because the yeast is constantly producing CO2 which pushes any ambient air out of the system during fermentation
>>973913
put a waxed board with a rock on top.
>air tight.
>>973101
How many batches do you have under your belt?
The issue may lay in your bucket itself. Old? Lots of tiny scratches?
>>974141
4. Only 2 successful, 2 bad.
I used a 8 liter glass jar with a screw on cap to ferment.
I used H2O2 to clean the jar and 70% alcohol whatever comes into contact with the mash (stirring spoons and syphons...)
>>968923
You use sodium metabusiulphite to sanitize the cider before fermenting it. Same stuff I use to sanitise the container, since it doesn't need to be rinsed off. It just generates dissolved sulfer dioxide which kills stuff then evaporates.
>>966223
Anyone else here /biab/?
I switched from a 10 gallon 3-tier gravity setup to a simple BIAB setup last year and haven't gone back. Quicker brewdays and with my pH meter monitoring the mash I still get good efficiency.
>>967034
Randomly Northern Brewer and MoreBeer are my standbys.
>>972896
Niiiice. When I sell my quad and get some hobby money I'm going to order a grainfather the first thing I do. I brew BIAB right now, but it's impossible to exactly repoduce each brewing which makes trying out new recipes a bit of a bitch. I'm also going to fit a Stc 1000 Brew (reprogrammed) the first thing I do. And that whiskey liebig for the grainfather looks fun as hell too, if I can find a company that will ship it to here where it's illegal. I also saw that Mangrove Jack released a hop spider for it. Can't wait.
Sadly, I have gone full pleb right now because there was a 50% sale on cooper's TC selection cans, so I have to brew and drink some 120 liters of extract beer before i'm back in the saddle. It's a shitty job, but someone's got to do it.
>>977827
Heh, Coopers are ok. My first brew was a soop'd up Coopers IPA.
Grainfather is the tits.
I live in a small town and homebrewing is steadily growing here. Not too long ago a LHBS opened up and I was ecstatic. They have everything I could need and on top of that the owner sold me a fridge he had that was used as a kegerator and I converted it into a fermentation fridge with a heat mat and everything. Now I can brew anything I want.
I am a happy man!
Brewed a Maris Otter/Mosaic SMaSH today! Gonna be gud! Happy Homebrewing!
Will a standard stockpot work fine as a brew kettle for all-grain brewing? My brother and I are trying to do a cost effective setup to get a good understanding of the process and some brewing experience before investing in higher end equipment. We already rigged up a mash tun and hot liquor tank from a couple water coolers, and we have plenty of carboys for fermentation.
>>972316
>absolute minimum to make cider:
1 gallon jug of apple juice
Balloon with a pinhole in it
Yeast
>>976407
/biab/ reporting in. Still eyeing pH meters but they're a bit spendy.
Got a nice recirculation setup in my pot and I'm doing 7gal boils now after I upped my boil to 90 minutes.
>>976867
"Drinkable" is a sliding scale, and it's a waste of the good stuff if you don't switch to plonk once you can't tell the difference.
>>979880
Does this actually work? Is it safe? I'm just looking for a cheap way to make booze desu, don't care too much about taste.
>>980566
You say that, but you don't quite understand how bad alcohol can taste. However, this is all that you need to make alcohol:
>Yeast
>Sugar
You can literally just dissolve a bag of sugar into a gallon of water, put yeast in, and wait a month. It tastes worse than awful, but it will reach like 10-15% abv.
>>979880
and sugar there's not enough sugar contained in the juice as is imo.
The average temperature where I live is over 80 degrees, what should I brew?
Making one batch of hooch to test out the method. If it works out im gonna get a few buds together and make like 20 gallons in a shed in the woods to sell. Is this a bad idea? Alcohol is pretty hard to come by where I live and we are all under 21, so we are thinking about selling it to chads for their parties at a huge markup, for barely palatable hooch.
>>980711
There's plenty, you'll get 5-6% normally from average apple juice. I've been doing this for years. A lot of times if you add sugar, you'll end up with 7-9% cider that has no apple flavor.
>>981226
Belgian yeasts generally do better at higher temps.
What's a good, cost effective way of building a temperature controlled fermentation chamber? I'd like to keep it cheaper than buying and modifying a chest freezer, and ice box type setups really wouldn't work for me. Would a mini fridge be able to cool a larger volume if it was insulated well, or would I just burn the motor out?
I am making some cider with the yeast sugar Apple juice and balloon method. Gonna let it ferment 2 weeks. Is this safe? I read about people getting botulism from prison wine and I am thinking about throwing this out and just buying some Coors. How can I see if my cider has botulism in it?
>>981276
Give some to your dog, see if it dies.
>>981260
I'm more of a wine person, does that yeast perform well with grapes and high alcohol concentrations?
>>981290
My dog died 2 weeks ago senpai ;_;
>>981481
Probably wouldn't drink that batch, then.
>>981276
Check for low enought pH? Look it up.
>>981623
Fucking kek
>>980566
It works. It's worth spending the couple of bucks on champagne yeast, one package will do a few gallons.
>>966223
I once tried to can the lactose method. and made some really nasty booze. pumpkin flavored booze.. was so bad.
>>966223
Been using this method for a while, cheap, easy, good results
https://youtu.be/RWGxmdtybs0
>>979880
I stopped using the balloon. I'm the anon that uses a 5 gallon water jug and two liter bottles.
If the cap is screw on, you can screw the cap tight enough so when you squeeze air escapes, but air won't enter easily and when the yeast starts producing CO2 it will keep a slight positive pressure inside the jug, ensuring oxygen won't enter.
>>983439
I guess the absolute absolute minimum is to open the jug of apple juice, close it again loosely, and hope some decent strain of wild yeast got in.
>>983460
That's not enough to produce reliable results.
Picking a leaf from a tree and dunking it in the juice would probably produce reliable results, it's pretty much like relying on wild yeast on grape skins in winemaking.
