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We have been home brewing for many many years.

Made some pear and kiwi ciders last fall.

Wife caught a couple of flash sales last week and ordered 10 kits. Looks like we'll be making 66 gallons of beer here shortly.

Any other Brewers?

Only reason I thought to post this was the other thread about running out of water and the cases of Frozen water bottles that keep we in the freezer to chill our wort.

The other thread the other day how about honey got me thinking about trying some mead. So I ordered 10 lb of honey from Walmart. It was amazingly cheap at $2.12 a pound. I'm not sure if I'm going to like mead or not it seems kind of gay.

But so does pear and kiwi cider. But in reality not bad at all. Local moonshiner does a Peach... a very good Peach distilled spirit. Not that crap where you put a can of condensed cherries into a mason jar with Everclear.

Just get you a brown robe and a rope belt...then shave the top of your head..

It would be a hoot to set up a booth like that on farmers market day....

My boy made some, wasn’t bad!

Why buy kits?

Price, convience...?

I've been brewing for 25+ years. Fun hobby that all your friends appreciate!

Got a pale ale in the keg that is going fast. A recipe I always wanted to do. Basically, an Octoberfest malt/grain with Sierra Nevada PA hopping. What do you get? Malty Octoberfest goodness with a the pale ale hoppiness to balance. On the malty sweet side rather than dry like the classic Brit IPA.

Things I tell new brewers to make life easier is to get 3 pieces of equipment that never wear out and make brewing a pleasure

- keg don't bottle

get a conical fermentor and ditch the carboy method

- get a propane turkey fryer and do a full 5 gal boil

Other thing I keep telling my son in law who is new to brewing is buy fresh yeast and don't reconstitute yeast from dry packets in kits. It never has worked for me, and doesn't work for him. He's stubborn.

Beware of fake honey. It's more prevalent than many realize. No surprise that the Chinese are the worst offenders.

Both of my sons brew beer. The one works for “adventures in home brewing “ http://www.HomeBrewing.org/ if you are interested.

i've been brewing on & off since 1987. its my late winter hobby. as we speak i have a guinness clone mashing. i do mostly black beers these days but also the occasional pale ale or german lager. bottled a bock yesterday. i will do about 18 or so cases from late dec to late april and it lasts me until the following spring.

my beers used to be hit or miss, but with modern methods, equipment and ingredients, i now consistently brew better beer than most commercial micros i have had. i do not have good luck with ipa's or anything that is heavily hop accentuated and the good hops cost too much money to really get the character you need in those beers. the hops could easily cost more than the malt in a good ipa. hoppy beers are not my favorites anyway.

not bragging, but my stouts and porters are world class. (well i guess i am) i have taken 1st place in national regional competitions when i did that sort of thing. i don't compete anymore. waste of a good beer.

i gave up the kegging thing a few years ago because i like the portability of bottles. and i don't mind the extra work. next batch will be a barley wine with a english ale as the small beer from 2nd runnings. the small beer off the imperial stout i did last month was a german lager that i call lawnmower lager. it is light, clean and delicious. perfect for those that don't like stout/porter.

at one time i thought about doing this for a living but didn't have the guts to do it. kids, mortgage, job etc took precedent.

45 years ago I ran the green garbage can (30+ gallons) brewing cartel in college. Our goal was to make it cheap and we got that done; while it always got drunk, the room for improvement was readily discernible. From cans of malt syrup, table sugar and dry baker's yeast, the sky is the limit as far as future sophistication goes. While I haven'g brewed in years it was a great life experience that has been passed on to my kids and their spouses. Hatari gives solid advice; it's much easier to keg the brew and have it under CO2 pressure in a dedicated fridge. Start where it's easiest for you and take it as far as you enjoy. Highly recommend this art form, your friends will never leave you and your efforts will be the toast of all celebrations.

Mead is definitely not gay but some homemade wines are. Distilling are nice clean neutral spirit is way easier than making a drinkable beer.

cyser is nice too. 5 lbs of real honey and 5 gallons of fresh cider. use a liquid sweet mead yeast and let it primary for a few weeks and then secondary for a few months. every so slight corn sugar prime at bottling time and it tastes like asti spumante. my wife keeps bugging me to make another batch.

What Hatari (with one exception) AND Gringo Loco said. I would be very leery of that 'honey'. If it says China anywhere on it I'd throw that cheit away.

I've been brewing all grain (no extract) for 30ish years. Used to bottle, but what a PITA. It all goes into stainless cornelius kegs now. CO2 or Nitro, depending on what style I brew.
I brew in modified stainless sanke kegs on propane burners outside. Brewing in the kitchen is a no-go. A batch here is between 12 finished gallons and 50. Primary ferment in food grade plastic 7-gallon tubs with lids and air locks, secondary fermentation in glass. I used a conical fermenter for a few years.. loved the idea of it and the relative simplicity. But had sterility issues and the recipes never turned out tasting the same as when finished in clean glass. Went back to glass and don't regret it at all.

House staples are a Northern German style of pilsner, and a pale ale. Once a year I'll do a Guinness clone or a red ale. The lagers I brew in winter and age in glass out in an unheated shed for a minimum of 2 months. In warmer climates you can convert a chest freezer to keep your lagers cool. The flavor improves dramatically.

It's a great hobby. Your friends will appreciate it a lot.. I figure a finished pint of great beer costs me about $0.65 including everything but my time. I use German malt and Czech hops and yeast.

Happy to share recipes. Feel free to PM with questions. I

Wife caught a sale. Something like $22 delivered. Kits are easy peasy... All Grain is a little bit cheaper sometimes but a lot more hassle.

We will corny keg some of it and bottle the rest.

Comes out to about $8 to $10 per case.

Sam Adams type beers and some ipas.

I've spent a lot of money through them. Especially back when I was buying all the hardware and kegs to make my freezer into a kegerator. 8 keg variety. I like all grain brewing, but if i get back into it i'm moving to brew in a bag. Probably 2.5 gallon batches.

Even if it doesn't say it's from China, it still could be.

This article is a little dated, but it goes into some detail. I read a much better article years ago that also detailed the testing methods used to verify honey, and also how counterfeiters were foiling them.

Honey laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey floods into the U.S.

Used to brew using malt extract. Made some darn good beers that way, but spray malt and extracts are expensive. Now I'm trying to do all-grains but getting the gravity I want is a challenge.

it can be easily done. Ain't rocket science. Awfully hard to make it taste better than store bought though

The Turkey Fryer is essential. Kegs are the only way to fly. But You can get by for a long time without a conical. Modern Plastic Carboys like the Big Mouth Bubbler or Fermonster are cheap. The have most of the upsides of the conical but you still have to rack it off the sediment. I've threatened to try the Bubbler with the valve on the side. At this point, I'ld rather waste or leave some beer behind then have to clean racking equipment.

Most people and the continuation of their homebrew hobby is completely dependent on how much and how easy the equipment is to clean.

A fermenting chamber, wort chiller, and good yeast and it's hard not to make better beer than most of what I can buy local.
I still like my Shiner, Killians Irish Red, And a few of Boulevard's offerings. But you can make some damn nice beer at home.
Most of the piss poor beer I see from homebrewers is from a complete lack of aging on any beer, and they always think beer has to be 10%+...Those are the beers that need a LOT of aging.