Home brew kits

[AlanG]

I'm thinking of delving into the world of home brewing (beer and maybe cider). There seems to be a massive amount of starter kits out there and lots of reviews recommending them all.

So does anyone do home brewing here? If so. Any starter kit recommendations?

[Peter Gillson]

Alan

i've never tried myself, but a friend of mine has. I recall he tried a number of kits which all worked. He has nos progressed to buying ingrediants and brewing beer rather than buying kits.

Peter

[AlanG]

Cheers Peter. I particularly like the look of the Balliihoo starter kits. They seem to have really good reviews and offer different set ups to suit the budget.

[BattleshipBob]

Not a clue Al, my mate made some a good few yrs back, strange colour, was worried I'd go blind but you could run a lawn mower on it

[Airborne01]

Have you considered consulting our 'colonial' members on this subject ... ?

[John]

Many years ago me and a mate brewed hundreds of pints of beers, largers, ciders, spirits, alcho pops in fact anything you can think of, I don’t remember ever using a starter kit, we used to have 10 40 pint barrels and 40-60 bottles on the go at any one time, in fact not only do I not remember using a starter kit, I don’t remember much of that summer :tears-of-joy:

[papa 695]

I'm thinking of delving into the world of home brewing (beer and maybe cider). There seems to be a massive amount of starter kits out there and lots of reviews recommending them all.

So does anyone do home brewing here? If so. Any starter kit recommendations?

I can’t help you there Alan, but it sounds very interesting. Looking forward to seeing the blog.

[spanner570]

Hi Alan.
I've been making my own beer for well over 40 years.
Not much needed to brew ale. I don't know what a starter kit is. Be it a starter or not, I would think the stuff you require is much the same. You can go daft and buy gear you don't really need. I just use the basic clobber - Always have done, and am perfectly happy with the results. So are my mates!
I always use beers kits that come in tins . I can't be bothered with all the boiling of grain etc. I let someone else do the hard, messy work! I just open the tin, add water( sometimes no sugar is needed) and wait a couple of weeks.....:upside::upside:
I brew the proper 'Real Ale', not this trendy 'golden' nonsense. I also brew cider in the summer months. Again from a tin. Excellent results are easily obtained and it can be brewed to the strength you like best.

sreehC.

noR

[AlanG]

I'm more of a real ale type of guy too Ron. Never thought about the tin options though.

[spanner570]

Around £17/ £20 gets you 40 pints of 4.3% ale -or weaker or stronger, it's your choice.

[Tim Marlow]

Real ale and real cider are my tipples of choice as well. Not done much home brewing, the day job sort of put me off it. I was a pharmaceutical fermentation professional for about forty years. However, I might be able to help with any technical questions that arise Alan….

[GerryW]

My grandfather used to brew his own, pity that he took the recipe to the grave with him, two/three pints and even seasoned drinkers were burbling! Lovely flavour as well, know that it was done in a 40 gallon waterbutt over a 100 watt bulb in an opened up gallon oil can (reflected the heat generated by the bulb) from scratch.
I just went the wine route, usually from scratch, but did a few kits from 'wilkos'

[PaulinKendal]

I've not brewed myself, but one of my brothers does. He uses fermentation equipment from Grainfather - eyewateringly expensive but, with modern ingredients (a far cry from the terrible kits available from Boots, decades ago) he produces lovely beers.

But I've got to say that I'd rather get a superb pint of real ale from a local pub. Nothing you brew at home can ever quite match the quality of what a really good commercial brewery can produce, and a really good local pub that cares about its product can serve.

[Dave Ward]

Alan,
My brother & I used to do home brew ( nearly 50 years ago! ). We started with Geordie Home Brew Kits. These were old fashioned kits with a muslin bag of hops & barley etc, which had to be boiled in a large tureen, to make the wort. - This is the part of the process that is replace by the tinned stuff. Add yeast/sugar , ferment & bottle! We used to use pint brown glass bottles with a hand crown corking machine. You always had a few failures - bottles exploding, or going off. You had to be very rigorous in sterilising stuff before use. We eventually started buying hops, yeast, malt etc from a Sheffield Market stall - who sold all brewing needs - it made beer ridiculously cheap - but you had to be patient! Our favourite was Brown Ale - 2 or 3 bottles of that could deprive you of speech! Glass bottles must be fairly rare - I don't know if plastic bottles can stand the pressure. We stopped, when I went to sea, and them my brother moved onto wine making..................
Dave

[Tim Marlow]

Interesting stuff Dave. The reason for exploding bottles is that the fermentation hadn’t finished when you bottled it….it might have looked like it had….but it hadn’t

One wrong bacteria and you get souring as the bacteria proliferate, which is why yours went off. You need a monoculture of a known yeast and nothing else.

Yeasts are slow growing when anaerobic so are easily outcompeted by anaerobic bacteria. Once the fermentation is well underway this becomes less of an issue because the alcohol produced during fermentation is a preservative, preventing bacterial growth.

Cleanliness and sterility are essential for successful monoculture production. Scrub clean and rinse all of the kit before sterilising so that the sterilisation procedure can easily access all surfaces.

Best way to sterilise things is heat, but it isn’t that easy to do this at home. It takes a minimum of fifteen minutes at 124DegC to kill all bacteria. However, transferring heat alone to all surfaces is difficult, and is why professional establishments use autoclaves producing steam at 1.4 Bar and evacuate all the air before timing starts.
Glass bottles and metal utensils can be successfully treated in an oven on low heat for a couple of hours.
Anything that cannot be heat treated can be soaked in something like Milton sterilising fluid or sodium metabisulphite. Do this somewhere well ventilated though because the fumes can be nasty.
Everything that is going to touch the fermentation needs to be sterilised.