From kits to what? Next step?

[Fore]

I'm already half way through the list of premier kits that I want to try, made as per instructions, but I'm already thinking about the next step.

Whatever the next step is, I want it to offer the most for the least. I'm toying between tinkering with kits, or starting with malt extract and building my own. Buying some sort of fermentation temperature controller is also a wild card, as a fixed fermentation temp seems to be quite important.

So which will offer the biggest improvement, or am I playing with fine lines here? If I went down the malt extract route, is there much difference between the brands, or are the other variables (yeast, hops) more influential? Where can I find recipes for building from extract? Thanks.

 

[rpt]

Good fermentation temperature control is very important. Once you have that sorted then moving to extract brewing will improve the quality of your beers. There are recipes all over the internet and in many books. For example, Graham Wheeler's book of recipes has extract versions for many of them. Plus you can make up your recipes.

 

[Fil]

wherever u take brewing, a brewfridge will help u maintain ideal temps and crash cool to aid clarity prior to bottling/kegging.

look out for an ideal fridge on freecycle or from family or friends.
with a fridge £40 should cover buying all the bits new if u cant recycle em from elsewhere..

12" tube heater or ceramic heating lamp
STC 1000 or atc800+ controller
cable, glands and a box if needed

 

[PaulCa]

Remember to go to full extract or AG it is near essential you can boil 25 litres for 90 minutes.

For me, as I haven't decided to buy a boiler, this is prohibitive.

If this is like yourself, then you can do half mash/extract and top up with a basic kit of choice (something fairly neutral). All you need is a 12-15 litre stock pot and your normal cooker.

Basically you make 12 litres (ish) as extract+hops or AG+hops, it would ferment into beer as is, just 12 litres of it. So at flame out you add the contents of the kit to bring it up to a 22/23 litre batch. Simples. You can also just add more extract at that stage, but then you are relying on your ability to boil in enough hops for 22 litres with only 12 litres of water.

I may be corrected, but you don't need to boil kit liquid malt and I'm not sure you need to boil the normal malt extract (spray malt etc.) either.

 

[clibit]

You don't need to boil any extract, but you do need to boil hops. You could boil the hops in about half the final water quantity and about half the extract, then add the rest of the extract at the end of the boil and add to the FV with cold water.

Partial mash is probably the best way to go with a reduced boiler size though, or just make smaller batches of AG. Either way you get fresh grains and hops into your beer, and you will see a big difference. MAsh some grains in your pot, in a mesh bag, then boil it with hops and add extract at the end, and stick it in your FV with cold water to the planned batch size. Partial mash beers with DME are very close to AG beers, can be hard to tell the difference.

People think AG is a big hoohah, and steer clear of it, cos all the geeks make it look like a Heath-Robinson scientific engineering project. It's not, it's a doddle with a pan, a thermometer and a bag, like making marmalade or summat, and you get great beer and a lot of satisfaction.

I would like to have temp control, but I don't yet, and I still get great results. I just keep the fermenter in a place in the house which maintains a fairly steady temp, and keep an eye on it with a stick on thermometer. Beer was made for hundreds of years with zero electrical/digital equipment. Using experience, and a bit of skill and judgement. I could buy an aquarium heater for about a tenner, and I will, but I don't feel a burning need. I live in a terrace house with central heating and loads of loft insulation and the temp doesn't fluctuate that much! It stays between 15 and 22 nearly all the time. I didn't brew during the unusual, very hot spell in the summer, otherwise no problem. I visited a microbrewery once that had no temp control, and they built a very big copper coil wort chiller to drop the temperature during hot weather. So if you had a chiller you could do that.

 

[jonnymorris]

you can do half mash/extract and top up with a basic kit of choice (something fairly neutral).

Kind-of defeats the object of stepping up to extract doesn't it? I wouldn't recommend this at all. Either stick with kits and maybe modify them with some extra hops or step up to brewing with extract.

Partial mash beers with DME are very close to AG beers, can be hard to tell the difference.

But there is a difference both in terms of your ability to control the final product and the quality of it.

I would recommend considering extract brewing. I started with a 15L pot and brewed to 23L without problem. Once you've done a couple you'll soon realise that AG isn't much harder (though does take a bit more time).

 

[BIGJIM72]

Where can I find recipes for building from extract? Thanks.

Graham Wheelers book Brew Your Own British Real Ale contains extract versions of the recipes,as does Clone Brews.

It might be worth doing one extract brew for experimentation purposes. I found it to be a quite pricey way to make beer though.

I would have a read of the BIAB threads & see if that would be suitable.

As for tinkering with kits-brewing short or hop teas are probably the most popular tweaks. Dry hopping would also be worth looking at.

 

[MyQul]

Remember to go to full extract or AG it is near essential you can boil 25 litres for 90 minutes.

You can do a full length 23L AG BIAB with a 19L Pot using the Maxi- BIAB method

 

[PaulCa]

you can do half mash/extract and top up with a basic kit of choice (something fairly neutral).

Kind-of defeats the object of stepping up to extract doesn't it? I wouldn't recommend this at all. Either stick with kits and maybe modify them with some extra hops or step up to brewing with extract.

It depends on how you look at it. If you look at it like it's close to a full extract brew, then I suppose you could say, why not just do an extract brew? Also consider the beer kit as just cheap liquid hopped malt extract.

The way I look at it is the transition away from sugar. You can just use spray malt instead and not boil anything. But, using a 12 litre pot allows you to move then to mashing 1-1.5Kg of grains to replace the sugar and playing with different hops, while the beer kit is still there to cover mistakes.

Why not a bigger pot? My cookers best ring takes nearly an hour to raise that pot from mash temp to boiling. A bigger pot will take even longer, if it even fits on the cooker without teetering!

As someone else mentioned, extract can be expensive. The first time I made a full extract brew the order was £40! Granted I was buying several different types of hops and using liquid yeast. It all adds up and malt extract is what? £5 or £6 a kilo?

£2 500g Crystal
£18 3Kg Light Spray Malt
£12 3 different hops (100g ea) - these would do about 4-5 brews mind.
£6 Liquid yeast

Now I know you are going to tell me buying in bulk is cheaper and that I should probably shop around, but still it's expensive compared to 1Kg of grains and a beer kit. £4 grains, £10 beer kit.

That said I may move from using the kit and buy liquid malt instead. The 1.5Kg tin of liquid malt is about the same price as the 1.8Kg beer kit. The extra 300g should be easy made up in grains. EDIT: Acutally, it's arguable cheaper buying spray malt for £6 a kilo. 2 Kilo = £12.

As to quality of the beer, I alternated for a while between this half mash, half kit approach and a basic kit+sugar and the difference is like night and day.

 

[dx4100]

I would argue investing in a fermentation fridge while only doing kits isn't going to give you much unless the temps in your house / garage are all over the place. If your kits are fermenting out and tasting fine then what is the point ? Personally I never got on with kits. No where near close enough to the real thing.

I have a fermentation fridge but then I am brewing in my garage mostly and in the winter it can be -12 and in the summer +30. I have done kits in my fridge and in my office (temp rages from 18 to 22) and never noticed any difference in taste or outcome. Always **** :P Again, I didn't like kits :P

All grain is the way to go :) But if you want to walk before you run give extract ago! Never really seen the point in mini-mash...

 

[PaulCa]

For temp control I use my bath. So it really depends on if you have kids or SWMBO.

By using the bath you not only provide a way to raise or lower the temp (using cold or warm water), but the sheer volume of water in the bath around the fermenter creates thermal mass and thus stabilises the temperature, making it hard to move the temp due to a change in room temp.

Personally I am usually doing this to keep the ferment cool. In winter I only need water in the bath for the first few days to keep it at 18C. The bathroom radiator is off and the door closed, so it's fairly chilly in there anyway. In summer however I need to change the cold water every day. Without the water the ferment hits 26C and has a noticeable (to me) taste difference. With changing the water every day with fresh cold water I can keep the ferment at 18C even when its 32C in my living room!

 

[winelight]

I would argue investing in a fermentation fridge while only doing kits isn't going to give you much unless the temps in your house / garage are all over the place. If your kits are fermenting out and tasting fine then what is the point ? Personally I never got on with kits. No where near close enough to the real thing.

I think that's exactly the point! If you do use a fridge with kits (plus the various simple tweaks and enhancements gleaned from this forum), you can easily beat commercial beers.

And once you've done that, then you may want to move on... or you may be quite happy with better-than-commercial quality beers for peanuts and almost no effort.

 

[Fore]

Thanks everyone. The whole range of different opinions. What did I get out of it? Well, I haven't yet personally suffered from large variations in brew temp (good range of available temp choices throughout house and cellar), so although I appreciate that stable temp is important to the final result, I doubt I'd get the biggest bang for the buck with temp control. The bath idea is a good one, but the wife would kill me.

So then we get into the range of kit tinkering, right through to AG. Your comments made me realise that you don't need the full bling to get a great result. Can I say that I sort of overlooked BIAB as an inferieor approach? But your comments got me past that predjudice. If BIAB is pretty easy and produces a result far better than kits but much easier than the full set-up, why not?

So you helped direct me towards a new path. A new adventure awaits : .

 

[b4dg3r]

Going back to the large boiler part, I have recently downgraded from a 70L boiler to an 11L sauce pan (tenner off ebay), so i can experiment more.

I love my brew days but if i do one every week i will quickly run out of space, bottles and money. But doing 1 Gallon batches of BIAB I can do lots of SMASH (Single Malt And Single Hops) batches to get to know the flavour profiles of the hops.

Just my 2 cents