How to make my beer kit stronger - sugar questions

[shearclass]

Cheers Aleman, that gives me confidence i haven't spoiled it.

What is the 10% rule?

 

[Aleman]

Cheers Aleman, that gives me confidence i haven't spoiled it.

What is the 10% rule?

Up to 10% of the fermentables can come from sugar and you won't really notice it . . . . . Despite what any book says :lol:

 

[shearclass]

if the fermentables come from boiling the grains, is there some sort of formulae to calculate that X amount of grain will give you Y amount of fermentables?

How does the 10% rule apply to kits, is there a general approximation for how much fermentbale stuff there is in a 1 tin kit or a 2 tin kit?

Cheers

 

[happyhoppytaff]

the brew i have in the tub at the moment is a geordie bitter. i used a kilo of demerera sugar *and* i threw in a 400g jar of holland and barret malt extract. i was hoping to get a bit more strength and not lose flavour.

having read some of the replies i am bit worried this beer will be a bit on the thin side. it is taking ages to ferment, 12 days and counting-current abv is about 1.013. im hoping itll be ready soon.

once its drinking ill post here as to its quality


also, so is the dark side kit brewing? if so ive been using this forum colloquialism wrongly in other posts :?

sampled this beer last night. it has carbonated and is due to be relocated to the shed. it was prettty good. the malt extract is adding a lot of 'mouth' to the brew but hopefully this will even out after a weeks cold conditioning.

and it was quite strong.

 

[spudbasher]

Hows this for a noobie drunken brew day fcuk up? ,its to do with this thread I s,pose,

First off I bought an end of sell by date Finlandia lager kit cheap (£7). My son knocks the yeast sachet into the dog water bowl and dries it out on a hot rad,(as mentioned in previous post) after a drink I decide to try it any way ,it fires up ok in a starter bottle so I decide to use it. On filling the fv I use 2 or 3 kettles or cold to much by mistake (first one) so its an inch or so over 5 gall, I decide to chuck in 250g more sugar to compensate but then think "well it,ll be a bit thin" so next day I get 500g of Muntons light hopped spray malt and chuck 250g in.
Happily its bubbling away nicely ,I have an aquarium heater dangling in it at 18c.

Next night have another drink , about 12.30am decide that the 250g of spray malt I have left may go off so I think "what the hell" and decide to chuck that in.
Now I know after reading here that this stuff tends to clump so being clever I decide to give it a good old roust with my new big spoon.

I cannot adequately describe the amount of thick froth that spewed like a fountain from the top of my fv (4inch hole) for a while I couldn't see the vessel.

After mopping the kitchen out ,I decided to hide my home brew equipment away from accusing eyes ,while doing this I dropped my hydrometer .

I went to bed then.

 

[SamWise72]

If you're going to add spraymalt to up the ABV, and you're worried about throwing the balance out you CAN get hopped spraymalt, which will up the bitterness as well as the sweetness and maltiness. Of course, there are lots of different hops out there, and those used to hop the spraymalt might be very different from those used for the kit, and hence you could end up with a very different kit.

I counsel abandoning the kit altogether, getting a big stockpot, and giving extract brewing a try. You buy your extract in cans (liquid) or bags (spraymalt), you can choose the amount you put in, you can bitter it to your taste with your own chosen variety of hops, add aroma hops, steep speciality grains etc. Essentially, all the control you're trying to have over a kit, without the uncertainty of just lobbing things into a kit, and without the complication of going to all-grain. It only took me about an hour and a half to do my first extract brew, and it was a LOT more fun than just chucking the contents of two cans into a fermenter. I used an existing recipe, but as I gain experience, I'll be able to interfere with the recipes and create my own from scratch, as I get more of an idea of the effects of hops etc.

A recipe calculator will tell you what bitterness etc you'll get, and since "balance" is all about hop bitterness against sweetness from the final gravity, you'll quickly get an idea of what you like, and can experiment from there.