Progression

[Covrich]

I'm always one for doing a proper Sunday Roast Dinner. Not just potatoes, but parsnip, swede, carrots. Sometimes cauliflower cheese. I just love a Sunday roast dinner, lovingly prepared with a homebrew beer in hand.

Same with the brewing. Today's partial mash took the usual 5 hours from initial clear up to final clear up. For me the "dead" times are the waiting for the wort to boil and the cooling down the 12-13 litres of wort in the sink. Can't do much else at these times. During the mash you can bottle another beer or something. During the cooling period I usually do some ironing.

During a boil I often have 30-40 mins on the exercise bike

During the mash I am kicking the kids into bed

 

[razormedia]

some great replies.

I'll continue with the kits for a while and maybe experiment with them as I suppose they will be more forgiving if I make mistakes (I've just learned about the Muntons 1.020 curse the hard way).

Then I think I will progress to extract brewing to experiment with different hops and yeast for my own knowledge and then possibly BIAB.

Cheers all.

 

[clibit]

A good move would be to steep some grains if you haven't already. A little roast barley and/or chocolate with a stout kit for example. And it's not much different to add some pale malt to it, you just have to keep the temperature of the water between 65 and 70 for half an hour.

<I never give up> :-)

 

[Covrich]

I'll continue with the kits for a while

...so be it...... Jedi

 

[Badseed1974]

I only did one kit and then moved on to all grain.

So much more rewarding doing it from scratch :)

 

[clibit]

Nothing wrong with doing kits but it is easy to make tweaks, and you can easily make big improvements - steeping/mashing a few grains, adding hops, changing the yeast.

 

[Badseed1974]

Not dissing kits at all, I just found it to be a bit like using a cake mix as opposed to baking a cake

 

[clibit]

Indeed. But if you think creatively and make some additions to the cake mix, you can get a result somewhere in between, disguise the origins of the cake, and have some fun. :thumb:

 

[Badseed1974]

It was the Youngs IPA I did. I dare say I'd've had more fun with it if I'd went for a cheaper kit and tweaked it a bit.

No matter, I've well and truly got the AG bug now!

 

[dad_of_jon]

some great replies.

I'll continue with the kits for a while and maybe experiment with them as I suppose they will be more forgiving if I make mistakes (I've just learned about the Muntons 1.020 curse the hard way).

Then I think I will progress to extract brewing to experiment with different hops and yeast for my own knowledge and then possibly BIAB.

Cheers all.

whatever you choose unless you're putting 400G of hops in a 20liter brew and using 500ml bottles of evian :-) (other expensive bottles of water are available) you can still make a cheaper better brew than most of the offerings in the supermarket with KIT, extract or AG

 

[Cwrw666]

I did kits for many years and was mostly happy with the results but having moved over to BIAB, the beer is cheaper, way better, and so much fun to do. Only downside is that when we're out at a pub, much of what passes as real ale is sooo dissapointing.