What was your first step towards AG?

[moto748]

When I first made kits, in the 80s, I used a Burco boiler, a plastic bucket and demo-johns, a thermometer, and a hydrometer. But I soon went to buying tins of liquid DME and loose hops. Then, from that, went to adding some grains. And then to all grain, but still adding some sugar.

When I re-started last November, same thing. of course this site has given a huge supply of recipes, directly and indirectly, which has been a massive help.

But yeah, I'm all about BIAB. I use, and recommend, simply making up bags out of stockinette rolls (buy from Halfords or similar, people use it to polish their cars). I bought some more the other day. Cost me £1.68 for a big rolls. Just cut a length of the stockinette, which is in effect a long tube of cotton, into a length around a metre long, tied a knot in one end,and there's your grain bag. You can cut a shorter length and use it for hops too. Grains are weighed into the bag and dropped into the boiler. I can, and do, use a similar technique with smaller bags in a 15 litre stock-pot for small batches done on the cooker hob.

If you have some means of holding a decent quantity of liquid at mashing temperature, I don't believe you *need* anything else. Certainly at first.

 

[samale]

I was a kit brewer for about a year. I moved house and my new neighbor was brewing all grain. He gave me a few samples, the difference in quality was massive. That was me hooked, started with boiler and cool box. Moved to BIAB and haven't looked back. That's 7 years ago.

 

[rats_eyes]

I made a number of kit beers from tinned extract, some good, some bad. I did a load of reading and was inspired by Charlei Papazian's the joy of homebrewing to try a partial extract mini-mash. I already had a 5 litre stock pot, so used that to do a mini-mash with some grain, thne boil and add hops for the first time. The small boil was then added to a fermenter and topped up with water to make a full batch. This was much better than my kit brews and didn't need any equipment I didn't already have. I made the jump to all-grain pretty much imediately after this one, as I was hooked. I went down the bufallo boiler and coolbox route, as the all-in-one units were really expensive back then. If I were doingthe same now, i would go for an all-in-one unit, as they work well and are now much better value for money

 

[Rodcx500z]

After a 30 year break i bought kits when i retired, i bought a starter kit bucket pb and stuff then i was on the net one day looking at boilers and i bought a klarstein fullhorn 30L and now do biab, i still do kits as well when i can't be bothered setting the boiler up

 

[cushyno]

A good colleague of mine brewed a few extract batches with one of his mates and shared a couple of bottles. I began a period of collecting bottles for him which lasted for a couple of years. I didn't drink many bottles of beer at the time, so slowly the box in my garage filled up. In the meanwhile my colleague moved house and couldn't take the bottles so I continued to collect them.

Crunch time came when I had over 80 bottles with no home for them. The choice was to use them myself or recycle. "How hard can this be?", I thought.

A google for info on decent kits and bottling best practice led me to this forum and recommendations for the festival kits. I bought and brewed the Landlord kit and Razorback IPA (which was good). However, I was intrigued by a certain clibit thread on "Have a go at simple AG". Bought the obligatory Wilcos stockpot, and the rest is history. Never looked back and never bought any more than those first two kits, though I wouldn't rule out doing more in future.

 

[HarryFlatters]

I skipped kits and extract and went straight into BIAB with a Peco boiler. I watched a few youtube videos and went for it.

The first couple of batches were awful, because I didn't understand the importance of the cold side, but once I got my head around it, I've made good beer ever since.

 

[micklupulo]

I got into AG in the late 1980s with an Electrim bin which at the time was a slight extravagance and brewed some good stuff particularly with reprocessed Fuller's yeast. Gave up for years following a few failures which I now think were mainly down to gravity checking/lid opening. Resumed with kits in recent years and whilst better than previously nothing touches previous AG successes so recently got a new tap for bin and kettle lead to bypass over sensitive thermostat and maintain a rolling boil. Acknowledgements and thanks to someone on here about the latter point. Just done a Dark Rock AG tribute to St Austell Tribute and planning a Wye Valley HPA and thanks for recipes on here. Also just codged up an immersion wort cooler again inspired by one or two on here. Here's a shot of that (OK it looks a bit Heath Robinson) and ancient Electrim bin but now that outlay on expensive kit would be no problem I would rather perversely make do with what I've got!

 

[Alastair70]

I’d done a load of kits in the past. The novelty wore off because a lot weren’t that great and I drifted away from it. Roll on Christmas 2018 my middle son bought a stove top AG home brew kit. It took a month or more to get my head round water management, gather some stuff I never knew I needed and get the brew done. Only managed to produce about 12 330ml bottles, but couldn’t believe how much like proper beer they tasted. Two more successful stove top brews and I made the jump to 25L batches on a Grainfather.

 

[Begbie]

I actually started making mead in 2018, in 5L demijohns, thinking (wrongly) that it would be easier than beer brewing. A year later, for my birthday, my wife bought me a red wine kit from Wilko. That gave me the green light to buy a couple of 25L bucket to ferment and bottle the wine in....

I then bought a MYO Irish Stout from The Range to give beer brewing a bash, and quickly realised that I could get decent beer in half the time it takes to get a decent mead. A few kits later and I decided to give AG a go, and bought an 11L stockpot and two small batch 5L kits from Oak Homebrew, both of which were delicious. This gave me more confidence to start other recipes and buy the ingredients separately.

Having then read the "Have a go at simple AG" thread, I brewed two 5L SMaSH's - a Pilsner and a Citra IPA. The Pilsner is great and the IPA will be opened next week. I'm just 2 days from bottling a 10L batch of Chocolate Oatmeal Stout and I've got a 12L Erdinger Clone, another 5L Pilsner and 5L Citra IPA already lined up.....I've got the bug bad! I'm also slipping down that slippery slope of kegging that everyone talks about!

...and I've not brewed any mead since my first beer kit!

 

[DocAnna]

I'm just always wanting to improve, and am as bad about shiny new brewing kit as I once was with shoes (I still have a lot of shoes but rarely have the opportunity to wear them)

It's awful really : Plastic fermenting bin & cans -> better kits with dry hops -> extract kits with steeping grains -> own extract and steeping recipes -> Brewzilla all grain -> kegs... stir plates.. flasks... fermenting fridge.. CO2 bottles.. buying grain direct from the farm.... honey from local bee keepers.

I'm now looking at malt mills to grind my own grains and wondering about whether it should be a kegerator or keezer next! My children are convinced I'm going to retire and go into brewing (I'm not since I know how hard that really is commercially).

Anna

 

[Cestrian]

I started my move to AG with 2 can wherry kits. I’d use one can plus I’d boil some hops (think the first I used were cascade and amarillo) with spray malt in a big pan in the kitchen. i found the results amazing at the time and never looked back. After that started steeping grains too. That was the next step for me.