Hi all

[jus.manning Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close jus.manning]

Hey brewers,

New to the forum and am slowly reading up on this wonderful hobby.
I absolutely love beer, and am thinking of buying equipment and starting to make my own from home.
I have an exhaustive list of questions, but will try to answer most of them myself during my research efforts.

Looking forward to hearing from you all :-)

Regards,
Justin

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Hey brewers,

New to the forum and am slowly reading up on this wonderful hobby.
I absolutely love beer, and am thinking of buying equipment and starting to make my own from home.
I have an exhaustive list of questions, but will try to answer most of them myself during my research efforts.

Looking forward to hearing from you all :-)

Regards,
Justin

Hey man, welcome! Ask questions away, it's easy to ask and get the right answer. We're a great community here, you'll enjoy it.

[jus.manning Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close jus.manning]

Thank you Toxxyc,

I am fascinated with the "chemistry" of this hobby, and am itching to get involved, but as a single guy, I am wondering how much breweing I will actually do.. if I had to successfully produce 20L of beer.. I would probably only be brewing every few months. how long does the beer keep for, if I had to bottle or keg it?

and more importantly, how expensive can this hobby get? I tend to really dive in 100% when I start something.. and am not sure what costs I am facing.

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Thank you Toxxyc,

I am fascinated with the "chemistry" of this hobby, and am itching to get involved, but as a single guy, I am wondering how much breweing I will actually do.. if I had to successfully produce 20L of beer.. I would probably only be brewing every few months. how long does the beer keep for, if I had to bottle or keg it?

and more importantly, how expensive can this hobby get? I tend to really dive in 100% when I start something.. and am not sure what costs I am facing.

To get started, you can start small and cheap. 23l batches of extract beers. You can buy the equipment to get started, as well as the ingredients to make your first 23l of beer for under R2k. From there the costs can shoot up into the plenty of thousands, if you wish, but it's not necessary. 23l of beer is 2 cases of 450ml beers. It's not a few, but it's also not as much as you'd expect. If it's there, it tends to go fast. If friends come and visit it's very easy to kill that number in an afternoon/evening around a fire.

Regarding how long they last - most would say around 6 months to a year. If you store it properly, it should last even longer. You'll soon find yourself brewing as often as you can. I try to brew once a month, even if it's just small/tiny batches for testing and so on. It's a fun pastime.

PS if you buy a starter kit, just following the instructions correctly will mean you will successfully produce 23l of beer. You don't have to worry about that. It's pretty simple if you do a kit brew and you just follow the instructions to the T. Like baking those pre-mix muffins.

[Langchop Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Langchop]

Welcome to the hobby Justin. Sure you wont regret it.

Loooots of chemistry and technicalities for you to enjoy in brewing! Like Toxxyc said, beer batches disappear quickly. You want to give everyone a taste. Also, kegs all leak.

If you want the full flexibility and range of beermaking, then you want all grain, but tins/ extract is a nice way to 'wet your feet' (or tongue, so to speak)

Enjoy... and nice to have another brewer in my 'hood

[Harhm Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Harhm]

Welcome Justin.

Start with something like this to learn the processes.

Everything in there you will use again in future. In addition to the above you will need bottles, caps and a bottle capper. PET bottles also works fine to start with.

Read How to Brew by John Palmer.

Most important clean and sanitise Drink lots of beer and have fun brewing your own

[groenspookasem Banned Find all posts View Profile Close groenspookasem]

Welcome aboard ! I do recommend that you pick up a free copy (version 1) of John Palmers ebook http://www.howtobrew.com/ do keep in mind that many revisions were made since then - but it's a good starting point. I have bought the latest copy of it, and lots of info has been updated. I like the experiments that brulosophy.com pushes out, especially when it comes to "holy cows". David Heath is a great resource on youtube and he recently started a facebook group too. Here's a neat one to get you started https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqZ4nXRcdQ

How much do you like cleaning and sanitizing? It's imperative to do both of these as well as possible.

How expensive can the hobbby get.....well there's a loaded question :-) As expensive as you want, how much are you willing to spend?

There's a few approaches; highly simplified :

1) Extract brewing - those brewcans filled with malt extract and some old yeast. Most start here, you'd need a few things to get your first kit beer going, but it's pretty cheap. I've never tried one and comment on the taste, but the process is simple. Boil some water, lob your extract in, cool it down, transfer to sanitized vessel, pitch yeast (or buy some fresh ones). Wait a week or so, et voila.

2) All grain brewing - here's where it's at ! You use crushed grains (base, specialty) to mash at a constant temp (or step mash at multiple different heat levels) to extract fermentable sugars etc from the grain, making wort. After the mash and sparge, you raise the temp to boil and at various stages of the boil add your bitter, flavor,aroma hops. Once done, cool down to yeast pitch temperature, transfer to a fermentation vessel, pitch yeast, close up, install blow off or airlock and let the yeast ferment the hoppy wort into happy beer. Ideally temperature controlled fermentation is what makes okay beer, great beer - however there's a neat little norwegian yeast that isn't too fussy and a perfect entry point for someone without temp control.

3) Partial grain - combination of the above two - can't comment - never tried it.

Once you have beer, you need to serve it
1) Bottling, transfer your beer into a bottle, add some fermentables so the yeast can carbonate your bottle and leave it at room temp for a bit, transfer to fridge and condition for a few weeks. I am terrible at bottling and rarely do it - so I'm likely missing many details
2) Keg ! Transfer your beer into a keg, force or not carb the beer with some co2, connect it to a beer line/tap and enjoy !

After enjoying your first brew, you'd either love it or hate it, but going back to commercial beers or even "craft" beers won't be easy. There are many different styles, grains, hops and yeasts to ensure that you won't bore easily.

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Yeah that kit is great. Those ciders are also awesome. Those kits come in "beer" variety as well and is a bit cheaper then, but you really want that fermenter. It's great, and I love mine. Dropped it off a table and broke the lid, but it still works (fixed it with super glue).

That bottling wand is shit though. Recommend you replace it ricky-tick.

[jus.manning Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close jus.manning]

Thanks guys,

I really appreciate the warm welcoming and useful information being provided.

From a "brewing" perspective.. what would a batch of beer costs me.. Ingredients specifically?

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

Thanks guys,

I really appreciate the warm welcoming and useful information being provided.

From a "brewing" perspective.. what would a batch of beer costs me.. Ingredients specifically?

It depends entirely on what you want to brew. If you brew kits, which is recommended to get started, you'll require less equipment, but it will be a bit more expensive to brew. Around R350 or so, for a kit, including the liquid malt extract (LME) tins (the flavour tin, so to speak), the dry malt extract (DME) bag (the alcohol and body bag) and a packet of better yeast, as the yeasts under the tin lids are not the best.

If you're improved a bit and you want to start making beers using grains, in other words, you brew from scratch, you will need some more equipment. Brew/boil pots, mash tun, voile bags (if you want to do Brew-In-A-Bag, or BIAB brewing), etc. etc. Then your equipment is a bit more expensive, but your ingredients come down drastically. Doing a basic beer like a Vienna lager, if you start saving your yeast and brew with tap water (which is fine for starting out), your batches can come down to around R150 per batch, if you plan well.

I did the math earlier today elsewhere actually. I harvested my yeast, so it costs me nothing. I use tap water, so I don't count the cost. SA Hops is very cheap, and priming sugar as well. I bottle in mini-kegs with reusable seals and also in Grolsch bottles, so I don't pay for crown caps. Counting those, together with my grains, I worked out my next batch of Vienna lager will cost me around R137 to make. That's for 23l (26l if my efficiency picks up). That's not too shabby. That's 2 cases of 450ml bottles of beer for ~R140.

EDIT: If you buy the kit Harm listed above, it comes with the ingredients for your first brew - a Cider. Those ciders are great. You then just buy "refill" kits, and some other things which is cheap. Refill kits look like these: https://brewcraft.co.za/beer-recipe-...html?cat=24226, but you can get them cheaper.

[JIGSAW Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close JIGSAW]

Welcome

Looks like everyone covered the necessities already ....

All i can recommend is watch a ton of Youtube brewing videos .... you'll pick up quickly what to do and were to cut corners.

This guy from Canada got me started back in 2011

[Simple Member Find all posts View Profile Close Simple]

For sure you are going to get some conflicting advise on this forum because everyone has different experiences but can I please just make a word of caution when using tap water as per Toxxyc suggestion? Especially for extract brewing where you do not necessarily need boil all the water you use for the brew - please boil the water before hand and let it cool so that you get rid of the chlorine. I did this for my first extract brew and it came out fine. For the second brew I just chucked in water straight from the tap to make up the volume. The result was un-drinkable. It is very heart breaking to chuck 23l of beer that you have carefully brewed and bottled down the sink...... Since then I only use RO water for brewing. It costs R1.40 per litre which adds to the costs (no way you will do a R137 batch like Toxxyc) but the end result is a least drinkable!

[groenspookasem Banned Find all posts View Profile Close groenspookasem]

Your most expensive ingredient will be your hops, but can be cheap if you want it to be. I personally don't brew to save money, it's a passion. I tend to think that SAB has a bloke that has a few hop pellets in a censer and walks around the brewery during boil, someone eats a grain sandwich at the same time constituting the grains all whilst the mielies are mashing. Anyway I digress, you dont need to use all your hops in one brew, so a 100g of bittering can last quite a while.
Practical example : The last Bitters I made

4kg Maris Otter @ R30 p/kg sub with cheaper Weyermann malt R22 p/kg
0.5kg Vienna @R27 p/kg only used half so R13.50
0.4kg CaraGold @ R16/kg
100g Fuggles @ R80p /100g I used 50g for bittering and 50g at 5min for aroma/flavor
100g East Kent Goldings @ R84 p /100g I used 50g at 5min for aroma/flavor
R297,5 but there's more
I buy spring (not RO) water from local watershop, so add ~R30
Yeast - free, we'll I bought some around a year ago, let's say you buy Safale US04 @ R50 / 11g
My total R337,5 - perhaps not a great example, but this was a kitchen sink beer and I wanted to get rid of stuff.

That will fill my keg and I bottled 4x440ml of this. So, works out to R16.23 per liter or R8.11 for 500ml. I excluded equipment and running costs though - electricity, time etc. I brewed this in ~3 hours, fermented in 5 days, cold crashed and fined for two and kegged it the next weekend. In fact, I'm going to pour my first glass tonight :-)

You mentioned shelf life, you'll likely not pasteurize your beer so, stored cold I'd say 6-12months ? However, that won't happen and we both know it :-D

[Toxxyc Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Toxxyc]

For sure you are going to get some conflicting advise on this forum because everyone has different experiences but can I please just make a word of caution when using tap water as per Toxxyc suggestion? Especially for extract brewing where you do not necessarily need boil all the water you use for the brew - please boil the water before hand and let it cool so that you get rid of the chlorine. I did this for my first extract brew and it came out fine. For the second brew I just chucked in water straight from the tap to make up the volume. The result was un-drinkable. It is very heart breaking to chuck 23l of beer that you have carefully brewed and bottled down the sink...... Since then I only use RO water for brewing. It costs R1.40 per litre which adds to the costs (no way you will do a R137 batch like Toxxyc) but the end result is a least drinkable!

I have to add here that it does depend on where you are. I also wouldn't brew with Durban tap water. The amount of chlorine in there is staggering. For me, filling the fermenter the night before drives off any of the chlorine that might be detected in the water. There's a website somewhere where you can check a full analysis of the tap water in your area that I've used before, and my tap water is just fine.

When making extract kits, I would also use RO water. I pay R1 per liter, so that adds R22 to your 23l batch's cost. That's not a lot at all. However, when making beer from scratch (grains), it's a very very good idea to ask for a full analysis of the RO water you're buying. RO water is never completely empty, and it contains a bunch of minerals and so on added back to make it suitable for drinking. This is important as it affects the water's pH and that also affects the mash pH. From experience, most RO waters contains calcium in the ~10mg/l range. For brewing beers, talking generally here, you want to aim for around 60mg/l. To fix this, a common additive is actually calcium chloride. This supports my argument that the chlorine doesn't matter, or calcium chloride would not be a recommended addition to the water. It releases a ton of chlorine ions in the water, which drives off on it's own.

So yeah, while I think it's important to take a look at your tap water, I definitely won't say that RO water is a set requirement. If you do use RO water, I would highly recommend you treat it and set up the profile to match your beer profile, but that's down the line's worries.

[jannieverjaar Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close jannieverjaar]

Welcome man. So as you can already see you can dig into any of the variables all the way down to the volatility of the ion involved. And that why some of us are here.

I would suggest start simple. Understand what's up, how sensitive your palate is to some of the flavors involved. And if at all possible get a brewer close by to taste your beer early on so you can get to know the differences in perception.

I started with kit. Did 5 or so. Then partial (coz you can add this step without spending any $ if you have a soup pot) it makes a good beer. Then moved to all Grain.

So my thing is I get really excited about a hobby and go all in, 4 months later I'm bored I.e. inland kiteboarding...... to name but one)
So I decided with this hobby I'll let my equipment grow with my skill and palate and not go all in from the start. Looks like I'm not getting bored with this one any time soon.

This is what I call my path of least resistance
1) buy one of these fermenter kits
2) bottle to start with
3) later get a large urn and do BIAB
4) get a fridge (+stc1000) just for your beer (use it for fermentation control and lagering)
5) get a second fridge for conversation to a Keezer for when you start kegging. Use it as your lagering fridge for now
6) get the kegging equipment.

I want to move to step 5 next.

Somewhere in between you can start thinking about your water chemistry. Since its minimum of 90% of your beer it's not a bad thing to spend some time on.

At some point I'll also start following my own advice but at this point Rand Water Board is what I boil and then brew with.

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