Nice Cookies

I’m a noob. I’ve been thinking about homebrewing for a few weeks, and when we got a phone call from my boyfriend’s brother in Iraq, he said that he wanted to give it a shot too. Since he’s coming home on leave in feb, I figured it’d be fun to have a couple different types to choose from, then he could pick what to brew.

So we went out and bought a full home-brew kit with everything, a 6 gallon glass jug, a 5 gallon one, a 5 g bucket with the spigot, all the other paraphernalia that goes with it, and the kit came with our choice of a mix. Since my boyfriend isn’t too fond of ambers, but loves hef, we got the wheat beer mix. Anyway, we sanitized everything carefully then boiled our water, added the 2 syrups, (one was the actual mix, the other was wheat syrup or something to replace the sugar).

Anyway, I’m pumped. We’ll see how this batch turns out. My expectations aren’t too high, but I figure with a little more experience, there’s no reason that my beers shouldn’t turn out just as well as others with the same equipment. We got this kit, the guy there managed to upsell me to the nice kit, because everything it had over the $120 one was stuff that I’d have to buy eventually anyway.

Any input/suggestions? I registered on brewboard, but the people there are pretty advanced, and it overwhelms me a bit.
My only suggestion is to wait and see how it turns out. Been brewing for 4 years now, and it’s definitely good for honing your patience.

Most homebrew kits are amber or darker. As for other styles to try, northern brewer has some interesting ’specialty’ beers that venture away from the typical beer(s).
Buy this:

It is the bible of homebrewing.

If you want okay beer get a kit. It’s good to start also.

If you want great beer, beer that is just as good as anything Europe can put out you have to go all grain. This means no kits and only raw ingredients. It’s not hard and I’ve started 2 others right off the bat with all grain and they were fine.

A few more steps like the wort and mash but it’s not really hard. you just have to go through the motions.
Contrary to what many homebrewers claim, it’s not cheaper then buying commercial beer in any way. But it’s plenty of fun (now I just have to drink about 5 cases worth of brew so I can brew some more).

Good suggestion on the book. There’s no need to move away from extract brewing right away. Figure out if you really like it, make several batches, and then you can think of dumping more money into the hobby. Join a local homebrew club (you can find one using the AHA website ), join a forum (Northern Brewer’s forum is full of people that’ll be more then happy to help you ), and have fun.

I know lots of brewers and everyone has told me that you will only spend half of what you do on buying beer by the case.

Sure they only spend that on the raw ingredients. They never bother to calculate the hundreds of dollars they spend in equipment and hours of time it takes to make. I know I make enough money in an hour to buy the equivalent cases of beer then the 3+ hours it takes to make a batch of beer that nets you about 1.5 – 3 cases of beer. I’m a member of two local homebrew groups and love the hobby but I think it’s funny when people preach that it’s cheaper when they have $500+ of equipment and spend and entire day on the weekend brewing. With that $500 in equipment alone I could be sitting on cases of commercial beer for quite a long time before you’d hit a break even point.
Yes, but the equipment will pay off over time and if you keep brewing I am sure it saves money.

But, another factor is by commercial do you mean Budweiser, Coors, Miller? Or do you mean imports and microbrews? Because I dont buy Bud, Coors, Miller so that would make a huge difference.
Microbrew is commercial. Any beer you buy at the store. Sure the equipment pays for itself over time but for almost all homebrewers, they never stop buying it. There’s always something else they need (even some of these guys in the local groups that have been doing it for 10+ years and have thousands of dollars in equipment still have all kinds of fancy new things to buy all the time). Even if you stop buying equipment at some point, it’s gonna take a LONG time before it becomes cheaper to brew then buy. Point really is that it’s not cheaper like they claim but there’s something about the satisfaction of a beer you spent hours making and they always taste better because you did spend all that time making it.
I brew great beer, beer like saisons and triples and expesso fig stouts and the satisfaction I get from doing so is far greater than the little cost I incur. The lost opportunity costs mean nothing to me when I am doing something I love.

Most people watch a disgusting amount of TV, it takes me half the time(Total time over a period of months) for me to brew, bottle, etc… the beer, than the average person takes watching TV in just 1 day. I’d say I’m making the smart choice economically.

You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to brew good beer. In fact most of that is a waste. You don’t need copper tubing to chill the wort at the home level, you don’t need a fancy capping system or labels because quite frankly if you are to the point where you brew hundreds of bottles in one batch it’s much smarter to just keg it and only bottle a few for whenever.

In the end making beer calms me down and it’s just like cooking or playing music. It’s just a bonus that I can brew the same quality beer for $0.30 a bottle as the Belgian import that costs $4.

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