Bearsy

A friend of mine has been talking about starting up his own little microbrew in his garage and I was wondering if anyone else does something like this.
Feel free to share photos or anything.

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K10

One of my good friends does....so i reap the benefits with none of the work.

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The Rev

I used to, about 10-15 years ago. I was all about it, making most of my beers from grain (rather than malt syrup). It's a fun hobby. A little time consuming, especially if you're starting with grain (5 gallons took me roughly 12 hours, from grain to fermenter), but worth it if you like the satisfaction of getting faced off your own creations.

Also, as a side note, I found the buzz to be a bit brighter, and the hangover less severe, with my own brew. None of those nasty chemicals and preservatives, I'm guessing.



The Rev

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farmergiles

A friend of mine does. His beer is surprisingly good most of the time and apparently it is really cheap to make.

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SageTree

There are also a lot of local 'U-Brew' businesses around that have space and can help you out as well. I think $2 a bottle is the average cost of doing something like that, in the people I've experienced doing it, + buying bottles etc....

It's a good venture.

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Kompressor

I threw down some investment money for a group of us to start one up.

Friend does most of the brewing, we help with recipes/bottling.

Experimenting a lot, usually turns out good but we've a few dud batches.

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Captain Cannabis

yup. beer wine and cider. i learned from my dad who has been teaching people to brew long before i was born.

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John F. Kerry

my one friend had like 50 random beer bottles filled with his "homemade brew" and he made me try it one time- tasted like total ass.


...i think it would be fun to make your own hard cider or alcohol from other kinds of fruits tho. id like to make some pear or orange cider if its possible to do such a thing

how do u do the cider captn?

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vanilla

cider is just apple beer, fermented apple mash

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Purd Hupley

I did a couple of years ago. Very amatuer. I used the kits, but would doctor them up quite a bit. I made a stout that I more than doubled the malt, so it was super rich and had about a 19% abv. Would fuck you up on about 2 bottles, but it was so heavy that 2 bottles were about all you could drink.

I'm going to gear up after Christmas to make a couple of cases for the fund raising auction at the Boy's school in April.

Has anyone watched Brewmaster on Discover, I think? Very typical reality show concept...tight schedules, accidents that put them behind schedule...that sort of thing. An OK watch tho.

Captain Cannabis

you actually cannot make alcohol from oranges. you are better off investing in a bottle of distilled spirits infused with oil from orange peels (gran marnier, triple sec, etc). or i guess you could distill you own spirits and flavour it with orange peels, but i don't really get the impression you understand how much work that would be.

homemade beer can go bad over time or else if you are not careful about sterilization and sanity practices. usually it ages well, but then there is a point where it just cannot age more and the flavour declines. the more super authentic you are about your process probably the longer it will last, but in my experience making small batches (<50L) usually it starts to get really tasty, and so you drink it more often, and then it is totally gone before it can go bad at all. hopefully you made enough to last until it gets really good.

this year was my first brewing cider, and so my research phase consisted of talking to people who made cider before, and browsing google results for "make your own cider". i came up with a novel method based on my experience brewing and my inexperience handling large volumes of apples. filtration proved to be the most difficult step, and i messed it up and ruined a batch of 40L on my 3rd batch. the first 2 batches are bottled, carbonated and aging, and i have enough apples left to make another 50L or so when i have some free time. probably will get to that in the 2nd week of december.

my original plan involved distillation, but mastering basic hard cider is prerequisite to the process, so my lifetime goal remains distillation and this seasons goal is quality basic cider. my method uses decidedly too much love (read: labour) to be carried out in a reasonably time-efficient manner, but the results have been better than expected and so it will continue as such.

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Bearsy

Post some pics of your set up mang

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Captain Cannabis

turns out you need about 100lbs of fruit to make a couple bottles of some distilled liquor. so you can imagine this operation would need to be scaled up

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Bearsy

Very cool. That's what? A 5 gallon jug?

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Captain Cannabis

that carboy is 23L (6.08us gal)

that is just a random series of pictures with nothing to do with each other. there has actually been 3 batches so far.

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Kompressor

Aye nice setup. Ours has two carboys, a big pot obviously, a wort chiller, and a bottler.

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tedkennedy

cool, brewing is something i might wantt o do someday.

actually, im going to be working as a fermentation lab technician (for scientific research/pharmaceutical purposes not for alcohol) so i figure in a short amount of time ill be an expert on fermentation... so home brewing would be a natural progression

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matthew munari

Über King

my friend does home brew, but it tastes like ass

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