Home Brew Forum

Thought I’d post a thread on my road to home brewing.
My wife gave me a home brew kit for my birthday back in August. Ah ha I thought, a new hobby and saving us money as well!!
So, after loading the fermenting bin with a tin of Geordie Lager I trotted of to my local homebrew store to buy 40 x 500ml bottles at a touch under £30 ouch! .
After a week I bottled up the lager and left them in the shed which was warm at the time. The result after 2 weeks was ok but nothing you would give to discerning lager drinkers.
Whilst they were settling down I bought a tin of Coopers Australian Lager. A make shift panel heater was rigged up under the stairs cupboard to keep the temperature to around 25C.
This lager cleared in 4 days and oh bugger it was off down the shop again to get some more bottles.
Loaded up the bottles with ½ a teaspoon of granulated sugar and left them in the cupboard for 5 days before banishing them to the shed for a couple of weeks.
Spending an extra couple of quid on a better quality kit makes all the difference (or is it luck?) Crack open a bottle of the Coopers brew then have a can of the fermented goats urine from the local Spar and it makes you realise was junk you have been drinking!! The Coopers seems to be far more drinkable than the first Geordie batch. This is my opinion only --- I’m sure there are loads of Geordie drinkers out there who would have me hung by the English plums!!
Anyway it was time to move from the stairs cupboard to the shed. I constructed was can only be described as a wooden box with a removable door lined with Jablite expandable foam board with a tube heater and room stat. I’ve got the next batch of Coopers fermenting there now. The temperature seems to hold at a nice 25C without using too much juice.

The next task was to source more bottles. Covert bottle runs in stealth mode were made to all the local recycle bins where 40 ish bottles of Bulmer’s were recovered along with various 500ml local brewery browns.
I’ve read a lot on previous posts about going to your local pub to source bottles. Wouldn’t local landlords be a bit miffed if home brewers kept turning up on his / her doorstep for bottles they could ultimately be drinking out of from his / her pub?
Oh hell it’s much more fun spending an afternoon with your legs hanging out of a wheelie bin with the wife and kids on lookout.
Has anyone used Budweiser /Stella/San Miguel bottles. I’ve picked up loads of them but they seem a little light. Our local Isle Of Wight brewery bottles that were acquired in the stealth mode mentioned above are excellent and exactly the same as the ones you buy from the local homebrew shop. The clear ones are good for keeping an eye on the conditioning. I use one bottle per batch for this purpose.
I’ve also set up a make shift racking system for the deluge of bottles that will no doubt result from the weekly stealth runs to the recycle bins!
That’s it for the moment. It’s now just a case of keeping up with supply and demand. That’s a struggle !

Your fermentation vessel looks quite lonely in comparison to your bottle collection. Think Magners bottles and any real ale microbrewery type bottles in brown and you won't go wrong. I applaud your immediate dedication to the cause by raiding bottle banks. Good man, the though has crossed my mind in the past but instead i buy a couple of this and a coupkle of that when i in the offie or supermarket. Judge the contents then keep the bottles. Expensive and not so much fun i suppose but fingers intact so far!

Luckely my son and his mates drink shed loads of magners round our house on friday nights so i just rescue their bottles and put them to better use

stvchrry wrote: Has anyone used Budweiser /Stella/San Miguel bottles. I’ve picked up loads of them but they seem a little light

You're right stv these aren't man enough for bottle conditioning.

Matt

Welcome and well done on the bottles!

One piece of advice though, 25C is a little warm for fermentation as it will cause some nasty flavours. I'd recommend trying to maintain 18-20C.

/Phil.

I used the 1L san miguel screw top bottles plenty of times back when I started brewing, they worked fine, no bottle bombs. Obviously use at your own risk though and don't overprime!

Agreed, Coopers do make a high quality kit, I don't think i've read a bad review of their kits and the IPA is top quality.

Well it looks like you are off to a very good start in this hobby. When I started doing the homebrew thing, lo those many years ago, I quickly had a big bottle collection just like you are starting to build up. You might not want to admit it now, but there is a draft system in your future (and a bunch of other stuff). At one time, I owned several cases of 12oz bottles which I took great pains to keep filled up all the time so that I always had variety. I had a system to rotate the cases around such that I always had several types of beer available all the time and life was good.

My wife was after me to buy her a bigger house (a debate I knew I was going to lose at some point) and I finally gave in as long as I could buy two refrigerators to put in the garage, one to ferment in, one to serve out of. I then "invested" in a draft system, one corni keg, CO2 bottle, regulator, hoses and cobra dipenser which all fit in the frig. One corni keg somehow multiplied to five. At that time, I got the bright idea that opening the door to the refrigerator to get beer was crude and it would be necessary to drill holes in the door of the frige so I could install three taps. Since keeping a CO2 bottle in the frig is a waste of cool space, I drilled a hole in the side of the frig so I could keep the CO2 outside of the frige and get the CO2 to the kegs (the cost in small parts to do all this adds up). Oh, by the way, I also installed three down stream regularors to I could isolate each keg and run them at different pressures (weizen needs a lot more pressure than say a bitter, right?). I now had myself to the point where I rarely needed to bottle, except for competitions, so I invested in a counter pressure bottle filler which I use only three to four times a year (thank God).

Now this is the really crazy part of my sad tale, I have come almost full circle. A couple of years ago, I thought it would be way cool to bottle up my specialty Belgian stuff in corked bottles (just like the monks do in Europe). For Christmas a couple of years ago, I talked my wife into getting me a pretty expensive corker and I have been collecting Belgian 750 bottles (the damn things are very expensive to buy by the case and the shipping charges will kill you). Within the last year or so, the big homebrew distibutors are now carrying the corks and wire cages for those bottles and my corker does a great job of driving those corks. Anyhow, over the last week, I bottled 15 gallons of homebrew and all of it finished with corks and wire cages. My plan is to only bottle the higher gravity beer that can be cellared for a good amount of time but upon reflection, I think I just got back to where I started (except for the cool looking corks of course).

I guess my whole point though is that it never ends. I would really like to set up a beer engine (which would be very novel on this side of the pond) and I have also gotten to the point where I think going out to the garage to get beer is somehow redneck. I wish when I had my current house built that I insisted on a wet bar, I wonder...........

Barley water, this is a cracking post, says it all really. Bet you are still enjoying it!

Barley Water wrote:I have also gotten to the point where I think going out to the garage to get beer is somehow redneck. I wish when I had my current house built that I insisted on a wet bar, I wonder...........

Im also thinking journeys to the garage are a bit uncouth im either going to have to turn the whole garage into a bar, or else squeeze a minibar into the house somehow

I've just built a new conservatory (with a marble floor) between the garage and the house......so I can get beer and stay dry.

Del - why not just try a very long beer line.....

Fantastic post! You have inspired me to convert my pantry in to a micro brewery!

Do you have any photos of the mods. you have made to the fridges? I would love to see what you have done.

Cant you get a robot to deliver you beer? now there's a gap in the market!

Keep up the good work!