It's Alive!

[arturobandini]

Hi all,

First post from a brewing virgin here. With the recession and impending fatherhood closing my wallet faster than I can pull a fist full of fivers out of it I've turned to the homebrew. My homebrew experience is effectively zilch having only helped my Dad make a rather tasty stout back in the day and sampled my brother's Youngs starter bitter kit and his second attempt; an english porter (both pretty delicious). I've got a starter kit of my own to break into and it comes with some kind of "generic lager" which I intend to make as a "dry run" before I go for a Brewferm after I bottle that.

Anyway, my main question is how difficult are the Brewferm kits to do for a beginner? They get rave reviews in terms of taste and I was wondering whether that was years of masterful brewing on the brewer's part or just the quality of the kits themselves. As a side question, I am very attracted by the Diabolo which I am assuming to be a Duvel clone, a beer I am besotted with ever since Antwerp 2002, anyone with good experiences of this? How comparable is it with the genuine Duvel?

Everyone else notice how the examples of brewferm beers on their website are in the "official glasses" of what they are intended to represent like the Duvel, Chimay, Leffe Brune etc. Has anyone got a list of what they all actually representative of ? Anyway, enough rambling I'm sure you've all had this same excitement when you coupled together the two concepts of beer + cheap.

Thanks in advance

[RichardG]

I'm also relatively new to HB. I've now completed 4 kits with a 5th in the bucker. My 4th kit was a Brewferm Grand Cru, currently in bottles in the garage. Trust me, it was easy! Just like making any other kit; so no need to worry about it. I can't give you any indicators to taste as this is also my 1st Brewferm, but as you say, they do seem to get good reviews on this forum so I'm looking forward to mine. Should be ready in time for Christmas!

[arturobandini]

Thanks for the reply mate. I've been deliberating and think I'm going to go for the Diabolo in the hope I can get a high strength golden out of it. Next on my agenda was a good sugar for it. All signs are pointing to Candi Sugar and that seems especially importantly with regards these Belgian style beers. My question is as follows..

Light Candi for a lighter beer and Dark Candi for a darker beer? This seems face slappingly obvious to me but I don't want to just guess my way around it and end up ruining what good be a perfectly delicious first attempt. On another thread regarding these Brewferm beers someone offered to post a .pdf file of the Brewferm guide to which beers in their range need what sugar and how much and also what sugar to use for priming etc. Anyone got that?

Thanks

[Marts]

As I understand it candi sugar is basically just ordinary sugar. I've made the Brewferm Abbey and the Brewferm gold and used granulated sugar for both of them. They're still conditioning, but the testers i've tried are both excellent already. (must leave them alone. )
You'll get the information with the kit if you can't get hold of a pdf of it.

[arturobandini]

Another note regarding the brewbuddy lager kit i've got which i'm going to use as my practice run. I am looking for a finished article that is at the very least carbonated and drinkable but is there any way you can get a decent quaff out of it by using better sugar in the initial mix? Also with nod to bottling; what is a good guide for primer on a lager? You definitely want some gas flowing through there like some of the better commercial products. How much and of what kind of sugar is best to put into your bottles?

This site has increased my knowledge of homebrew so much in the past few days alone! Great site all and what an excellent resource.

[arturobandini]

Haha, monopolising my own thread...oops.

Anyway, I know it's easy for a new member to just throw questions out there and expect results and believe me I have searched for some answers to the questions I've been tossing up there in recent posts. However, I have found the answers to a few questions in this thread so I'm going to stick a quote from the other thread (two years old almost!) and a link to it in case anyone else has had trouble solving these problems.

This advice comes from the excellent DaaB who , in my short time browsing this forum, has come up with some amazing help for all and sundry. Cheers DaaB I owe you so many pints already.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9869&hilit=candi

DaaB on Fri Jan 11, 2008 7:03 am
With the Brewferm kit i'd use all the candy sugar as suggested in the instructions (x2 for 2 kits) and either make up to 6 gallons or as much as you can.

If you only have the capacity for 5 that's fine, it will just be stronger.

For the Mexican beer, I presume it is a lager type beer, i'd be tempted to use 750g of light (or extra light) spray malt/dme and 250g of sugar, discard the yeast and use Nottingham or Safale US05 (both are ale yeasts but ferment cleanly and are suited to making lager type beer without the need for temperature control.

If you want to make it stronger, use less water, it will have the same effect as I have suggested above. By using less water but keeping the fermentables the same you don't mess with the hop balance.