The Beer and Homebrewing thread [giveaways ended; quiz answers posted]

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I love beer. I love exploring the many different styles of beer and comparing different beers from within the same style. I love brewing my own and experimenting with different recipes, ingredients and techniques. I love tasting beer and taking notes of nuances (as my limited senses and knowledge allow), I sometimes even write a short review about a beer that I liked (or one that I didn't). I’m ok with a bit of a buzz, although it’s not a goal in itself. I normally don’t get any buzz because I drink a bottle or so a day and that’s simply not enough to have any such effect on me. I don’t enjoy getting drunk and practically never do.

The poll here unfortunately doesn’t support voting for multiple options, so I'll go for a short survey format...

What is your favorite brewery and beer?
What is your preferred beer style (pale lager / pilsner, dark lager, IPA, stout, Belgian ale, wheat beer, etc…)? alternatively, what beer style don’t you like? If you (think) you don’t like beer, share your experience too.
Have you ever brewed beer at home or considered to?

See the first comment below for a bit about homebrewing and of course the giveaways :-)

Update: Quiz answers. The quiz is here if you want to try it before seeing the answers...

9 years ago*

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What is the main reason you drink beer?

View Results

Mostly for the taste / aroma

Mostly for the buzz

Equally taste / aroma and buzz

I don’t drink beer. Give me a potato instead!

173 Comments

Yirg

Let’s start with the giveaways, since this is what everyone is interested in. The “gate” giveaway is the beer-themed game Bierzerkers. If you're Level 3 or higher, just answer the quiz correctly and you can join. If you also add a comment about beer on that giveaway, and if your profile is clean (passes the SGTools test) I'll send you an invite to join a group (called "Plan B") for three more giveaways - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (no thanks needed), Just Cause Collection and Trine 2: Complete Story. All three are Level 0 giveaways so if you answered the quiz correctly but couldn't join the Bierzerkers giveaway because you’re not Level 3, you'll be able to join these three.

All giveaways end on November 28, at 11:56 AM Israel (GMT+2)

About the quiz - reading this post once would be enough to learn a bit about homebrewing and to be able to easily answer the quiz linked below (which leads to the giveaways). I tried to make it more difficult to just search for the answers but feel free to do so if you’re so inclined. I suggest you just spend a few minutes to read, and then answer.

Note that this is not an authoritative primer about the subject of homebrewing, it’s just my takeaways, impressions and conclusions about this wonderful hobby after about a year or so and a few dozen homebrews. I’ll try to cover the pros, cons and process of brewing your own beer at home. Some aspects, such as availability of ingredients and cost may not reflect your local homebrewing market.

Let’s start with the benefits of home brewing...

Pros:

It’s possible to brew practically any kind of beer at home and you can experiment with styles that are hard to find commercially as well try your own ideas. There is no limit to creativity, as opposed to, for example, wine making.
The whole process is relatively short and within about 3 weeks the beer is ready to drink, at least for ales where fermentation is carried out near room temperature. Lager beer requires at least another month of storage in near freezing temperature (“lagering”), but it is still a short time compared to what is needed in the preparation of wine or mead (honey wine).
Homebrewed beer usually isn’t pasteurized and the result is richer and more complex taste and aroma compared with many commercial beers. Another related benefit is that the “head” (the foam on top of beer) is usually much more stable than beers that are sold in bottles (in contrast with draft beer where pasteurization is typically minimal and the head take longer to precipitate).
Cost. This probably won’t appeal to those from countries where beer is cheaper than bottled water (like Germany), but here in Israel the cost of homebrewed ale is between 20% to 35% that of commercial beer in the same style. Part of the difference is because ales are less popular and the ones that are sold here are not cheap, so the difference compared to homebrew is more significant. But even compared to the cheapest lager, homebrew beer is still cost effective (assuming you do this as a hobby and don’t calculate your homebrewing time by the hour). I think it’s a bit ironic that process of making lager is more complex and expensive than that of most ales, but the market price is determined by supply and demand which is why in practice lagers are generally less expensive than ales.
Most of the process is very enjoyable and I love the intoxicating smell of hops while boiling the wort (the name for the would-be beer prior to fermentation). Incidentally, the smell of coffee roasting is one of the reasons I roast at home, but I’ll dedicate a separate thread on that (some day soon).

Cons:

Depending on the style of beer, brewing and bottling takes between 3 to 5 hours of work for a batch of 20 liters / 5 gallon. Most of the process is enjoyable and it’s a lot of fun to partner with a friend or a family member, but some steps aren't as fun - cleaning and sanitizing the equipment (super important and is not too difficult). Cleaning bottles before bottling the beer is a bit more tedious. Chilling the wort can be a challenge, and not of the fun kind. Lastly, lager beer fermentation is done in colder-than-room-temperature which is difficult to achieve without a refrigerator, and later on requires further storage (lagering) at even colder temperature (close to freezing) for at least a month before bottling, and then the regular wait of another couple of weeks for the beer to carbonate in the bottles. Definitely not suitable for those who have trouble with delayed gratification or those who don’t want to consume much of the space in their fridge with lagering containers. Ales however don’t have any of these issues, so they are much more friendly to brew at home.
Cost of equipment. Depending on location I would say it’s somewhere between $150 to $250 for a homebrewing basic kit, a stainless pot and bottling equipment. Not too expensive compared with many other hobbies, but not a negligible sum.
To get more flexibility and to be able to brew all styles of beer it’s best to use only grains as the source of malt (see “All Grain” method below). Using malt liquid extract (LME) instead or in addition to grains is easier, but less flexible. The problem with AG method is that it requires additional equipment (or DYI hacks) and adds at least another two hours to the process.

A bit about the ingredients and process.

Main ingredients:

Water. The base ingredient. Mostly tap water is sufficient.
Malt. This is barley grains that went through partial germination and were then dried or roasted to some degree. The malt provides the sugar for the beer, which during fermentation is converted to alcohol. Available as grain or as liquid extract syrup (LME).
Hops. Flowers of the hops plant, usually used in dried pellet form. Gives beer its distinctive bitterness, the flowery hops aroma and helps in preserving the beer for a longer time.
Yeast. A living single-cell fungi that performs the actual fermentation and converts sugar to alcohol.

Methods:

Extract only. All the malt used in this method is LME (there's also a dried powder form, DME, which is more expensive and therefore less popular). Using extract only may be the easiest method, but results in very simple tasting beer.
Extract with specialty grains. The sugar comes from LME, as above. In addition a small amount of water that was steeped in specific malt grains (depending on recipe) is added before the boil, to give the beer more complex taste and color. This is a good option if you want to brew great tasting beer while keeping things simple and easy.
All Grain (AG). In this method all the sugar and much of the complex flavors of the beer comes from using malted grains only, in a process called “mashing” where the grains are steeped for more than an hour in a temperature stable insulated container (called “mash tun”), resulting in conversion of the starches in the grains into sugars suitable for fermentation. This process is more complex and if you mess up the temperature the result is poor.
Partial Mash. Like AG, but some part of the sugar comes from LME.

The second method (extract with specialty grains) is very good to begin with, and I'll try to describe it in bit more detail below. This is just to give you an idea, it’s not a recipe you can follow as I’m skipping some details.

Depending on recipe, put about 1 kilo (2 pound) of specific grains in a cloth filter bag and then steep in 70°c (160°f) water for about half an hour. This gives the beer its special flavor and color.
Remove the bag out of the water and pour to the pot; add about half the amount of water (10 L for a 20 L batch, 2.5 gallon for 5 gallon batch), then add the liquid malt extract (LME) according to the recipe. Bring to an aggressive boil.
Add some hops in the beginning (amount and type depending on recipe). This gives the beer its bitterness and acts as a preserving substance.
After about an hour, add some more hops and leave for a few minutes (depending on recipe). At this stage of the boil the “second serving” of hops only add aroma to the beer and doesn’t have enough time to impact bitterness (unlike the first serving which only added bitterness but not aroma).
Turn off the flame, add some ice / cold water to chill the wort to 28°c (82°f)
Move the wort to a covered fermentation container, equipped with an airlock, a mechanism that lets the CO2 produced during fermentation exit the container (to prevent buildup of pressure) but prevent germs from entering.
Add the yeast on top and cover for half an hour
Agitate the container to introduce some air into it, this helps kick-start the yeast. Then leave to ferment. This stage usually takes about a week and should be done at around room temperature (20°c / 70°f) for ales.
Once the bubbling activity in the airlock stops for a whole day, fermentation is over and the beer is ready to be bottled.
Transfer the beer to a mixture of sugar (depending on recipe), keeping things extremely clean (this is very important throughout the process). Then use bottling equipment to fill the bottles and cap them.
Leave for about a week or two for second fermentation in the bottle, a process which create carbonation (gas).

Drink the beer! and enjoy the quiz :-)

9 years ago*