That's "Mr. Beer" to You

I'm a fan of beer.  Besides the headaches in the morning, there isn't much I don't like about it.  Amber, Pale, Brown, Dark... you name it... it's a beautiful thing.

For my birthday my girlfriend made me the proud owner of a Mr. Beer home brewing kit.  So, I will soon be up and running with my very own supply give or take two weeks.

Anyways, I'm going to start my first batch later this week and I'll be posting reviews of my hopefully delicious home-made masterpieces.

The Mr. Beer site has a ton of recipes and I'll probably even come up with a few of my own.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.  I'll probably mess up a few times.

Comments

[Tracy]

hard to imagine it has been 5 years since I was in Spain celebrating your birthday with ya! Happy Belated! Trace

[dylan]

Good luck with the beer thing. I like it too.

[beer]

Brew low cost beer. The amount of time you spend on brewing beer makes the small difference in cost between "just OK" ingredients and top quality ingredients a minor point. Either way, the cost of brewing a 5 gallon batch is much cheaper than buying a couple of cases of beer in the store.

Beer is made of cheap ingredients, so it doesn't hurt to buy the best. Surprisingly, the cheapest way to brew beer gives you the best results: all grain brewing is the cheapest way to brew when grain is bought in bulk.

You do need a grain mill and a mash tun, so there is a small investment in equipment needed. But you should be able to brew excellent quality beer for less than $2 per gallon, and you could brew a mild ale for as little as $1 per gallon, or less than 10 cents per bottle (one gallon is about 10-1/2 12oz bottles). Most of my pilsners are about $1.50 a gallon brews.

Other ways to reduce the cost of your beer are by growing your own hops and reusing yeast from the fermenter. Easy to do, and it means that I don't have to buy yeast more than once every half year or so. The hops should last e through most of the winter brews. So all you need is grain, which is about $0.70 per pound in a bulk purchase (much of the cost is in shipping).

Beer Brewing Equipment Basic, simple, cheap equipment that gets the job done. Sometimes it adds to the challenge. But through the mystique of brewing and remember that illiterate alewives brewed for centuries using tried and true recipes and procedures before the dawn of kegerators, ph meters or hydrometers.

Beer Keg Brewing. After using bottles for years, you can jump to the corny keg (Cornelius keg). This is an important step because it makes brewing so much easier. You can still bottle, but just a few bottles per batch, and use a corny keg to fill the bottles. You can use corny kegs as secondary fermenting vessels. You can try out method where you leave the beer in the primary for about two weeks until it clears nicely, and then upi carefully siphon it over to a corny, avoiding transferring any trub.