Adventures in Making Beer

[Bong O. Boi]

In my constant search for some sort of meaning to my life, I've been experimenting in making beer. So far, I've made a nice Canadian style brew, a Czech pilsner, a kick ass hard strawberry lemonade and this super heavy brown nut/ wheat beer that makes you feel like you've eaten a full meal with every bottle. At 14% alcohol, a bottle makes you rather cozy- feeling too.

So today I bottled up 35 bottles of Dogbolter Ale. It's a dark, heavy, really tasty English ale. After doing some tweaking (more like tweaking with a big hammer) with the sugar and malt in the recipe, I've managed to come up with a delicious 17% alcohol content. By next Friday evening, I'll be angry and drunk.

When I went to Seattle in August for Hempfest, my x-gf's brother took me to a little microbrewery in Mountlake Terrace where I got turned onto to Red Ale. Nectar of the fucking gods. The little microbrewery down the road from us makes a superb Red Ale too. I think that will be my next attempt.

Honestly, what I'd really like to do is get one of those stovetop stills off eBay and make my own gin. I can get juniper berries from my mom's yard. The wife, however, has put her foot down at that idea. It horrifies her enough that I drink the 'shine my neighbor hooks me up with. She's convinced the slug will blind me. C'mere, baby...I got a slug that'll blind ya.

Anyhoo, here's a pic of my Dogbolter before I box it up for the week. Apologies for the Corona bottles. A coworker gets them from his neighbor. Beats buying new bottles.

Red

[Kraigus12]

My girlfriends dad brews his own beer. She brought me a couple bottles one time. Oddly enough, they were in Corona Bottles.

[Carlos Spicy Wiener]

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yea I've done that, if you know your going to brew your own and have some beer bottles left over from some other stuff just clean them with hot water and make sure it's done good and use them. It will save you some cash, and if you have a few friends who drink from bottle ask them too, your gonna clean them anyway.

I wish i had extra time to try cool shit like this. I'd probably accidentally poison myself or something, though.

[Bong O. Boi]

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It's actually pretty easy. When I started I bought these "kits". They have these different varieties in a can. You dump the can and some sugar (you're supposed to use corn sugar, but I cheat and use powdered) into a pot of boiling water. Stir it up good and dump it in a bucket with more water. throw the yeast, that comes in the kit, into it. Put a lid on it and wait 2 weeks. Bottle it up. Wait a week and enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJKW...x=0&playnext=1

This guy shows how to do it pretty quick and easy. I cut a lot of corners even from this guy and have had no problems. I just soak the bottles in the sink in hot water and then rinse them out real good with hot water. As added insurance I spray the bottles with a no rinse sanitizer.

You really can't poison yourself. If the batch is bad, you'll know it from the first sip.

The only things I had to buy was a capper (like 13 dollars), an airlock (2 dollars) , a case of bottles (10 dollars) and some caps (3 or 4 dollars for 150). I got a mayonaise bucket from a resteraunt for free. Everything else I already had in the kitchen.

Give it a shot, Satan, The most time you'll spend is bottling. I can blow about 3 hours on that, mostly because I'm horribly unorganized. That's why I do it on a Saturday or Sunday.

It's kinda funny. It's like how the peaches from my tree taste better than any I can get from the store. Same with my beers. They taste better than any that I can get in the store.

Red

well hell, i thought it was some really complicated shit involving measuring all sorts of chemicals and ingredients. Seeing as how i can't even cook, i figured any attempt at making beer would be a failure of epic proportions.

You make it seems easy...i might just try it.

Back in the day, my brother and I experimented with this. At first we did a "Beer in a bag", where you add water and hang it up in the closet for a couple weeks. Eventually, we graduated to "real" beer making. Instead of buying the capper and all that, we drank Grolsch out of those stopper-top bottles, and reused them. We drank a lot of Grolsch, anyway, cuz it's fucking delicious. I'll never forget on our first batch, we went out and bought this giant stock pot, filled it with water, added the hops(and whatever else) and let it boil. Well, the shit started boiling over, and the hops were everywhere! We were scraping them off the stovetop with the edge of our hands and putting them back in the pot. This post is way too long to be interesting, so I'll just say I enjoyed doing it, but there is a learning curve involved. Also, don't walk away from the pot!

[deadinabottle]

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its always a good idea to use a little bleach when washing out the bottles, pots and carboys as any bacteria will destroy the beer. just make sure you rinse them out really good.

[rdc2007]

I make my own beer. My younger brother started doing it when he was in grad school but didn?t have the place for it when he moved home so he gave the stuff to me. I made my first batch in August of 2008. The day before we evacuated for Gustav I bottled it and brought it with me when we left. My mother in law had just had surgery and she used the liter bottles I was using then as weights for her exercises. That batch turned out great. I haven?t had a bad batch yet!

Now, instead of the liter plastic bottles I started with, I bottle everything in the standard glass bottles. Friends save them for me and I remove the labels and clean them thoroughly, first spraying them out with a jet attachment, then boiling them then finally they soak in a cold chlorine sanitizing solution. I take no chances. Once bottled, I make my own labels as well. I'm kinda OCD that way, besides, I enjoy doing all that. I have two batches to bottle tomorrow with three more brewing. I intend to supply the beer at my St. Patrick's Day party next month.

Here's a couple of the labels I've done recently:



And two variations on the Witty Monkbier:

that is so cool. It never even occurred to me that you could get creative and make your own labels and shit. That's a kickass hobby that has some real potential.