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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Reality of Home Brewing Versus In-Store Brewing
-- A Taste from TheInkFlowsLikeWine.com
Learning more and more about home brewing, I've realized I'm going to have to try my hand at actually brewing for myself this Saturday if I'd like the beer to be ready by the time my family comes for Xmas. I didn't realize that there would be so many differences from when I did it in the brew store, but I guess I should have. For one thing, I need to prime the beer to carbonate it with some type of sugar, which makes it take a bit longer to carbonate, around 2 weeks instead of 1. This differs from when we gave each bottle a shot of CO2 and let the yeast carbonate the beer. Although, they may have actually primed it and I didn't know, not sure I guess.
I'm looking through the beer kit my friend gave me and trying to figure out what I need, how to siphon properly, and all the other stuff I should have asked about when I was learning how to brew. But it's a totally different method for everything besides the actual cooking process. The bottling and priming is different, as well as the possibility of doing a second fermentation or a mash. The home brewing world is quite dense I've found, but I'm willing to dive in a make some mistakes.
I'm also scanning the internet for an easy beer recipe that I could make without it turning into a disaster. I thought about maybe trying to make an oatmeal stout again to see if I could replicate the results, but that seems a bit boring. So I'm on the look out for a good, simple recipe if any one knows one.
