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Looking for the home brewers here, never done anything like this , but I'm interested to start brewing in my garage.
Where do I start? What do I need?
The very basics are:
Fermenting bin - £15
Big long plastic spoon - £5
Bottles or a keg for the finished beer - bottles are free provided you buy the beer inside them!
Siphon tubing - £5
Cleaning solution -£3 but that only gets you VWP, chlorine based solution which I hate
And a beer kit. And some sugar if the kit requires it. £12-£25
If you don't have a local Homebrew shop, try Tesco Direct. You can buy a Coopers Microbrewery containing all of the above for well under £100. Or Wilkinsons.
Now I'm no fan of beer kits so I brew from grain and hops. The very basics for this, in addition to the above, are:
A mesh bag for the grains - £10
A boiler - 32l stainless steel pan with tap - £70, or an electric, digitally controlled boiler - £115
Digital kitchen scales
The raw ingredients, malted barley in various depths of roast, hops and yeast. A simple recipe containing just pale malt and a single hop, plus yeast, should come to around a tenner
And a recipe
Additional kit to make life easier includes:
A chiller - immersion chiller £55, plate chiller £90
A bottling stick £4
If you're going to brew in the garage at this time of year, you'll also need a builders' trug and an aquarium heater, or a lager kit/recipe
Extract kits are a good place to start as they're cheap, easy and make acceptable ale - gets you used to the basics of the brewing process.
All grain brewing in a bag that John lays out above is now so straightforward, though, that I'd be tempted to just dive into that - you can brew really excellent ale that way. You need to boil a lot of liquid, though, so if you're doing it in your garage an outlay on some sort of boiler / propane heater is unavoidable. Could do it on your kitchen hob if you have a massive stock pot.
Or the 32l electric boiler I mentioned...
Where are you Denis? Anywhere near Leeds, give Chris a ring at Morley Homebrew and see if you can get on the next demo day, second Sunday in March
0113 2537688
Excellent website here [url= http://www.howtobrew.com/ ]how to brew your own beer[/url]
Thanks
I live near Afan , South Wales.
Looks like. I have the basis here to begin my own brewing, thanks.
you need lots of empty bottles. Best start emptying them now.
Theakstons, Black Sheep and Fullers are especially good as the labels fall of at the first sight of water.
Wychwood bottles are not so good if you have a two lever capper, the mouth of the bottle is too fat
Coopers PET bottles are good as you can tell when it's carbonated - the bottle goes from squishy when first filled to rock hard when fully carbonated. I always have at least one of these in every batch
I gtot a starter kit with Wherrys for £60
Just want to check. That escalated a bit quickly.
You need a big bucket, some home brew, some sugar. That's it,
Once you've done the first bit (a week or so), you need somewhere to put it, either a big barrel or loads of plastic bottles. And some more sugar.
John is correct, it's a bit cold yet. If you want to start home brewing, start in summer otherwise the secondary fermentation in particular will be a bit slow.
Or brew indoors and do the secondary indoors as well