There are very few smells in the world as good as walking into the barrel room of a winery.
I actually was clearing out my garage last weekend and I tossed out most my beer making stuff. The only things I kept were a couple carboys and the capper.
On our honeymoon my wife and I stayed in Napa for a day. Sampling the rose in the barrel room, then sipping glasses on the veranda at sunset was an experience not soon forgotten.
@Scuzz man I have way too much brewing stuff. Like half of a spare room full of it. I’m just waiting for the day my SO gives me a talk about reducing the amount of space for that. And what’s messed up is I wish I had more. I can completely understand getting rid of all of it. We have a club email list where people very frequently post, “getting rid of it all,” emails and give back to the local homebrew clubs.
I am old enough that back in the day we used to get a couple car loads of people and drive up to Napa for the weekend and just have a good time. Now you couldn’t get me to go there if you put a gun to my head. We go over to the Sonoma side. Fewer people and still some very good wine.
When I started making beer my beer was better than what you could buy in the store. Now however I can stop at any store on the way home and find excellent beer. So other than the joy in making it I just didn’t think I needed the stuff anymore.
I have a neighbor down the street who makes very good beer. He won a Sam Adams contest years ago. Every now and then we get some of his stuff.
I’ve done that cost/time/availability calculation in my head many, many times. The problem for me is consistency, and then brewing something I want to drink a lot of. I mean I’ve brewed dozens of time. In those times I’ve made maybe 10 beers I thought were better than what I could go out and buy. I’ve suffered through about the same number that were either bad or ended up being partially or fully poured down the drain. There are a ton in the middle that I could take or leave, but I drank or shared them with friends.
But let’s say I could consistently make a beer I would consistently want to drink, maybe an IPA. I could very well get my cost down below a decent IPA six pack range (I think Two Hearted is $8.99 right now.) The problem is consistency. It’s also consumption before I get tired of it or it oxidizes too much. And the biggest problem with consistency is gear, and making things very repeatble, so you end up with more gear, etc.
It’s a fun hobby, but there are pitfalls, and like you, I find myself just buying beer a lot more, especially when I just don’t drink as much as I did in the past.
The best home-brewed beer I’ve ever had was an IPA that @fire brought over from a friend at work. Dude had a tasting at his house we couldn’t attend, but put out the bat signal for folks who had growlers as it was an IPA and he was about to go on a trip and he wanted it to be consumed while fresh. It was a really, really good beer and luckily I have a growler.
She had another friend who had her bring me a brown beer he made one time. Oh my. It tasted like butt.
I’ve always wanted to try home brewing, but boy can your mileage vary.
-xtien
In the last 3-5 years there has been an explosion of small craft brewers in my area. Places opening up in strip malls, some with restaurants some with just beer. And even these guys, who have the best equipment and materials, sometimes make bad beer. Not just beer I don’t like, but tasteless, boring everyday stuff not worthy of being called craft beer. But some of it is very very good.
I’m like @Scuzz in that I think I’ve had many, “professionally,” brewed beers that were just mediocre or in some cases, bad. Homebrewing is no different. But I think you have to look at it along the same lines of any new skill or hobby you learn.
I guess one great thing about it as a hobby though is you learn to actually taste beer. I know that sounds funny, but you start to recognize flaws in beers you taste, and even learn to eventually recognize ingredients as well. Certain malts are distinctive, and you eventually can spot several hops by smell and taste. I was encouraged to keep a log on my brew day and throughout fermentation, etc. And keeping notes on stuff like that really helps correlate steps you do with tastes you end up making.
EDIT: One thing to mention is that it’s a really great group hobby. There are a lot of clubs, and you share from the experience of others. A very common thing at meetings is sampling someone else’s work and critiquing them on what they did well, or what they did poorly, all while enjoying beer.
I found out a few years after I quit brewing that there was a very active Home Brew Club here and that there was even a guy who kept supplies available for purchase in a corner of a business he ran.
I was audited (workers comp) one year by a member of the club.
That actually sounds really cool. It is reminiscent of the writing meeting I go to a couple times a month. Except without the beer, sadly.
-xtien
Yep, it’s similar here. Though the three local homebrew supply places aren’t tied directly to the clubs, they support and have a lot of events with the clubs. Our main one here is also so large they have an annual Oktoberfest event that regularly raises from 50-100K for charities.
I typically buy about 1/2 my supplies online, and the other half from the local supply store. I like buying malts/hops/yeast locally when I can because shipping those items sucks sometimes due to weight or temperature requirements.
Edit: @ChristienMurawski It is very cool, we’ve had a few local folks that have gone pro, some joining breweries and others opening their own. That’s not something that happens with a lot of other hobbies.
There is a “beer crawl” held twice yearly in the downtown area of the town I live in and about half the brewers who participate started out as home brewers.
I just finished my second (small) homebrew batch, a apple cider with champagne yeast. Just a little 1-gallon carboy, previously from a kit. Technically, this was a kit refill, but the “refill” was a pack of sanitizer and a pack of yeast (sourced my own cider, obviously), so not much to it.
Unsurprisingly, the end result tasted a lot like a slightly apple-y dry champagne, which is decent, but I’d prefer a slightly sweeter cider, although I’m not quite sure how to accomplish that. I guess the first step is just trying a couple different yeasts. Being in NY, I can get good, fresh apple juice pretty much year round so I’ll probably try again soon.
My local beer superstore has a big homebrew aisle, so hopefully I can find an interesting yeast there.
I read about cyser (apparently apple-honey mead), and may look into a small batch of that. I’m considering buying the Proulix cider book to research a bit. Anybody happen to have any experience with it?
The sugar in juice is 100% fermentable, so the yeast will convert all of it. You can add a yeast stopper before fermentation is over to keep some sweetness, or add artificial sweetener or lemonade.
That’s easy. In addition to adding sweetness like @Jorn_Weines mentioned, you can switch yeasts so that it doesn’t finish quite so dry. I would highly recommend some english ale yeast, and since you want it to finish a bit sweeter, something with a lower attenuation percentage. See this chart for a good comparison (though there are newer ones not on that list, especially for dry yeasts.)
If you add sweetness post fermentation (back sweetening), there are a couple of methods. Kill off the yeast with campden tablets, wait at least a couple of days, then you can back sweeten. Some folks like to be extra sure so they will transfer what’s left off the yeast and into a secondary container. A common way to back sweeten is, drum roll, adding more juice. One I’ve done is adding in cranberry juice. So flipping good. Some discussion on this method.
You can also go the other route, which is adding in sweetener that doesn’t ferment. Wine conditioner can be used, so can artificial sweeteners. I tried both of those methods and wasn’t really happy with the results, but mostly because I don’t think I got them down very well. It’s worth playing with. And since you are doing small fermentation vessels, hey, add some more and try a variance of methods and see what you like. Cider is wonderful for that, so easy to step it down to several small batches going at the same time. Some discussion on the artificial sweeteners.
Almost forgot, if that’s the cider book I’ve seen int he homebrew store, it is excellent. I have it at home and have tried several recipes from it. Unfortunately I don’t have it here to reference the title/author, but I’ll try to locate it once I’m home.
This is the one I was thinking of:
The instructions I have do a secondary fermentation in the bottle, which seems like it would be incompatible with having additional sugar? (I assume I could kill the yeast partway through the secondary by heating or something.) I see what you’re saying about fermentable sugars though. I don’t know how much I really care about the moderate carbonation…I should probably try a batch of still, sweeter cider. I’ve really only started playing with it so clearly there’s a lot to learn.
Cranberry Juice sounds great. I’m pretty fond of Downeast’s Cranberry cider already.
http://downeastcider.com/goods/cranberry-blend/
It would, that’s a recipe for bottle bombs I’m thinking. You’d want to look at non-fermentable sweetener additions, though you could still do your primary ferment with 4/5 apple, 1/5 cranberry if you wanted to try the addition of a flavor. I cheat out on bottling, meaning I keg carb, so I no longer worry about bottling. It was one of the best gear decisions I’ve made while homebrewing. I couldn’t stand bottle day. :(
And that’s the book I have! Excellent info in there.
One of my good homebrew friends is a cider junkie and had me learn it with him. We would frequently buy everything for it and then on a beer brew day while waiting on mash, we would each do a 1/2 batch of cider and try something new. I did that a few times, he has made a ton of batches though. He’s also made Graf (beer + cider) which is damned good as well.
Over the last several years I haven’t found anyone who “bottles” anymore. They do the keg thing.