Home brewing anyone?

Yellow Ledbelly

Does anybody here dabble in home brewing beer?
My buddy and I have been in serious discussion about giving it a try...probably starting with one of those kits but it seems like a fun hobby, maybe a little pricey though.

Anyone have advice on getting started, recipes, successes or horrible failures to share?

weekapaug19

just started this year, midwestsuppy.com is good place to start with a kit, keep an eye out on groupon, they have specials all the time for beginner kits. made 2 pretty good beers, 1 bad one (temp got way too hot during fermentation)

Johnny Aggro

I made one batch of beer about three years back. Its all about the fermentation in heat. You need it around 25c/72F for a week. You cant go wrong with the kits, but making sure everything is totally sterilised is the other main imprtant bit. Once sugared and bottled i left mine for around 3 weeks. not half bad.

a buddy of mine has used chillis to create interesting tastes. Once you get your method down the sky/ or you bladder capacity, is the limit!

loadedgun

I got the groupon kit deal through midwest earlier this year. Great deal. After the up front cost, I figured I'd be saving about half price on beer compared to retail.

My first batch didn't come out too great, and I just bottled my 2nd batch last week. Should be ready by PJ20.

Warning though, it is addicting. 2 batches in and I've already started buying more equipment.
Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew!

Neosurfer79

I have been homebrewing for 5 years now...great hobby and very rewarding..but you won't be saving money on brewing your own beer compared to buying it in the store...Do Not buy the Mr. Beer brewing kit..it is a waste of money....stick with glass carboys....and at least try to work your way into partial mash brewing because it is much more rewarding then using just malt extract..let me know if you have any questions!

JTH

I've got a batch going right now. I was hoping to have something ready for PJ20, but I dind't get around to it until this past weekend. (I pitched the yeast on Monday morning.)

My advice: start simple. Plastic buckets work just fine. I've got glass carboys for my primary/secondary fermentation vessels, but other than that, my setup is pretty minimal. I use a tamale pot (that I bought at Kmart for like $5) to boil my wort -- no $200 stainless steel stockpot or anything like that for me.

The only other "extravagance" is that I have an Erlenmeyer flask to make yeast starters any time the yeast is questionable (I always do any time I'm using dry yeast). I've had a couple batches that got ruined due to bad yeast.

I went with liquid yeast this time so I didn't bother with the starter.

Yellow Ledbelly

Thanks for all the tips.
And yes I have tons of questions but I figure it's not quite as complicated as it seems to my feeble mind right now. Hope not anyway.
As for it being addictive, I can totally see me getting really out of hand if I ever really get into it.
Buddy is going to get his wife to buy him a kit for his birthday in a couple of weeks and we are going to see what comes from that.
I don't know....we love beer and it just seems ilke it would be a really cool feeling to open one and know that you made it...like someone said, it seems like it would be rewarding