I was a professional brewer and a homebrewer for decades before that. I can still knock out 20 to 30 batches a year still especially since I went from 10 gal to 5. But I’ve seen a lot of equipment for sale on marketplace and eBay. Some things took time and dedication to buy/ build.
so My ?? Is, if you did and now have stopped homebrewing why? Any particular reason? Cost, availability of ingredients? Just very curious.

Why do you think this hobby skews to an older guy demographic? I’m 28 and all the guys in the local homebrew club I joined are ~40+. It’s still a lot of fun I was just curious… and it’s a long shot but anyone here around my age and live in Worcester county MA?

Good morning, brewers!

I just got my hands on a five gallon brewing kit and wanted to put it to use soon. My only experience brewing/fermenting has been homemade ginger beer from wild yeast, so I’m a bit intimidated by the influx of information I’m getting online.

So, I figured I’d ask the simple question of what y’all wish you were told or knew as a beginner. For clarification, I primarily want to brew beer and cider, but wine and seltzer aren’t off the table, either!

Cheers!

I loved homebrewing to an obsession for 14 years, since discovering it sitting in a computer lab in college ordering Homebrew Adventure kits. I matured into it listening to hours of The Brewing Network as I brewed 2-3 times a month to keep my 5 taps filled.

Unfortunately at 34, I gave up the hobby and sold everything as we uprooted our family overseas to southern Germany 🇩🇪 🇺🇸. The first few years were glorious, inexpensive German/European beer flowed everyday, but after a few years, I lost interest in beer. Beer is great here, but “boring” after a while. I actually stopped drinking for a few years, found interest in fitness/cycling, lost my “American pudge,” and drank mostly N/A Weizens.

Fast forward to now, at 44, we own a little plot of Sauvignon Blanc grapes and after 3 years of getting the growing/pruning aspect down, decided to try making wine.

There was something about religiously sanitizing all equipment, taking gravity readings, and smelling fermentation, that woke something up inside of me.

After doing tons a research and learning about new players like Kegland, I’m seriously considering jumping back in (wife gave the thumbs up). I used to have a simple turkey fryer setup with a couple igloo coolers for mashing/sparging.

Those with similar experiences, any regrets?
The “game” has changed soooo much in my 10.5 year absence:

-AIO systems seem to be norm (and look pretty bad ass, looking at the Brewziilla 4)
-pressure fermentation
-closed pressure transferring
-pretty much only online ordering (almost seems like you have to plan 4-5 brews out to save on shipping)
-Dry yeast is now preferred!!!!??!!!
-Apparently yeast starters are now obsolete
-NEIPA?
-PET kegs (actually considering beginning with these instead of cornys)
-no secondary anymore
-less big influencer/expert names, but more social media influencers..

It’s almost overwhelming, thanks for the rant.

Hi! Has anyone here ever seriously considered selling their beer commercially?

I’ve been homebrewing for years and at various points I’ve thought about turning it into a business. I’ve done some small commercial projects and events, but I’m increasingly wondering whether trying to monetize brewing can actually take away some of the enjoyment that made it appealing in the first place.

For those of you who have been brewing for a long time:
What keeps you passionate about homebrewing?
Have you ever considered starting a brewery or selling your beer commercially?

If so, what made you decide for or against it?

Do you think turning brewing into a business risks ruining the hobby?

Looking back, would you make the same decision again?
I’d be interested to hear both from people who stayed hobby brewers and from those who went professional.

Whats your oldest piece of brewing equipment? During my brew day a few weeks ago it was looking at my equipment and had the realization that in the past 32 years of home brewing a lot of equipment has come and gone, but i have 1 10 polar ware gallon brew kettle and a j schmidling malt mill that i have used for
The past 30 years. I have other kettles and another malt mill but just prefer these 2 pieces of equipment when brewing.

I have now brewed 6 batches and my last two went really great tastewise. It was really hoppy beers and I thought they tasted pretty good. The thing was they clearly oxidized by color. The last one was nice yellow and clear. 4 days later it was more hazy and brown. But it still tasted nice somehow. I don't have room right now for storing a keg. But is that just life? How does one bottle without oxidize or is that just the game? Do I avoid hoppy beers? Or is there something I could invest in before getting a new fridge + keg?

I don’t care if it’s expensive though hopefully it’s below a few hundred dollars. My other neighbor’s house completely burned down this evening and Mr. Brewer ran into my front yard with his hose (my front of house has no spigot, I was in the backyard with my hose).

I don’t know if what we did affected anything but goddammit it really seems like it’s the main reason the fire didn’t reach my house, and I need to tell this man thank you again.

Basically what the title states. How do I avoid exposure as much as possible as a Homebrewers with a fermenting bucket and bottles.

Edit: the amount of answers are overwhelming and I don't have time to react to everything! But thanks for all the help guys!

I dearly want to be able to bottle hoppy beers without oxidation soon, and I'm looking to invest in some sort of CO2 purging solution you guys talked about. But when looking at a fermzilla + BEERGUN setup with CO2 tank, my friend asked me if I couldn't just buy a CO2 tank and some sort of wand to purge my bottles with without buying 100s of dollars worth of pressure fermenter.

What about a fermzilla is needed for succesfull bottle purging?

Cheers

I brewed a hefeweizen with:

• 60% wheat, 25% Pilsner, 10% Munich, 5% Caramunich II
• Mash: 60 min at 67°C
• OG: 12°P, 10 IBU, Saphir, boil 60 min
• Pitched dry W68 at 17°C, held 17°C constant
• Fermented for 7 days, until FG stable
• Bottled with 5 g sugar per 0.5 L
• 7 days carbonating, then 7 days at 4°C
• Clean bottles, sanitized with SanStar

The beer looks great: stable foam, nice lacing, good carbonation. But there is almost no aroma at all — no banana, no clove, nothing. It tastes slightly sour and bitter and not very soft.

Is it simply too early to judge, or did fermenting at 17°C suppress the banana/clove character too much?

Edit: pitched 0.4 g/L wort, the goal is banana, not clove.

Edit 2: I will try doing a simple 50% wheat malt and 50% pilsner malt adding around 5% dextrose to reach OG 1.053, using 0.25 g/L underpitching with W68 dry yeast, open fermentation at 22 C.

I am making a Belgian quad as my first beer. My gravity is stalling near 1.0234. My OG was 1.1028. Why is the gravity not going lower? I used 4 liquid packets of Wyeast 3787 and 1.5 tsp of Fermaid O for a 5-gallon batch. I finely crushed my grain myself.

Grain Bill

I mashed at 150 Fahrenheit for 75 minutes, then brought it to a 168°F mash-out for 10 minutes. My mash briefly went too high to 158 Fahrenheit, but I brought it back down.

My pre-boil gravity was only 1.048, so I added extra Belgian Candi syrup (D-180) during the boil. I added 4.5lbs total. I thought most of this sugar would ferment out past the typical 74-78% attenuation by Wyeast 3787. I also added 2.5 oz of Styrian Goldings Hops during the boil.

I was aiming for a lower final gravity 1.014-1.018. Why is my gravity stalling higher? Was there too much sugar in the wort? Is there anything I can do to reach my desired gravity? I have EC-1118 yeast, but I don't want to change the flavor profile of my beer from that Belgian quad style. If I could get it down to 1.020, that would be good (although the original goal of 1.014-1.018 is ideal). My inspiration for making this beer is St. Bernardus Abt. 12.

Here is a link to my fermentation data from my tilt hydrometer: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TIfuz3Tx-7Da9xN24Vp_lmMfMjm8mtJTLJM6zcptByM/edit?usp=sharing

Just turned 21 and I want to get into home brewing… I’d like to try and make something with a higher ABV and have it be relatively simple. I’ve got a couple friends and family members who’d like to buy some off me so it’d have to be good for that. I don’t have any equipment as it stands but I’d be willing to get some.

So I’ve finally decided to give homebrewing a try after talking about it for years. Picked up a starter kit last weekend spent hours setting everything up and honestly felt like a mad scientist in my kitchen. I even had jackpot city running in the background while waiting for the wort to cool felt like the perfect chill setup. That said I already feel like I’m walking blindfolded through a chemistry lab. There are so many small details like sanitizing, fermentation temps, bottling timing and every guide I read seems to say something slightly different. I just want to make sure I don’t completely ruin my first batch.

For those of you who’ve been doing this a while what are the biggest beginner mistakes you wish you avoided early on? I’m talking about the stuff you don’t realize until you taste that first “oops” beer.

My husband loves to brew his own beer, while I love to bake my own sourdough bread. He’s asked me to stop doing that because apparently my hobby was killing his beers. I do miss it terribly though…

I totally accept his reasoning and the problem, but I was hoping for a possible solution so we can both enjoy our hobbies and eat my bread while drinking his beer.

What can we do?

What do you do while you're brewing? We have an hour when the grain is in the mashtun. Then we have an hour when it's boiling. I'm finding it hard to fill the 2 hours. I don't have to babysit my rig. But I don't want to mow n fill the air with pollen. I don't want to work on something n get my hands greasy or full of wood dust.

I have been brewing extracts mostly to save time but I was spending around $55 per 5 gallon batch which is a little crazy for my B grade beer so I decided to go back to all grain and go as cheap as I can and it's still $40 for a simple pilsner with 34-70 and 3 oz of hops? Plus an extra 2-3 hours.

Anyone have any success keeping it to $25-ish?

I haven't come upon a reasonably priced mill yet but I'm guessing that would be the move to buy bulk grain and hops. I thought my shop would have cheaper grains but 9 lbs of czech pilsner malt ended up only $10 less than 2 cans of extract.

Like the title says. Late in the night I was not thinking straight and I poured my wort on a container that still had some starsan in it. I pitched the yeast into the wort 30 min before. Is this going to prevent fermentation? Will it taste bad? I spent the whole afternoon making the beer only to make this dumb mistake...

Good afternoon! I recently moved into an apartment, taking my brewing supplies with me, and I'm trying to puzzle out how to best handle the issue of exhausts from my kits. I don't want to stink up the apartment, and the closet I was planning on keeping it in doesn't have ventilation.

I tried looking into this online, but I was never able to find someone who simply put a tube on the end of their three-piece airlock and put the exhaust out the window. Is this something that anyone here has tried before?

I hopped on the beer homebrew wagon 20 years ago. Had ALL the equipment. So much so that it was problematic. Eventually gave up beer brewing as it was too complicated, expensive, and most of all, time consuming. Eventually switched to mead brewing and I quite like its laid back nature. I didn’t want to get back into beer brewing because I don’t want to deal with all the equipment again. That was until I saw a YouTube video of someone brewing in an Oxebar brewing system AND serving it in the same vessel. I had no idea this was possible. Which leads me to my question; is there a more durable system to do this in? Possibly a 1-3 gallon brew keg I can do this in without worrying about the plastic breaking or wearing out? Do you have any links to resources about brewing this way?

The idea of this method is very enticing to me. I am not looking for award winning beer. Just something fast and easy that I made myself.

Why does this subreddit not allow pictures? I’m my country (UK) imgur is blocked which makes it impossible to view posts with pictures in. Would be nice if there was the option to post pictures directly.

So I've recently come to the conclusion that I want more beers on tap. Currently I have 4 taps and 6 kegs in my keezer. While it was enough for a while, I feel like my pipeline leaves me with one or two taps with either no beer or a green beer thats not quite ready to drink. Even with having the extra two kegs for conditioning.

So my question is... how many kegs/taps do you all run?

Happy weekend!

Sorry for asking a stupid question. Wines are too expensive here. I tried finding pure 100 percent fruit juice but the best one i found had 18.6 percent apple concentrate, INS 300 antioxidant.

I don't have a juicer and it is beyond unhygienic to buy juice from local shops.

I was thinking about using instant yeast bread yeast since I couldn't find any genuine wine yeast.

Hello everyone,

After having less luck with bottling, I finally got some kegs and want to try a simple, malty, low-IBU beer that should have a relatively fast turnaround. The main goal is to see if I can get the whole process right from brew day to kegging.

I've become quite unsure about my process because I seem to get some kind of off-flavour in most of my beers. I've honestly started thinking about quitting homebrewing, so this time I want to keep things as simple as possible and eliminate variables.

Ca: 57 ppm
Mg: 7 ppm
Na: 8 ppm
Cl: 9 ppm
SO₄: 15 ppm
HCO₃: 186 ppm

I'm going to make no changes to the water this time. Let's see what happens without trying to adjust everything. I can not measure pH so maybe my adjustments were wrong.

• 70% Pilsner — base malt
• 20% Munich — maltiness
• 5% Carapils — head retention
• 5% CaraMunich II — caramel notes
• Mash: 67°C for 60 minutes
• Boil: 60 minutes
• Hops: Hallertau Tradition, targeting ~15 IBU, 60-minute addition
• Chill to 25°C
• OG 1.053 (13 P)
• Pitch S-05
• Ferment at 17°C for two weeks or should I check FG until three days stable?
• Keg at the end of fermentation
• Carbonate at 12 psi / 4°C for two weeks

I'm mainly trying to make one uncomplicated beer where I can hopefully get from brew day to a good pint without introducing too many variables.

Really want to get something nice to drink and finally have some success.

Thanks!

Edit: I have following malts:

Belgomalt Pilsen 2,5 - 4,5 EBC Belgomalt Munich 25 - 35 EBC Belgomalt Wheatmalt 4,5 - 5,5 EBC Weyermann® Melanoidinmalz 60-80 EBC Weyermann® CaraMunich 2 110-130 EBC Weyermann® Chocolate 500-800 EBC Weyermann® CaraPils® 2,5-6,5 EBC 25 Weyermann® Carafa® Special type 3 1300-1500 EBC Flaked oats Flaked wheat

I’m looking for ideas for my next brew so thought I’d ask you guys!

My answer is, in America at least, any kind of bitter. I rarely find them when out to eat or drink at local breweries, and when I do they’re so “Americanized” (high ABV and hop forward with American style hops) that I’m more inclined to call them pale ales than anything. I wish authentic bitters were more common (around me at least). Honorable mention goes to “lawnmower beers” like Cream Ale and Blondes which both get called “boring” too often in my opinion, and a good Brown Ale is hard to beat too.

Cheers!