What are your “Must Have items” for Extract brewing?
What are your “nice to have items”?
Not trying to hijack the earlier thread, just thought it might be nice to have 2 topics for this, One for All-Grain brewing and one for Extract.
Bench capper for the bottlers.
Must have:
Kettle big enough for full boil. I personally had better results with full boil extract than partial boil and topping off.
Nice to have:
Burner to avoid giant boilover mess on the stove. Garage floor is much easier to clean up.
Rad
I agree. If I had to tell someone what to buy it would be a bigger brew pot for full boils. Mine is 8 gallons and kind of tight for a full boil. I would feel much more comfortable with a 10 gallon brew pot. Had my first boil over outside yesterday and even though it wasn’t a bad one it was bad enough. I needed one more arm. Stirring with one hand, spraying cold water with the other, trying to turn down the temp all at once. Yikes!
(I’m brewing one gallon batches).
- mini-cupcake holders (for small amounts of hops and yeast)
- digital scale (for measurements up to an ounce in 0.1 gram increments)
- refractometer
- a software recipe calculator
- this forum
- an excellent homebrew club
- fermentation and temperature control (“a picture is worth a 1000 words”)
Completely agree, except I would classify the outdoor burner as a must have. If you have a significant other who isn’t fond of a humid, hop smelly house with the risk of a major mess, an outdoor burner is a must!
Not sure what the picture is. Harvested yeast or little Minnie beers
I brewed a gallon batch and split it into 4 to try a couple of different things on a ‘small’ scale (the water bottle on the left has ice in it). The ‘A’ & ‘B’ labeled fermenters in the back are gallon batches that I did brewed around April 1st & will be bottled ‘soon’ (initial 'FG" measurements will be taken later this week).
Dang… a gallon split into four must give you what, a bottle per experiment?
Stop it now
Two bottles from three of the experiments & three bottles from the fourth. Next time around, I’ll target 40 oz (rather than 32) into each of the jars so I’ll get three bottles each.
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That’s not too bad - the smallest I’ve gone is using a 750ml wine bottle as a primary fermenter. Got one 12-oz bottle out of it, and damn was it a good beer!
Don’t you guys have any friends ?
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Who really wants to drink more than a 6-pack of anything?
I actually had a bottle of hill farmstead that I finished on brew day, and it had a helluva yeast cake on the bottom of the bottle. I was making an IPA that day, so once the wort was cooled I refilled the bottle with wort and slapped on an airlock. Ultimate nanobrew!
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Airlock or blowoff tube?
I’ll know in a couple of weeks if I did as well as you did.
Airlock… Just filled it to the shoulders. It had a mixed culture in it, and in my experience they have much smaller krausen. Maybe a half inch max?
