Now that the insane practice of outlawing Homebrew has been ceased in Alabama, I’m officially a brewin fool!! Of course, I’m a total Noob with no clue what I’m doing, but darn if this homebrewing thing ain’t the most fun you can have with your clothes on!!!
I just racked my first batch of Caribou Slobber extract to the secondary (I know most of ya’ll don’t use the secondary) and now I need to fill my fermentor up again! The Caribou Slobber has gone like clockwork and tastes fantastic (had to drink my gravity sample of course- even the wife loved it!) So now it’s time to get some more experience. I don’t want to get ahead of myself by jumping into BIAB or partial mash, so what would you experts recommend a total derp like me should brew next? I am partial to hoppy IPAs and love Hefeweizens.
As far as equipment, I got the NB deluxe NooB Kit with a gravity testing kit and went out to the kitchen store and got an 8-gallon boil kettle. I also fashioned an immersion wort chiller from less than $50 worth of supplies from Lowe’s (worked like a champ- 12 minutes from boil temp to 78 f).
If you want to stick with extract kits and like IPAs, search Northern Brewer’s site for IPA extract kits and you’ll find several. Read through the descriptions and user reviews to see which one sounds most appealing to you. Sorry I don’t have one to recommend. I’ve only made one IPA so far and it wasn’t a kit. Dry hopping in secondary at the moment. Can’t wait to drink it!
As far as extract kits, I’ve made the Caribou Slobber, Brickwarmer, Cream Ale (multiple times) and St. Paul Porter, and I’d recommend any of them (if you like the style). They all turned out great.
If you like hefeweizens, I would highly recommend NB’s bavarian hefewiezen extract kit(definitely go with the weihenstephan liquid yeast). Really easy to brew and all the beer drinkers in the family LOVE it. I’ve got a second five gallon batch that’s been bottled for a week–can’t wait to try one out. The american wheat is also a solid, easy brew that is a great base to experiment with. Got that one in the fermentor right now, added orange zest late in the boil–it smells awesome. In reality, I have not had a bad kit from NB, they’ve all been very good, much better than most I can get at the grocery, anyway.
Just have fun with it–sounds like you’re doing just that.
Thanks, Ron I was keeping the Hefe in my wish list wondering if it was any good. I’ll give it a try next weekend. I prefer my Hefes mittelklar as apposed to dunkel, so I’ll look through the great advice here or talk to the experts at NB to see how that’s done.
