Do you get good results out of your beer? I've been thinking about trying this for a long time....but wondered if it was worth the effort.
1900% increase in the beer tax!
- Thread starter brianhos
- Start date
I think homebrew is way better than almost anything you can buy at the store - or at least it can be.
It doesn't have to be that much work, to be honest. You can probably brew an extract batch in a couple of hours (and most of that time will be standing around watching wort boil). All you need is a big pot (8 gallons or so preferably, but smaller is alright - you just wont' be able to boil all the wort), a couple of fermenting buckets (20 bucks or so total), some bottles (not twist-off - but you can use commercial ones - just soak them in oxyclean for a half hour or so and the labels will come right off, otherwise you can buy new ones but they are a bit spendy), some caps (couple bucks), a capper (10 bucks or so) and a few sundry, inexpensive items, and the ingredients.
For extract brewing, you literally boil water, toss some powder or syrup in it, add some hops at certain times in the boil, pour it into a bucket, toss some yeast in and wait.
Takes a week or so to primary, and then maybe another week to settle out in secondary (though you don't necessarily need to do this), then you bottle, wait a week or two and drink. A 5 gallon batch of extract beer will run you around 25-30 bucks or thereabouts, depending on what sort of beer it is and how many hops you use etc. That makes roughly 50 12 oz bottles of beer.
Of course you can get way more involved that. I brew all grain, which requires a little more equipment (mostly stuff you can build yourself with parts from home depot), and a bit more time (4 hours minimum). There are guys out there with crazy huge setups that cost thousands of dollars, with pumps, couterflow chillers, conical stainless steel fermenting vessels, automated temperature controlled natural gas burners etc.
Nothing tastier or more rewarding than a beer you've brewed yourself.
Edit: if you're wanting to get started in the Des Moines area, I highly recommend Beer Crazy up in Urbandale. It's in the strip mall behind where Autograph's used to be on 100th. He's got as reasonable prices as you'll find anywhere on the internet, and he's local and a great guy. He's very helpful and can answer any questions you might have about equipment and whatnot. He's got a great selection of beer too, to tide you over until your first batch is ready to drink
There's also a place in Valley Junction, which is a bit bigger, but the prices are quite a bit higher and the guy is a bit...odd.http://www.gobeercrazy.com/
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I love how the government these days keeps trying to get out of debt by taxing the crap out of everything. So they don't know how to spend money so they always want more from the people. Then they wonder why nobody has any money to buy anything and keep the economy afloat.
