Home Brewing Ghetto Style
 

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mmmmmmmm beer.

my friend up here at uconn started brewing in his appartment. If you find a local shop that knows their crap you can pick it up pretty quick. Pretty soon you will be makin all different kinds!!

Yay Mr Beer! Our first kit (my buddy and I) was a five gallon bucket kit. Worked fine, but we never brewed another batch. It sure does stink when brewing it on the stove.

I've always wanted to try my hand at it, seems like a lot of work though.

Not really, maybe 20-30 minutes in the kitchen. It's mostly a waiting game.
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According to a quick google search, that kit is very reasonably priced IMO

Welcome to MR.BEER® - Kits

hm maybe I could actually make a beer I like...

Im not a huge fan of beer either but I am tempted to get one of the kits.

Mr. Beer kit is not that great. Know 2 people that got it for xmas and tried it. The beer really ends up tasting ciderish. Very drinkable beer, however. Now that I think about it, not a bad idea for a first timer that doesn't like beer...its very mild in the end.

I've brewed many many batches of bucket beer. Can be great stuff if you sterilize EVERYTHING. If you dont like beer now, there is nothing that will get you to appreciate it like home brewing. Plus brewing 10%+ beers kicks ass.

I want Abe's brew burner =P

not likely with a mr beer kit. what beer dont you like? do you find that it doesn't taste good because of the smooth, featureless region from your navel to your ass crack?

the taste has just never tickled my fancy (nor the area from my navel to my ass crack)

My girlfriend and I are having a really good laugh at this right now.

You can always brew with a little more class and go with a hearts homebrew wine kit. My friends and I have been doing it for awhile. It's great tasting wine.

I think I will do wine soon. The older I get, the more I start to take a liking to wine.

At that point I will have made all of my own vices except growing tobacco and mushrooms.

I switched from beer to mead years ago. Too many times I ended up with beer that was only as good as I could buy, for a lot more work. Mead, on the other hand, is almost impossible to find, and even if you do, chances are it's old and stale.

Mead is basically fermented honey water. Not as sweet as you might imagine - more like a semi-dry wine. Much stronger, though. The mild stuff I make (7-8 pounds honey for 5 gallons) is still as strong enough to give you a buzz on a single 22 ounce bottle. The full strength stuff (15-18 pounds honey) will knock you on your ass.

oooohhh now this sounds interesting, I could pretend I was Beowulf in the Mead Hall and fight off the terrible Grendel while somewhat inebriated!!

I do all grain brewing (start with crushed grain and hops and end up with beer) - it takes a while and is a bit of work but it's fantastic for the results you get and the amount of control you have over the process. It's pretty freaking enjoyable.

The great thing about brewing is that you can make huge complex beers or small simple beers. And they are often great for the price (ie, you can make 5gals of a decent simple IPA that weighs in ~6-7.5ABV for $20-25 depending the price of hops and grain). Not bad at all.

That said I don't know anyone who saves money brewing, if anything I started buying MORE beer while buying and building MORE brewing equipment. Is pretty sweet to have kegs of your own beer though.

(and as another said Mr. Beer kits aren't too great. They're alright for starting out on but the quality of beer isn't near what you'd get out of a simple extract kit you'd buy from a Homebrew store. For ~$100 you can have a full starter kit that will let you brew most types of ale (lagers are tougher since you need to store them at low temps))

And indeed, making beer is like mac and cheese but with insane sanitation practices. =D

What you guys need to do is start brewing up some ethanol. Shot for me, shot for the car, shot for me...

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You can ferment nearly anything that has sugar in it.

I knew some people in Georgia who made wine from blueberries instead of grapes. They had a small blueberry orchard. It was strong and not very sweet and was pretty good. Store-bought blueberry and blackberry wines are too sickly sweet.

Those same guys made fig wine once, too.

The guy who owns Maztech, a Mazda repair shop in Tampa is bigtime into the home brewing club in town. He is also a master beer judge or third degree black belt or something. They just had a mead competition in Daytona or somewhere over that way.

I personally love weizen.

Yeah, seriously! Let me go get that $10,000 worth of change from under my couch.....