Easiest Fastest and Best Value way to Brew Beer?

FutureTeashock

I want to start brewing before Leo's hated minimum unit pricing kicks in.:mad:


The problem is, I don't want to spend hours faffing around to make a single batch -- I want to enjoy my beers as soon as possible.


Which beer kit suits my needs best? There are so many of them! :eek:

Bogwoppit

All the beer kits will take about the same amount of time.
The quality varies and it usually depends on the price, where you want to go in that price range depends on you.

SoupyNorman

The faffing is what it’s all about.

Having been bitten hard by the brew bug in the last 6 months I’ve gone from having the same mindset as you i.e. brew lots of my own cheap beer and cider to now where I want to produce bespoke high quality batches and age them. I’ve just bottled up my first cider batch of the year and I wont expect I’ll drink any until at least Christmas and on into next year.

Also, it certainly does take moderate care and attention to complete a batch. Many things can go wrong along the way and the only real way to perfect your technique is practice but it certainly takes a lot of patience.

Lastly, equipment. My wife is getting mildly concerned at the frequency of the Amazon deliveries to the house, individual items you need are not hugely expensive in themselves but when you stand back and take stock of all the bits and pieces that make brew life easier the costs can mount up HOWEVER most items reusable and just one off expenses.

If you really want fast cheap booze, I’d suggest making Turbo cider.

squawker

FutureTeashock wrote: »

Which beer kit suits my needs best? There are so many of them! :eek:

stick to Coopers or Mangrove Jacks when starting out

I would stick to Ales / IPAs starting off as they will quite happily ferment between 17-24 degrees as this is a good house temp for Ireland

Get a kg of DME and a kg of Dextrose mix these to 800g of DME to 400g Dextrose this will give your kit a better mouthfeel than just dextrose and your brew will be about 5%

also dry hop your Ales for around 3-4 days before bottling for more aroma

I watched this guy when starting off

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX7rmkU_Yc8

I’ve only started at it myself and my biggest issue was wrapping my head around the malt extract, dry malt, and sugar thing. Got some really good help on here and watched this guy in his very first few videos (skipped the cider, etc stuff) as he had the very same questions I had (though he’s moved on quite a bit since).

squawker

ReginaldSmythV wrote: »

I’ve only started at it myself and my biggest issue was wrapping my head around the malt extract, dry malt, and sugar thing.

Pretty good guide here as well

https://www.nationalhomebrewclub.ie/wordpress/guide-to-fermentables-sugars/

squawker

squawker wrote: »

Pretty good guide here as well

https://www.nationalhomebrewclub.ie/wordpress/guide-to-fermentables-sugars/

That’s great actually, bookmarked that.

I’ve a bag of DME that I’m going to use for a stout with some sugar as soon as one of my buckets are free.

ArrBee

If your main concern is unit cost you might still be better going to Aldi.
Over you add the time it takes with brewing, cleaning being a big part of that, I don't see how you can get cheaper than the suite beer available in the shops.

But if you like the flavour and want to experiment a bit, that's when brewing becomes worthwhile...

ArrBee

But to answer your question....
I found the cheap kits are pretty ok.
Ukbrew
Mr. Pint
And another one. Check out the online be shops and try their cheapest. You can always soccer it up with malt instead of dex and extra hops. Or other adjuncts. I did and orange and cardamon pale ale once based off a 12 euro kit. Turned out great

squawker

ArrBee wrote: »

If your main concern is unit cost you might still be better going to Aldi

how so? you can make 40 pints of really nice IPA for 22 quid that's better than any of that cheap nasty Aldi lager in 30 minutes with kit beers (and with the new Alcohol bill coming soon your Aldi lager will be nearly €2 a 500ml can)

but homebrew works out at 55c a pint and you don't get that satisfaction of making it yourself if you resort to just sticking to mass produced ditchwater

But a word of warning I started off with Kit beer and now have moved on to full mash, its an addictive hobby :cool:

ArrBee

squawker wrote: »

how so? you can make 40 pints of really nice IPA for 22 quid that's better than any of that cheap nasty Aldi lager in 30 minutes with kit beers (and with the new Alcohol bill coming soon your Aldi lager will be nearly €2 a 500ml can)

but homebrew works out at 55c a pint and you don't get that satisfaction of making it yourself if you resort to just sticking to mass produced ditchwater

But a word of warning I started off with Kit beer and now have moved on to full mash, its an addictive hobby :cool:

I wasn't including any increases in cost of crap beer. If it's going up to 2 euro then sure. Brewing is value.

You've said a lot to favour brewing that isn't cost. It's that the beer is better, satisfaction, etc. And personally, I agree.

My point however is that, by the time you add your time you have to be doing it for those non cost reasons.

If you only care about the cost and don't particularly like nice beer, preferring the suite stuff then you maybe better off just buying it.

Discloser:
I brew and can't stand crap beers. But I know plenty who only like crap beers.

sharingan

squawker wrote: »

how so? you can make 40 pints of really nice IPA for 22 quid that's better than any of that cheap nasty Aldi lager in 30 minutes with kit beers (and with the new Alcohol bill coming soon your Aldi lager will be nearly €2 a 500ml can)

Bear in mind that the Aldi 2€ lager also includes Spaten. Which is a very good Helles, and the Lidl Crafty lager for €1.79 is a great pilsner.

If you wish to make your own beer, purely for cost purposes, you need to include ongoing costs as well as the costs of process improvement. It is useful to factor in 1€ /hr for your labour.

You are kidding yourself if you think you will save money - it doesnt happen, and I mean total costs.

By all means experiment with it, and see what you can make out of it that is nice and personal. But this isnt a free ride.

Disclosure: I have been brewing 9 years now, and medalled at a few competitions along the way. I make accessible, crowd pleasing beer - lagers, pale ales, the odd stout/brown ale, and a saison on occasion, and my ingredient cost is way down. So in theory, batch per batch I am right in the sweet spot for cost cutting: 55L of brew for an ingredient cost ~20-30€ - about worst case scenario about 35c / 500ml for the expensive hoppy stuff, maybe as low as 15c / 500ml for simple blonde ales with a modest hop bill.

What those costs hide is the large amount of money spent on kit to get to that level, and the extra spend on kit to control the time sink. The effort is real to get the good results. While you can achieve great results with basic kit (as long as that basic kit includes a temperature controlled fermentation chamber), many brewers who have been bitten by that bug will continue to spend more for progressive refinements in quality and process.

L1011

€1/hour for your own time??

If you are doing something to save money you need to provide a realistic value for your free time. Mine is what I'd get after tax if I was doing paid overtime for it which is vastly, vastly higher than that. If I'm not saving that I'm not making a good use of my time.

Bogwoppit

L1011 wrote: »

€1/hour for your own time??

If you are doing something to save money you need to provide a realistic value for your free time. Mine is what I'd get after tax if I was doing paid overtime for it which is vastly, vastly higher than that. If I'm not saving that I'm not making a good use of my time.

Only relevant if the time spent brewing is actual time taken away from that well paying job. If you were doing it instead of sitting on your arse watching Netflix then it’s a different value.

ArrBee

Bogwoppit wrote: »

Only relevant if the time spent brewing is actual time taken away from that well paying job. If you were doing it instead of sitting on your arse watching Netflix then it’s a different value.

I don't think I would ever watch TV if it cost me my net hourly rate to do so.
Actually, I don't think I would do anything if it were the case....


Hang on.... doing nothing would cost just as much! agghhhhhhhH!

sharingan

L1011 wrote: »

€1/hour for your own time??

If you are doing something to save money you need to provide a realistic value for your free time. Mine is what I'd get after tax if I was doing paid overtime for it which is vastly, vastly higher than that. If I'm not saving that I'm not making a good use of my time.

The argument here is that you should put a value on your time spent on brewing. Even a shocking 1€ an hour spent in brewing activities adds up to wipe out any gains on the per litre difference between house beer and shop beer.

If you put a higher value on your time, the home brew costs go way up. It’s not about whether your free time is worth more than that, it’s about acknowledging its role in the cost equation

I wouldn't be doing a single thing otherwise at the times I'm making beer so I count it at 0 per hour.

L1011

If you're doing it for fun, learning or whatever other reason there's no need to attribute a value - when you're doing it in the belief that you're saving money as the OP wanted you really do!

raxy

I don't get the argument about costing the time you put in. The cost to make it is exactly that, what you spend to make it. Ingredients, materials & utilities (gas/electricity).
You don't pay yourself so why make up a cost for no reason. Your payment is the enjoyment in making & drinking it.

ArrBee

For me, it's more an opportunity cost rather than an hourly rate as such.
When I am brewing there are a bunch of other things not being done. I don't know about the rest of you but I have a never ending list of things that need doing around the house and if I am comparing the cost to furnish myself with 40pints it is a factor.

For someone who loves the time spent brewing and has nothing else they could be doing, then perhaps they'd like to calculate their time as zero cost.

Don't forget that this thread started as a question:
-how to brew the cheapest but still OK to drink beer. not for enjoyment, but for cost.

Not, "how to brew nice beer", "or I'm interested in brewing what do I need to make a start."


Sometimes I wonder if I could by corny kegs of good craft beer from a brewery, what would the cost be and would I stop brewing myself.

sharingan

Your time comes into it, and it is worth accounting for that somehow. Because every brewer I know ends up spending money on something that will help them save time on some of the brewing activities.

Whether thats kegging, or some kind of automation, like temperature controllers, Clean In Place gear, timer plugs etc. You are always playing a trade off between lower production costs and your time.

You are not saving money if you are purchasing lots of process improvement kit every couple of months, and your time is hardly valueless if you feel the need to buy kit to get some of it back.

Perhaps you dont but something as finger in the air as an hourly cost on your batches, but you should account for it somehow.

loyatemu

you're going to spend your spare time doing something, might as well be brewing as anything else.

90% of the kit beers I've tried (including 100% of the kits I've brewed myself) have tasted like "homebrew" - i.e. drinkable but not quite right.

The difference in quality with all-grain is massive, even a mediocre all-grain brew will usually be miles better than a kit beer.

But once you're into all-grain brewing, you start looking at ways to save time and effort, or to produce even better beers. Then you find yourself buying a grainfather, multiple fridges, kegs, taps etc. Cost becomes meaningless at that point.

sharingan

loyatemu wrote: »

But once you're into all-grain brewing, you start looking at ways to save time and effort, or to produce even better beers. Then you find yourself buying a grainfather, multiple fridges, kegs, taps etc. Cost becomes meaningless at that point.

I do find that your purchases tend to plateau out, and its at that point that you can hit that fabled 'cheap beer' train, where your only costs are ingredients, time, and production costs (water, leccy, burner gas, CO2). I know a lot of people who have hit that point, if I could get my **** together with a good brewing schedule I would be one of them too.

With kit beers you do hit the price per litre sweet spot with minimal investment, but the quality is not there with what you can do from original ingredients.

ghost of ireland past

I'm interested in brewing too. I definitely don't want to pay the minimum alcohol prices but I don't drink much so it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I did the cheapest and nastiest thing. It didn't work properly though.


I bought a 5 liter bottle of water, from Lidl or Dunnes, for 1.29.
1kg or 1.5kg ordinary white table sugar, cost 1 euro per kg.
1.25 grams of 18% white wine yeast from Dibosh, bought from Aliexpress, <2 euro for 5 grams.


I did no cleaning as the water bottle was new and sealed. I opened the water, poured about 750ml away, added the sugar, disolved the sugar, placed the water in a hot room for 24 hours @ 24 degrees, and added the yeast.

I had no airlock so I just loosened the top slightly.

I got lots of carbonation (carbon dioxide gas) inside the bottle. The 18% wine yeast is supposed to work in only 5 days I thought but it doesn't seem to finish in that time.


Anyway, this didn't work properly. The mixture seems to have got infected with bacteria. That sounds terrible but it is more common that you think.

When I shake the 5 liter water bottle there is huge gas inside. A tell tale sign of bacterial infection is that when shaken there are big bubbles, but after a few seconds you can see lots of very small bubbles which you can see right throughout the liquid. Apparently, those small bubbles which take several seconds to form show you that there is a bacterial infection.


I had started a second bottle before the first one had stopped and the second bottle seems much better. It's still going and fermenting 4 weeks later. I can see bubbles rising if I hold a torch up to the bottle. I have no airlock, just a loose cap.


My conclusion is that it's harder than it seems.

If I added some potassium metabisulfite to the mix it might prevent the bacterial infections by producing sulfites which aggresively target free oxogen and remove it. Oxogen causes lots of problems.

loyatemu

ghost of ireland past wrote: »

I'm interested in brewing too. I definitely don't want to pay the minimum alcohol prices but I don't drink much so it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I did the cheapest and nastiest thing. It didn't work properly though.


I bought a 5 liter bottle of water, from Lidl or Dunnes, for 1.29.
1kg or 1.5kg ordinary white table sugar, cost 1 euro per kg.
1.25 grams of 18% white wine yeast from Dibosh, bought from Aliexpress, <2 euro for 5 grams.


I did no cleaning as the water bottle was new and sealed. I opened the water, poured about 750ml away, added the sugar, disolved the sugar, placed the water in a hot room for 24 hours @ 24 degrees, and added the yeast.

I had no airlock so I just loosened the top slightly.

I got lots of carbonation (carbon dioxide gas) inside the bottle. The 18% wine yeast is supposed to work in only 5 days I thought but it doesn't seem to finish in that time.


Anyway, this didn't work properly. The mixture seems to have got infected with bacteria. That sounds terrible but it is more common that you think.

When I shake the 5 liter water bottle there is huge gas inside. A tell tale sign of bacterial infection is that when shaken there are big bubbles, but after a few seconds you can see lots of very small bubbles which you can see right throughout the liquid. Apparently, those small bubbles which take several seconds to form show you that there is a bacterial infection.


I had started a second bottle before the first one had stopped and the second bottle seems much better. It's still going and fermenting 4 weeks later. I can see bubbles rising if I hold a torch up to the bottle. I have no airlock, just a loose cap.


My conclusion is that it's harder than it seems.

If I added some potassium metabisulfite to the mix it might prevent the bacterial infections by producing sulfites which aggresively target free oxogen and remove it. Oxogen causes lots of problems.

the yeast also needs oxygen.

what are you trying to achieve here - your resulting "drink" will be foul. You want something quick and cheap, make turbo-cider.

ghost of ireland past

I was trying to produce alcohol. That was it. I wasn't intending to drink it.

I thought that I'd be able to bring 4 liters of mix to an 18% concentration in just five days. That would be 720ml of pure alcohol, which is the same amount of alcohol as is in three vodka bottles.

I was sticking it to the man. It would have only cost me about 3 or 4 euro, and that's including paying for water.

To be honest, alcohol use is dangerous for your health and I'd encourage people to consider what the 'Cannabis is safer than Alcohol' political party have to say in that regard.

That is also something that can be easily done at home. I might not be great at brewing beer but I have green fingers.

Feisar

ArrBee wrote: »

I wasn't including any increases in cost of crap beer. If it's going up to 2 euro then sure. Brewing is value.

You've said a lot to favour brewing that isn't cost. It's that the beer is better, satisfaction, etc. And personally, I agree.

My point however is that, by the time you add your time you have to be doing it for those non cost reasons.

If you only care about the cost and don't particularly like nice beer, preferring the suite stuff then you maybe better off just buying it.

Discloser:
I brew and can't stand crap beers. But I know plenty who only like crap beers.

If beer is an acquired taste, why would one intentionally acquire a taste for expensive beer:D

mordeith

ghost of ireland past wrote: »

I was trying to produce alcohol. That was it. I wasn't intending to drink it.

I thought that I'd be able to bring 4 liters of mix to an 18% concentration in just five days. That would be 720ml of pure alcohol, which is the same amount of alcohol as is in three vodka bottles.

I was sticking it to the man. It would have only cost me about 3 or 4 euro, and that's including paying for water.

To be honest, alcohol use is dangerous for your health and I'd encourage people to consider what the 'Cannabis is safer than Alcohol' political party have to say in that regard.

That is also something that can be easily done at home. I might not be great at brewing beer but I have green fingers.

You might need to consult some Finish friends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilju

Bogwoppit

ghost of ireland past wrote: »

I'm interested in brewing too. I definitely don't want to pay the minimum alcohol prices but I don't drink much so it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I did the cheapest and nastiest thing. It didn't work properly though.


I bought a 5 liter bottle of water, from Lidl or Dunnes, for 1.29.
1kg or 1.5kg ordinary white table sugar, cost 1 euro per kg.
1.25 grams of 18% white wine yeast from Dibosh, bought from Aliexpress, <2 euro for 5 grams.


I did no cleaning as the water bottle was new and sealed. I opened the water, poured about 750ml away, added the sugar, disolved the sugar, placed the water in a hot room for 24 hours @ 24 degrees, and added the yeast.

I had no airlock so I just loosened the top slightly.

I got lots of carbonation (carbon dioxide gas) inside the bottle. The 18% wine yeast is supposed to work in only 5 days I thought but it doesn't seem to finish in that time.


Anyway, this didn't work properly. The mixture seems to have got infected with bacteria. That sounds terrible but it is more common that you think.

When I shake the 5 liter water bottle there is huge gas inside. A tell tale sign of bacterial infection is that when shaken there are big bubbles, but after a few seconds you can see lots of very small bubbles which you can see right throughout the liquid. Apparently, those small bubbles which take several seconds to form show you that there is a bacterial infection.


I had started a second bottle before the first one had stopped and the second bottle seems much better. It's still going and fermenting 4 weeks later. I can see bubbles rising if I hold a torch up to the bottle. I have no airlock, just a loose cap.


My conclusion is that it's harder than it seems.

If I added some potassium metabisulfite to the mix it might prevent the bacterial infections by producing sulfites which aggresively target free oxogen and remove it. Oxogen causes lots of problems.

Bottled water is not sterile, boil it first.

You’ll need to add oxygen for the yeast and I’d suggest maybe some yeast nutrient too if you want a full fermentation.

You’ll need balls of steel to drink it and rolls of toilet paper for the aftermath.

sharingan

ghost of ireland past wrote: »

Anyway, this didn't work properly. The mixture seems to have got infected with bacteria. That sounds terrible but it is more common that you think.

When I shake the 5 liter water bottle there is huge gas inside. A tell tale sign of bacterial infection is that when shaken there are big bubbles, but after a few seconds you can see lots of very small bubbles which you can see right throughout the liquid. Apparently, those small bubbles which take several seconds to form show you that there is a bacterial infection.

This isnt a sign of bacterial infection. The only way to tell if its contaminated with bacteria is to smell or taste it, or put it under a microscope.

Bubbles form by their own physics.

Some advice - the hooch you were making would have been gack to drink. If you wanted to do something that actually has pleasant flavour, reuse the 5L water vessel, but instead fill it with cheap fruit juice, add yeast AND yeast nutrient (as there is no nutrition at all for the yeast to grow healthily).

lalababa

Alot of 1.5/1.7kg beer malt extract kits for 10-15 euro are ok. If you add a small amount of boiled or dry hopping for like 50cents or add a mash 500g of malt -a euro, you can 'sex up' these kits.
So.... the cheapest easiest would be
A 25-35L fermentation bucket-10-15 euro.
Used plastic bottles that had carbonated drinks in them. Need 23L.
Some steriliser
A siphon tube-5euro.
A 10/15 euro beer kit.
1kg of sugar.
Gives you 45 pints of beer @ .66/pint for the 1st brew and .33/pint thereafter.
You can go cheaper with all mash kits. But you have to buy a few bits and it is more complicated.For instance you can get 25kg malt for 27euro. 5kg makes 23L with a little hops added.....7euro/46.....gives 15cent/pint of the best kind of Homebrew.