ABC Queensland Radio - Home Brewing

[Exile]

A new segment on a Friday night...libations with Lachie.
Lachlan Mackintosh is a keen brewer and connoisseur of all alcohols.
For him it's about drinking fine alcohol in small quantities.
This episode Lachie and David invited David Kitchen, owner of a home brewing shop, to discuss the finer details of making it yourself.
From beer, wine and ciders to spirits. How much does it cost to set up and what about the legalities involved.

Episode 1 Up

http://blogs.abc.net.au/queensland/2014/10/libations-with-lachie-eps-1-home-brewing.html?site=sunshine&program=612_evenings

 

[TimT]

Interesting - and they answer the question that AHBers including myself have tossed around from time to time, the cost of homebrew as compared to the cost of commercial beers. They give around 50 cents for a can kit, and $1.50 to $2.00 for all grain. Not sure about how they got to that, but it doesn't sound too far off the mark.

 

[TimT]

I don't know where they get the idea that wine is slightly harder to make than beer, though - in my opinion the situation is if anything the reverse; getting the wine must is simplicity itself - you either dissolve a sugar in water or just press the juice straight out of the fruit. Compare that to the fussy and intricate process involved in the mashing of malt.... and that's before we get to the difficulties around when to add hops, how to get the right flavour out of them, etc. (The pay-off, of course, is beer does tend to mature much more quickly).

 

[DU99]

a good kit can cost's about $15.a simple grain brew should be about the same price including hops

Grain Bill:

• 3 kg US 2-Row about $12
• 1.2kg Golden Promise about $5

*based on 80% efficiency

Hops:

• 7 g Warrior (17.7 AA%) @ FWH
• 14g Mt. Hood (5.4 AA%) @ 10
• about $2 for hops

and remember that's only the can ,no dextrose/malt/hops

 

[Bribie G]

Like anything else, let the media near any subject that you personally are familiar with and they just never seem to GET it.

 

[TimT]

Like anything else, let the media near any subject that you personally are familiar with and they just never seem to GET it.

Reminds me, a friend recently posted how they once presented an academic paper about AFL and afterwards ran into a bloke who basically said, 'well, this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong too.' She put it down to a male/female dynamics thing - a woman talking about football, which is assumed to be a man's domain, and getting corrected by a man. I put it down to a geek/non-geek thing - talk about a geek's area of expertise and they're inevitably going to correct you. A), because they like talking about their area of geekery anyway, and B ), because they want to prove they're the biggest geek around.

Same thing here, really.... and we're the geeks doing the correcting

Worth remembering, though.... the two folks in the interview are homebrew geeks, too. Even if they're sadly deluded homebrew geeks ....