High Alcohol Homemades

[[email protected]]

hi all!

this has more than likely been asked before, but how to i make homemades with more grog in them? do i need to use more sugar and let it ferment longer?

iv brewed a corona style beer, usung hops and champagne yeast, with a #10 sugar...... do i wait a week and then add another sugar?

one of my mates brewed an asani? beer, japaneses style, and it had 7.3% grog in it!

any suggestions?

 

[pdilley]

Yes, throw a whole load and them some of sugar, water and yeast together and have fun.

A lot on here are more into taste and quality but if having lots of hard hitting grog floats your boat and gets you making beer go for it.

Edit: There is some guy on YouTube that posts videos of making beer this way. You may want to check him out. Others may have a link to him.

This can also be done with more costly ingredients like more malt extract, more grains in your mash if making all grain beers, or a bit of corn sugar, liquid rice malt or other fermentable sugars. Just go easy on the sugar and other non-malt sugar sources. You shouldn't normally use no more than 500 grams or maybe a kilo at the most, for a really big beer. Most of the time, simple sugars are simply reserved for adding at bottling time only to carbonate the beer in the bottle.

Cheers,
Brewer Pete

 

[Kranky]

If you want a higher ABV in your beer but no additional flavour just add dextrose. If you're doing extract and want a bit more flavour add in more extract and hops. Yeast will turn the extra sugars into alcohol, so get some decent yeast from your LHBS. If you want to make really high ABV beers you will need special yeast, as normal brewing yeast wont attenuate properly.

There are a lot of great recipes on this and many other internet sites. Track down a recipe of something you think you will like.

I'd suggest you get yourself some brewing software and spend a few hours figuring out how to use it. Input whatever recipe you want to use and then fiddle around with it until you are happy with the expected outcome.

 

[[email protected]]

cheers fellas! i have been looking on here and have found a couple of posts on the subject, i should have looked before i posted, so thanks for taking the time to answer!! ill have a yarn to the LHBS (local home brew shop?) and see what they say too!

 

[RobH]

G'day Beerbelly84,

What else have you brewed so far? How did you go with those? What style of beer are you looking for? What ABV % are you looking for?

When I was just doing extract brewing, I used mainly Coopers international series kits (Pale Ale, Mex Cerv, English Bitter) & ended up not using anything else other than the Coopers Light Dried Malt.

The ferment process is the same - as in you do not add more suger a week later etc...

I used 1kg of Coopers Light Dried Malt (LDM) with each of these kits & filled the fermenter to anywhere between 18 - 22 litres ... so with an 18 litre brew you will get around 5.3% & about 4.4% with 22 litres.

Adding 500gms to that will up the ABV (Alcohol By Volume) by about 1.2%

Using the LDM is going to give you a fuller bodied beer that just using plain sugars like dextrose.

Other brewing tips (if you haven't picked them up already) are:
* Use a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity before pitching the yeast, and then one or two weeks later when you expect fermentation to be complete - record these values and use an online tool to determine what the ABV is.
* Use the hydrometer to determine that fermentation has finished - a stable reading 2 - 3 days in a row at a final gravity value in the range that you should expect for a finished beer indicates finished fermentation
* Get IanH's spreadsheet & play around with that - http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...st&p=736560
* Ferment your ales at 18-20 degrees celcius

Without knowing a bit more about what you are intereseted in achieving & how much experience you have I'll stop at that ... see how you go

PS: As Brewer Pete said too, most people on here are more interested in the taste and quality of what they brew than the alcohol volume ... and that is not to say that you aren't interested in that too, it's just that it isn't a priority for most & you may expect some "less than positive" responses to a question such as yours. Whatever your tase is, if you persist with it and take the advice of some of the homebrew veterans on this site you will move from brewing average, ok & good beer, to brewing great beer!

Cheers.

 

[big78sam]

LHBS (local home brew shop?)

Yep

http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...;showarticle=17

 

[[email protected]]

i have made in the past 1, a coopers premium larger, the one i got with my first home brew kit. this turned out to be a winner, with one guy in particular asking for more!
second was a corona, just with the beer craft recipe, too gassy for me, and at the same time tried an apple beer, with a coopers base. i made the mistake of putting the apple puree in at the start, hence the apple went off..... but its getting better with age!
fourth, you could say, was a passionfruit pure blonde, made by the recipe, but adding 1.3kgs of passionfruit pulp (boiled) with two days to go of a seven day fermentaion. this has been quite a hit with the mates, with only 2 out of the 15 odd people who have tried it saying its rubbish! the owners of my LHBS said it tasted great and wanted to know the recipe so they could offer it to their customers!

i do like the idea of getting the taste of the beer that im trying to make, but i dont want to have to drink 12 to get just tiddly...... i dont really care if people have a go at me for wanting to get a bit more grog in my beer, to each to their own! i mainly started brewing so that i could save cash and have something i could call my own!

so, with the corona im brewing now, iv got the one lot of #10 packet suger from the LHBS, and a second..... im on the third day of fermentaion, should i put the second in tonight when i get home?

 

[Bribie G]

How high do you want to go? The problem with adding sugar after sugar to the basic kit to produce more alcohol is that it gets way out of balance. However if you would like something quite headbanger that still tastes quite smooth and drinkable, try:

2 cans of Coopers Lager
1kg Dextrose

It will froth out of the airlock so try to keep below 20 degrees.

This should get you up to about 7.5% ABV which is around the strength of most American "malt liquors", the alcohol of choice of the homeless and unemployed, but with better flavour

 

[[email protected]]

thank gosh im not american, homeless or unemployed!

 

[Bribie G]

:icon_offtopic: Julia could well sort that out for you in the next few years although the mad monk is waiting in the sidelines to make it happen quicker h34r:

If you ever get into all grain brewing, you can make really tasty grain brews that strength that actually taste awesome.

 

[[email protected]]

annoyed! put the second #10 suger in my corona brew the other day..... just measured it and its only 2.99%! what have i done wrong?

 

[Spork]

How would it work if you used the "normal" amounts of ingredients but just less water. ie: If a 21 litre recipe makes 5% abv, would the same recipe made to 14 litres produce 7.5%? I'd imagine that while this might have a "stronger" taste the flavours would still be pretty much in balance.

 

[[email protected]]

seeing as iv already got my two fermenters in use at the moment, then i think that thats going to be my next step! trial and error all the way!

 

[bignath]

annoyed! put the second #10 suger in my corona brew the other day..... just measured it and its only 2.99%! what have i done wrong?

I reckon you've measured it wrong....

More info on your fermentation process is needed here.

What yeast? Kit yeast?
Temperature, Volume, Hydro sample process etc...

Unless your fermentation has stalled, i would be expecting an ABV reading higher than that after nearly a week in primary....

From memory (my K&K days) a can of goo plus a kilo of some sort of fermentable will get you in the ball park of around 4.5% if doing a standard batch size. You've added an extra kilo, and assuming you're using an ale yeast (most kit yeasts are, even if the tin says lager), 5-7 days in primary fermentation and it should be close to finishing...

Give us more info mate, and we can help you further.

 

[[email protected]]

ok here goes..... excuse all my newbieness......

30/04/11. BC Mexican cerveza, BC sugar #10, Morgans Cascade hops, Saflager W-34-70 yeast, dry enzime from under the wort lid.

Start Temp, 34 dergrees.
Start SG, 1.031
27 litres... (the wife was being distracting)

5/5/11. Added the secong BC #10
SG, 1.015 (taken after the suger was added)

8/5/11. SG 1.006


after laying the brew down, the bubbling went on for a couple f days and nights, then stopped....... after the second suger went in, the brew bubbled and has only just stopped this morning.....

it did foam up heaps when i put the secong sugar in.......... just a normal hb kit, a huge keg, lid and a airlock....... current temp is 22 degrees

 

[Josh]

If you have a spare fridge, you can also try freezing a portion of the fermented beer. The water in your beer will freeze but the "grog" will remain liquid. Then you just rack off the ice and have a higher strength beer.

I use this method to make my Eisbock which is an intensely malty beer. But with your beer it won't be too malty ie. should give you the rocket fuel you are after.

 

[Kieren]

My calcs say it should be around 5.2%

The total sugar you have added for 27 L should give you around 1.046 OG.

If you had done a 'standard' batch size of around 23L then you could have expected an OG of 1.054 and if you hit the same GF of 1.006 then it would have been 6.3% or so. So yes, if you use less water for the same amount of sugars you will get a higher OG and higher alc %. If you halve your volume you should double your OG but this won't necessarily double your alc %, that will depend on what FG you reach which will depend on how good your yeast management is.

 

[Pourmeanother]

Not sure why you would not put all your sugar ( Fermentables ) in at the start ?

Sounds like it has finished to me at 1.006 check it over the next couple of days see if it gets any lower if not id say shes ready

 

[manticle]

Can be easier on the yeast.

 

[Pourmeanother]

Ok . You learn something new every day