Tassie Kit Brewer

[Clevohead]

Hi All,

I am from Tassie, a couple of mates and I have been home brewing for the last 7 years, we bottle 3x brews per week on average while also running our still in the background making our own spirits.

We have a wood fired hot water and bottle washer system allowing us to wash and sterilise approx 90 bottles (long necks) in an hour. I am currently in the process of moving over to kegging after picking up some Cornelius kegs and having just built my own home and new shed/bar I am looking forward t getting away from bottles. In fact the first beer is going into it's keg tonight!

We just brew tinned kits at the moment nothing fancy here, they are easy and we have a consistently good drink from them, I may start playing with some recipes once the keg side of things is up and running, but we just like to keep it simple.

I am starting work on my Keezer this week, and that is partly why I have come here as you guys keep popping up in my research.

I look forward to learning a bit while searching around in here and checking out everyone's setups.

Cheers
Ben

 

[koshari]

Firstly you wont look back moving to kegs. Single best thing i ever did regarding brewing.

Temperature control would be a close second.
Do yourself a favour and set an old fridge up with a stc1000 controller and a heater and use that as your fermenting cabinet.

Set the controller for 18 deg and then cold crash after fermentstion to 1 deg for a day or so before kegging.

As for kits heres my 2 cents.
-use a kit as a base and to get your bittering hops to save you doing a long boil.
-use light malt extract (LME) as your additive rather than dextrose.
-steep some grains for added body/flavour. I simply use a combination of crystal malt and roasted barley depending on the style i want.
-try a little dry hopping, especially for lighter ebc/summer style ales.

Also keep a log and get a copy of ians spreadsheet. Its an awesome tool for designing your brews.

You will be suprised of the range of styles you can create with just a handfull of bulk ingrediants.

And most of all enjoy.

 

[Clevohead]

Firstly you wont look back moving to kegs. Single best thing i ever did regarding brewing.

Temperature control would be a close second.
Do yourself a favour and set an old fridge up with a stc1000 controller and a heater and use that as your fermenting cabinet.

Set the controller for 18 deg and then cold crash after fermentstion to 1 deg for a day or so before kegging.

As for kits heres my 2 cents.
-use a kit as a base and to get your bittering hops to save you doing a long boil.
-use light malt extract (LME) as your additive rather than dextrose.
-steep some grains for added body/flavour. I simply use a combination of crystal malt and roasted barley depending on the style i want.
-try a little dry hopping, especially for lighter ebc/summer style ales.

Also keep a log and get a copy of ians spreadsheet. Its an awesome tool for designing your brews.

You will be suprised of the range of styles you can create with just a handfull of bulk ingrediants.

And most of all enjoy.

Thanks for the welcome Koshari,

We currently keep a pretty good log book of all our brews with our gravity readings, temp, and any other note worthy things, we also have a dedicated fermenting cabinet for our three beer barrels, and a separate one for our mash with the still.

The temp controller is on the shopping list

I will be sticking with the tin kits (Coppers Mangrove Jacks etc...) for the foreseeable next two months or so as I settle into the new home, get the bar set up, and get used to kegging. Mainly just to stick with what we know as a baseline for comparison with what we do now.

I did come across the spreadsheet earlier and plan on looking over it in a bit bit more detail tonight, and I will definitely be evolving my brewing as we go, with so many good looking recipes to try on here

Cheers, and no doubt I will see you about the forums.

 

[ianh]

Welcome to the forum Clevohead, good to see another Tasmanian on the forum. There are plenty of knowledgable people on here who I am sure will help you.
cheers
Ian

 

[Ian176]

Hi All,

I am from Tassie, a couple of mates and I have been home brewing for the last 7 years, we bottle 3x brews per week on average while also running our still in the background making our own spirits.

We have a wood fired hot water and bottle washer system allowing us to wash and sterilise approx 90 bottles (long necks) in an hour. I am currently in the process of moving over to kegging after picking up some Cornelius kegs and having just built my own home and new shed/bar I am looking forward t getting away from bottles. In fact the first beer is going into it's keg tonight!

We just brew tinned kits at the moment nothing fancy here, they are easy and we have a consistently good drink from them, I may start playing with some recipes once the keg side of things is up and running, but we just like to keep it simple.

I am starting work on my Keezer this week, and that is partly why I have come here as you guys keep popping up in my research.

I look forward to learning a bit while searching around in here and checking out everyone's setups.

Cheers
Ben

You must be a Ford man with that name

 

[Clevohead]

You must be a Ford man with that name

Yep you picked it