Posted: 6/30/2004 1:32:27 PM EDT
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any here make home brew? do you use the beer machine? how does the beer taste? |
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I have been using the "Mr. Beer" system for a couple of months now. I am a convert! Haven't drank any store-bought stuff since. I can brew a case of REALLY KICK-ASS beer for about $10. I'm a big fan of dark ales, and have been experimenting with them (nut brown ale, Octoberkfest Vienna Lager, Linebacker Bock, Dark Bavarian Wheat). They all kick ass. Extremely simple to set up, since all I do is use their beer mixes. Just open the can of the basic beer mix, add whatever you want (malt extract, dextrose, hops), add yeast. Bottle after a week, another week for carbonation, and then drink! It is just like loading your own ammo. You don't save any money, but you drink a hell of a lot more for the same amount of money. And you can tailor it your tastes/needs. |
+1 I like Mr Beer's Ameican Pale. Yum. 
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| There's a place in Strongsville (near Cleveland) that you can go to and brew your own. they have the proper facilites, ingredients and recipes (over 100 types of beer). You cook it there yourself, they ferment it and you bottle and lable it. www.thebrewkettle.com Lots of places like this around the country. |
Obviously you have never used one. I wouldn't use the term "machine" for it, since it's just a keg. That's it. A keg. It has channels in the lid threads to vent off the CO2 during fermentation. That's it. After a week fermenting, you bottle the beer (after adding sugar for priming). Wait one more week, and you'll have perfectly fine, carbonated beer. I'm sure there are better, more sophisticated systems for the home brewer. But for somebody with limited time/knowledge of the subject, it is close to ideal. I don't get any kickbacks from the Mr. Beer people (I wish!), it's just that I have been supremely satisfied for the last couple of months with it. |
That would be great for people who want to try this brewing thing without actually buying the equipment. Once you try it, and taste the difference (the whole pasteurization thing takes its toll on taste), you'll want to keep doing it! |
| I have used the Mr. Beer system in the past. It worked out pretty well. We made some awesome malt liquor, as you could taste the alcohol in it. You can control how much alchohol is in it pretty easily, and we decided to make it pretty strong. I would reccomend the process to anyone. |
Well, it IS called The Beer Machine See here And after several attempts, my father could never get good carbonated beer. He followed the directions to the dot. Bad luck? Maybe... Bad execution? Perhaps. All I know is the beer was flat. |
| Some of the beer can indeed remain flat. That happened to me the first couple of times, but then I figured out that all I have to do is to shake the keg a bit before pouring beer in the bottles. That resuspends the yeast, so each bottle gets enough. With just a bit of yeast, secondary fermentation of the priming sugar will assure nice carbonation. If the yeast has settled too much (can happen if the temperature is perfect for them), then very little yeast will go into the bottles. |
You're probably thinking of methanol, which is (I believe) wood alcohol. It attacks the optic nerve directly if ingested, which is one reason I always wear nitrile gloves if I ever have to use the stuff. |
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My garage is a brewery. I have five stainless kegs, a dispensing fridge, a fermentation/lagering fridge, mash tuns, fermentor, counter presser bottler fillers, etc. etc. Like someone above said, don't do it to save money. If you want a hobby where you can make custom beer just the way you like it, go for it. While major breweries skimp to save every penny, I can use the finest hops, pure malted barley with no adjuncts, etc. Kind of like cooking. If I'm spending hours making a cake, I'm not going to use imitation vanilla, etc. When you first offer someone a homebrew ,they give you that look like "What?? You want me to drink it ?". They they look at a perfectly clear beer, have a drink and say "Damn....you made this...it's good" You can get in it simple as with a Mr. Beer, but you probably won't make over a couple of batches with it. Good way to get started to get the feel, but you'll only have so-so results. There are better ways to make an initial investment if you think you'll stick with it. Give me a shout if you need info. Ed |
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homebrew since 1992...it is fun, refreshing, and you get what you want.....just buy some good equipment and not a beer machine Stop at a local homebrew shop and annoy the crapt out of them with tons of questions.  ..you willl learnor order online and read northernbrewer.com |
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I have been brewing beer for about 20 years. I have not made much in the last 9 months because of the diet I have been following. I make 5 gallons at a time and bottle it. I have recorded many recipes...some good, some bad. It is a lot of fun and is very rewarding when you brew a great batch. |
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If you are going to do it, do it right. Don't you use one of those cheap-ass little kits. Go to Williams Brewery online. Look at their stuff. Start out doing a 5 gallon glass carboy as your fermentor and use beer bottles and cap them. When you get into it and want to make a little more investment, step up to the soda keg systems or something along those lines. The Williams Brewery kits taste really good too! Williams Don't invest a lot up front (maybe $300 for everything you need) and don't get too fancy. Start with the kits and don't worry about mashing your own worts and all that advanced stuff yet. But I would ferment in a glass carboy instead of in plastic. Some will argue that it makes no difference in taste, but I disagree. And of course, read a good book first!!!!! Williams has a good Homebrewing book with all the basics in it. Another thing that I used was a stopcock system that went into the mouth of the carboy so the entire carboy could be upside down during fermentation like an industrial-sized fermentator is designed. I can't remember the name of the thing (it isn't on Williams). I got it from some other online homebrew place a long time ago. The nice thing about this is you can pull off the sediment once a week, you can physically see the beer bubbling and fermenting, and you do not have to move the beer into another container before bottling; in other words, it greatly simplifies the process. Anybody seen one of these? These guys also have a cool fermentor that is a lot easier to use than the starter kit ones: Fermentor I just don't like the fact that it is plastic. -Juice Out |
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Another vote for "if youre gonna do something, do it right". If you like what The Beer Machine puts out, and you dont know what yer missing, then more power to ya. But it really does produce some shitty brew, by comparison. I know, I've used that and other kits. Stick with HB'ing and dump the plastics, switch to glass carboys and eventually make the jump to all grain. Then invest in CO2 kegging. You'll kick yourself for the time and money you wasted on The Machine. |
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Alright, since some people have some facts wrong, let's just set a few things straight: Fermentation (beer, wine, etc) is legal. You can make up to something like 300 gallons a year for your own personal use. Distillation (the process of extracting alcohol from a fermented mixture) to produce mooshine, whiskey, etc. is illegal without a license. Stories about "going blind" from making your own alcohol are largely from people not distilling fermented alcohol but instead trying to distill something with alcohol in it such as antifreeze (I think?) or denatured alcohol and ending up with wood alcohol. |
Actually you are wrong (or at least partially). The traditional cause of blindness from making moonshine occurred from too much heat when boiling off the ethanol. In fermentation of corn, other alcohols heavier than ethanol such as propanol are also made but in small quantities. If you add too much heat too rapidly during distillation, you actually split ethanol and the other heavier alcohols into methanol (wood alcohol) which causes blindness. This occurred with distillers who did not know what they were doing and did not do multiple distillations. The reason you distill is to evaporate off the ethanol and leave behind the heavier alchols, thus you only want the temperature in the mash slightly above the boiling point for ethanol. Too hot and you start unwanted chemical reactions, making methanol (wood alcohol). If you run the alcohol back through a second time if properly distilled the first time, you will get a much better (purified) product and leave the propanol and other residual heavy alcohols behind that were able to evaporate during the first still. Once you get methanol in there you are screwed. Dump the batch or go blind. With all that said, people have recently used antifreeze (ethylene glycol) to cut their moonshine with to make it go farther. Antifreeze does not have alcohol in it, but the molecule ethylene glycol acts similarly to alcohol and gets you drunk. It is a poison (just like alcohol in high enough doses) and the worst part is it causes kidney failure. The antidote for antifreeze poisoning is IV ethanol. The old stills also caused lead poisoning when lead pipe was used as the condensor. Copper, glass or another inert material is now used by anyone who knows anything about what they are doing. -Juice Out 
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That's right, people were cutting their whiskey with bad stuff... not distilling it. I believe you will hardly ever have enough wood alcohol distilled to cause any problems, but I have heard of people throwing away the first amount of alcohol that gets distilled from a batch because it will contain the highest amount of wood alchohol. This is info that I have:
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