Several years ago I was really into brewing from full grain. From grinding the grains on up. Lots of fun, but boy it's an all day process. So I would do 10 gallon batches and put it into 5 gallon kegs. Skipping the bottling made it go a bit faster and it always seemed to taste better on tap...
Hoping I get some hops this year and I swear I will break out all the old equipment and give it a go.
Heh, yep it is better on tap and once you have the equipment all grain is the way to go. Don't get to excited if its your hops first year, but next year they'll be gangbusters. Feed them lots of horse poop in the spring and keep them moist. Oh and if you thin the bines to 2-3 per hill you'll actually get more hops. Don't waste the cutoffs, if you get them young and tender they steam up fine and taste better than asparagus (a little bitter but less so than a lot of greens).
I usually do 5 gallon batches (my system can do 10 but variety is nice, 10g is a LOT of beer) but the setup/teardown time kills me so I usually do 2 or 3 batches in a day. I've pipelined the process so that an extra batch adds about an hour, whereas a single batch is about 4. Usually I brew a half dozen or so in the spring and another half dozen or so in the fall. The batches I like I keep, the rest I can take into work (there is a kegerator for friday afternoons after work and those guys will drink anything
). I usually only have maybe 1 or 2 a day (maybe 3 if I'm sitting around all sunday afternoon or none if I have something going on) but I take a lot of pleasure in the making and seeing what comes out (honestly I think I like the making more than the drinking, I mean you do have to taste it to see what it did, but I could make 100x what I could ever want to drink). In a way its like woodworking but there is more alchemy - I suppose if you really got into formulating your own finishes it might be similar.
Seems that a lot of the good beer around here has gotten powerfully strong, kind of hard to enjoy that one beer and you're all tipsy so I've been working on the opposite trend. Have a couple of 3.2% recipes pretty dialed in that taste really good (you can actually tweak mouth feel and flavor somewhat independently of alcohol % up to certain limits). There are also some low gravity styles that are really good. Sometimes its fun to make a strong beer but they're pretty hard to finish up as Rob noted.
A really good idea since you already have a kegerator is to fill a keg with water and keep it at about 25PSI. Instant soda water, I use a lot more of that than I do the beer
We make a lot of our own flavors (ideas below) but if you're lazy the pre-flavored italian soda syrups are still about 10c/glass or better (imho) is a spritz of fruit juice topped with the soda water. I don't pre-flavor it like some do because... well variety
Things I've learned about soda:
- almost any of the scratch root beer recipes I've tried are good, but a 1/4 to 1/2 C of raisins really improves the mouth feel
- Lemon Lime, shave ~6 lemons and ~6 limes (just the colored part, no pith) and steep peelings in 1qt simple syrup (1 part sugar/1part water). Strain and squeeze the juice in on top. Add a splash of this and then top with the soda water and it'll be the best lemon lime you've ever had.
- ginger ale is hard. Never can get enough ginger.
While we're here, a link to my kegerator build that I did a few years back
http://getaclue.org/~ryan/beer-freezer/. I've since added tap handles, etc.. and upgraded the pressure regulator with more independent knobs. Not really in love with the cherry stain but hey it sort of looks like furniture which got it into the house
Those of you who do drywall may recognize the drip tray.
Back on the original thread, I'm working on a set of ~50+ tap handles for a brewer friend of mine that are made with local natural edge cherry (did a sample set of 8 ~2 weeks ago that he liked, we're gathering up the wood for the rest), I'll try to get around to taking pictures when we get to it.... I used inserts, but I kind of like the look of the chrome ferrules, we'll see what the customer thinks the natural cherry all the way to the bottom looked kind of cool.