[DomusAlbion]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('johnmarkos', 'I')'m partial to anything from Anchor Brewing Company, right here on Potrero Hill in the city of San Francisco, California. I'm particularly fond of their porter.

[Eli]

I like the beer I brew the best like someone else said. Talk about fresh and good, home brewed and kegged beer can be really great.

I made a vanilla Bourbon porter that was fantastic that being said Guinness is good I also like boulevard wheat too Oh and Fat Tire is great by New Belgium brewing.

No worries about PO and beer I think beer would be the last thing that mankind would give up. Take my car and my AC but leave my beer alone.

[BastardSquad]

Pete's Wicked Ale!!!!

[The_Virginian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'G')uiness Draft angel11

Is there any better? Smile
_

[Teclo]

Hey, I'm looking into the possibility of turning my house into a small brewery. I was thinking the other day, how am I going to guarantee my beer supply. I started off planning to stockpile some cans then I remembered my old home brewing days. Today just went out and spent £40 on brew kits for 160 pints. Not bad

Now I'm wondering if I could grow the barley in my garden
Anyone know if this is possible? My garden is about 50 ft by 10 ft

Brewing beer is quite easy, really anyone could grow grains for bread or malt. I'm lazy and I can't see me tending hundereds of vegatables .. am I nuts or is this worth a try!?!

Teclo

[bobaloo]

I think a microbrewery is a great idea, but let's run some numbers.

Figure 50 bushels per acre for barley (ballpark). An acre is 43,560 square feet. Your garden is 500 square feet, or .0115 acres. Your expected yield is about 0.57 bushels of barley, or say 30 pounds. That's what, about a 5-gallon bucket full of barley?

There's a reason for those giant grain fields, it takes a lot of area to produce grain.

You might be better off setting up some real equipment and figuring to partner with a real grain producer with the land and equipment. Invest all your time, energy and money into the biggest/best brewing equipment and leave the farming up to someone else.

[anthem]

I know a little about homebrewing having made beer on several occasions. You'll need 6-10 pounds of malted barley to make 5 gallons of beer. I think you'll need a little more land than what you have to grow your barley, if you drink beer like I do. With an acre of land though, one could have a ton or so of barley, and that would be enough for at least a thousand gallons of beer. That would supply me for a couple of years

Hops do not require much space to grow a lot, just somewhere tall to vine on.

[anthem]

Another option for home alcoholic beverage production is cider. During a good year, just a couple of trees will produce bushels of apples (or pears if you like). Since so much fruit is wasted over-wintering or not picked up at all, it would make sense to ferment it an make cider (or perry as they call it). I remember many years growing up where piles of apples just rotted on the ground because we didn't can (preserve) them. My parents weren't too big into homebrewing, though they did make wine a few times.

Now that I've moved away from my home place, my wife and I don't have room for an orchard, much less a field of grain. My mom still lives on the home place, so that will be our retreat if and when it becomes necessary.

[anthem]

One other comment.. Bottles would not be my first choice for continuous home brewing. I would invest in some kegging equipment. Here in the US, bulk soda pop comes in 5 gallon kegs, which one can sometimes find cheap or even free if you know someone at the bottling plant. Though there are parts that periodically wear out, I'd rather use kegs especially if I was doing larger and more frequent batches of beer. Bottles are fine but you'll find you want to pour your beer into a glass anyway to avoid the yeast sediment on the bottom, so why not just start with a keg. Kegging is the absolute best way to go, IMO.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

Hi, can extract beer brewing is easy, full mash brewing is difficult. You have to boil the mash for hours at cetain temperatures so that the enzymes convert the starches into certain sugars for the yeast. I think bottles wouldn't be too much of a problem, You could use recycled pet bottles and wash them out. I use 2litre plastic coke bottles for my homebrew, and it's alot easier to fill up 15 2lt bottles than fill 30-60 800-375ml glass bottles and cap them with the capper as well. In the future, you may not beable to buy bottle caps, and will have to make due with plastic screwons as the metal ones arn't re-usable.

[aflatoxin]

Consider wine/cider.

I have 4 huge pear trees. Every year, I get at least 2000 lbs of pears whether or not I want them. The cold pressed juice gives a starting gravity of 1.070, or about 6% alchohol. I usually add about 150 pounds of sugar to get 150-200 gallons of 13.5% wine per year. (750-1000 bottles) This is more than I can drink.

Much, much more. Good stuff too. Reminds me of a chardonnay.

I have a garden and bushes under the trees. They don't take up much space.

I have considered making brandy, but I don't want to be a guest of Alberto Gonzales' playhouse. No matter how bad things are, jail would be worse.

[papalegba]

If you're thinking of getting into homebrewing, and growing your own materials, I'd suggest that growing your own hops is a great idea. Brewing with good hops can really improve your beer, and they're dead easy to grow. Obtain the rhizomes for the hop of your choice (I'm partial to Cascade), plant it on a sunny fence and stand back. They take a couple of years to get established, but once going there's little to be done except maybe give them a shovel or two of manure in the spring, and harvest the light pinecone-like flowers in the fall.

I pick mine when they are just starting to turn gold, and then freeze them in ziplocs to provide to a brewing friend, who reciprocates with some very tasty ales. The difference in flavor between these homegrown hops and the pelletized commercial ones is amazing.

[bobaloo]

I put in 4 hops cuttings this Spring of different varieties, they're flowering well. I'm really surprised at how well they grew from little starts, the vines are about 15' long. I twined them through the fence around the garden, they're covered with the little "pine-cone" shaped flowers. Looking forward to making a batch of beer with them this Fall. Next year they should be even better.

[kpeavey]

Home alcohol production is an outstanding industry. One which has been with us for centuries, and will be with us for many more.

A particular aspect to alcohol you may not have considered:
Lets say the MZBs raid your compound and you manage to get out safely.
They stumble across your beer stash. What's the first thing they are going to do? For most MZB groups, they would celebrate. Now you have a bunch of drunk and stuporous MZBs. What a fine target they make.

Optionally, drug or poison a particular batch of homebrew, make sure everyone in your group knows about it. Leave it in a location particularly easy to find. MZBs raid, you bail, they party, you go back to clear the bodies without a shot fired

[jeffvail]

I live in Denver, and have been considering starting a "Beer Farm" somewhere within a few hours of here for several years now.

My plan is to make it a semi-commercial venture, along the lines of a micro, micro brewery. Probably 10 acres of barley, which can be dry-farmed out here as long as one is willing to accept decreased yields, and uses some reasonable swales and cover crops to help out (see Masanobu Fukuoka's "a natural way of farming"). Hops are a bit more difficult to dry farm here, but can be done with swales and other rainfall capture techniques--it doesn't take many hops, relative to the barley.

The largest issue that most people don't think of, necessary to go all the way through the beer-making process, is the malting of the grain. It isn't that difficult to convert an existing shed into a malt-house, or to build one specifically for this (my plan, straw bale & masonry stove for heating), but it may be difficult in an urban/suburban area, as you need to brown the just-sprouted grains by heating them, and this can produce a fair amount of smoke, especially for chocolate malts and the like. But it's certainly possible. I'm also interested in trying some barrel-fermented "real ales", a movement that is strong in the UK and growing in the US... really amazing taste.

Last problem is that I'll have a few thousand gallons of beer (if that's really a problem!). I've done some crude number crunching, and wholesale sales of bottled beer just doesn't make sense on this scale. Selling kegs to specialty retailers makes more sense, but clearly the best way to make this kind of venture actually profitable is to sell direct retail at festivals, even host my own oktoberfest celebration, etc. Sell a few thousand pints of beer at a couple of bucks a pop and you're doing OK. Of course, giving lots away, bartering it, etc. is a great option as well. And if things go downhill, Beer is a pretty fungible commodity to have on hand--serves many purposes.

Once you've got the barley malted, full mash brewing isn't really that difficult, but does require a bit more equipment than the standard home-brew kit. And with 10 acres of barley I'll need something a big bigger as well, even with batches spaced out over the year.

[Teclo]

hmm, intruiging!

I did some research and found same. You need space
1000 sq foot = 100 pints. My garden is this size but not enough

My plan now is different, I'm going to grow to get seeds and stock pile them. Then give them to people to grow and return bounty for brewing
If 50 people grow 250sq foot thats over 1000 pints

I've decided to this winter work out how to grow indoors then in spring plant 500 sq foot and give to others. Might still be time for them to plant and get harvest that year. Seems to grow quickly

What I also like about this (ok... whats not to like) is its the original economy. When hunter gatherers discovered bread/beer they settled down. Same principle could work now

[RainShadow]

mmm... beer...

I've been considering wines from the home-hooch market in post-peak. The process looks simpler than for beer, and you can make it out of just about anything.

My main question has been how to maintain a good yeast supply. I've learned how to get yeast going for breads, and I know any yeast will do the job in a pinch. But I also know that they use special yeasts for wine making, and have been wondering if it would be possible to build up some sort of colony of the good stuff.

[I_Like_Plants]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('aflatoxin', '
')
I have 4 huge pear trees. Every year, I get at least 2000 lbs of pears whether or not I want them. The cold pressed juice gives a starting gravity of 1.070, or about 6% alchohol. I usually add about 150 pounds of sugar to get 150-200 gallons of 13.5% wine per year. (750-1000 bottles) This is more than I can drink.

[Specop_007]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Schweinshaxe', 'I') don't know a lot about Canadian beer but John Cleese (or was it a Monty Python sketch?) once said:

American beer is like making love in a canoe. It's fucking close to water.

Wittgenstein was a beery swine...

OK, I'm spamming this thread. Sorry for that!

Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

Shut up!

Spam, spam, spam, spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

Shut up!! Baked beans are off!

How do I get out of this thread...? OK, hit the the Submit button. Just hit the goddamn Submit button. What? Do it now... NOW!

[kelee877]

I went out to do the shopping and usuall,s today and it seems the price of everything has managed to go up in price..lol..except beer..

See there is a God...