Hello everyone from the South of England. Having brewed my first beer in March, I'm fairly new to home brewing. It's been an interesting journey so far and I've got four batches under my belt to date. I did a bit of research online before plunging in and decided to go straight for all-grain rather than extract or kits. It took me a fair amount of time to gather the equipment for a 5 gallon AG setup, but I'm glad I made the effort - the feedback from friends and family (some of whom had brewed from kits in days of yore...) has been very positive. I signed up to BF when I was starting to plan my first recipes. This site has been invaluable in teaching me the finer points of brewing - particularly in terms of devising recipes. I must have spent hours and hours playing around with recipe ideas and tracking the progress of batches, but I thought it was about time I ventured into the new forum to say hi to everyone. Being new to the hobby, I may have questions galore for the more experienced brewers!
Welcome JAMC! Excellent choice with the Lifetime Membership, we thank you for your purchase! Nice adaptation of the olympic poster for your avatar. We watched the olympics, what a great city London is, would love to visit. Indeed, going all grain is an effort, but a worthy quest. Going straight to all grain and skipping extract is an even bigger challenge, nice job. You'll never know what extract twang tastes like, or have to drink through a batch of it!!! Ah, first brews...
I came into home brewing asking myself how I could make the best beer I possibly could. Extract seems like a shorthand way of getting up and running, but there's definitely a trade-off in terms of quality - I wasn't up for that. I thought let's do it properly or not do it at all... I'm pleased with the way my first batches have turned out - recipes are stored here of course, will make them public when I've honed them down so they're just right. Can't overstate how important BF was - even at beta stage - in teaching me how to put a recipe together and understanding the impact of different brewing techniques. I don't live too far from London and was lucky enough to get tickets for one of the olympic events. It certainly was a crazy day out! As for the lifetime membership; it wasn't a hard decision. My day job involves me wearing many hats - one of which is web developer. Let's just say I recognise a good job well done when I see one. I'm very pleased to be able to get in on the ground floor and I think you guys have taken the right path by gradually building a community and continually shaping the site to suit the members. Keep going along those lines and I expect you'll get many more lifetime members.
Don't discount extract brewing. You can make very good, quality beers with extract. With the quality of products available for brewing these days, And good fresh extract, Your beer can be a good as you want. Its the brewer, not the system that makes quality beer IMHO. That being said, Welcome JAMC. My wife is from Ipswich, so we are almost family.
That's a fair point and I suppose I can't knock it having never tried it first hand. My opinion was formed from conversations with people who were using kits some 10 or 20 years ago, and I imagine there have been leaps forward in that time - or at least I hope there would have been! I've never been into Ipswich itself, but I've been to Suffolk and visited the lovely town of Bury St Edmunds (home of the Greene King brewery).
How far do you live from Burton-on-Trent? I'm not saying I like IPA or anything, but I do pray in that direction twice a day. The other three times I lean toward Dusseldorf .
I have gotten the same extract reaction from folks who were brewing about a decade ago. Back then the quality was very poor so you almost had to do allgrain if you didn't want it to taste bad. Extract has come a long way but I switched to allgrain to have more control over the final product. I made some great beers with extract though. Ones the older brewers couldn't tell were extract.
The way I look at it, when you mash and lauter you ARE extracting. It's all extract and extract only comes from mashing. I prefer fresh extract made with the grains of my choice to powdered or canned with a generic label like light or dark. That said, pre-extracted wort can make good beer. I've only made one kit beer (an Altbier), but it was good. I gave a couple bottles to a guy we were buying some used gear from - he said it was the best beer he'd had. I'm all all grain now - I'm not going back.
I'm about 170 miles from Burton-on-Trent as the crow flies. It's in the midlands, which is a world apart culturally speaking from the south-east where I am. The "Southern Brown Ale" style is the one that's local to me - I really should get around to attempting it one of these days... If you were to ask me where the centre of the brewing universe was, I'd probably say it was in Brussels.
I guess the Belgian beer fascination is just something I'll never understand. I'll take British style ales and German ales and lagers, you can have all that contaminated wort in between. Remember, I kid because I care...I'd better watch it or I'll be up s**t Kriek without a Trippel. In all seriousity, I am going to pick up a Chimay and give it a shot.
