Invest $2000 in Equipment and Get all the Cheap Beer You Can Drink

I feel like writing about the beer business.

I can give new people some advice.

1. Don’t bottle your beer. It’s a miserable job, your beer will get infections, you won’t be able to adjust the carbonation, and there is nothing like the convenience of draft. If you’re excited about taking your beer on the road, use small kegs. You don’t need bottles.

2. Build a keezer (freezer converted to hold kegs) instead of buying a kegerator (refrigerator made for kegs). It will hold more kegs. It will look better because you can put all the tanks and junk inside it. You can build it so all the beer stuff lifts off and onto a new freezer if the old freezer dies. Virtually all fridges and freezers are Chinese now, so they are poorly made. Finally, appliance repair people often refuse to work on kegerators, and manufacturer support is negligible. It’s better to spend $250-$400 on a new freezer than it is to spend hundreds more on a new kegerator.

3. Use dry yeast whenever possible. Wet yeast requires making a starter, which is a batch of fermented liquid that increases the number of yeast cells. It’s a pain. It also requires adding oxygen to the wort before you add (“pitch”) the yeast. It has a short shelf life, it has to be kept refrigerated, and it’s more expensive. With dry yeast, you just open the fermenter and pour it in.

4. If you can afford an electric brewing machine, or all-in-one (AIO), get it, because it will cut the work in half. But realize you may have to brew smaller batches when you want to make heavy beers. AIO’s only hold so much grain.

5. Use Star-San to sanitize. Forget iodophor. Star-San is colorless, and you can use whatever you spray it on right after you spray it. No rinsing.

6. Get yourself some push-fit fittings and EVAbarrier tubing. Forget barbs and hose clamps. This stuff makes things much easier. If you find you have a place where you have to have a hose clamp, use a stepped or Oetiker clamp instead of the worm clamps they sell at the hardware store.

7. Buy brewing software. It will keep track of your recipes and your progress. It will do a lot of the math for you. Be careful, though, because it has been said that some calculations done by beer programs are better done by hand.

8. Keep very detailed notes, like a scientist. Every time you brew a batch, create a text document and write down everything that happens. Date every entry. This will help you repeat your successes but not your failures.

9. Figure out how to serve your beer correctly. You want a system that carbonates it enough while not blasting beer out of the faucet so hard you get a ton of head. Look into things like flow control faucets, beer line length, and flow control disconnects. You should also skip gas manifolds and go right to a multiple-body gas regulator so you can give every beer the right pressure.

I am still not positive I have my serving setup optimized, but then 23 days ago, I didn’t even have beer to serve. All I had was a bucket of unfermented beer.

It’s possible to have a situation where your beer has too much carbonation in the keg, too much head, and no gas in the glass. You can have a lot of head and flat beer. It’s important to get things right.

My second beer, a wheat ale, is done fermenting. I have a way of kegging it, but it’s not ideal, so I won’t be able to drink it until Saturday at the earliest.

When I started getting equipment, I decided to get a Fermzilla All Rounder fermenter. This is a round plastic jug with a bunch of valves and whatnot attached to it. The advantages are 1) you can see what’s happening through the plastic, 2) it’s easy to clean because it’s short with a big mouth, 3) it can be used for fermenting under pressure, which can be helpful with some beers, and 4) you can serve beer from it because it’s made for pressure.

I now think this thing was not a great investment. I can ferment under pressure in a dedicated keg, and a keg is easy to handle. I can put my wort in a keg and put the keg in the pool to cool. The stainless steel will conduct heat well and cool the wort quickly. I can’t drain hot wort into an All Rounder because it can’t stand anything higher than 130°. Finally, Kegland, the company that makes the All Rounder, stamps an expiration date on them because they get weak with time. No problem if you’re not pressure-fermenting or kegging, but what if you are?

I kept it anyway. But I don’t plan to use it to keg the wheat beer. It’s fat, so it will prevent me from putting a total of 4 kegs in the bottom of the keezer. I can’t have that.

I should probably send it back.

I found a salvage guy online selling used Cornelius kegs. Not really Cornelius kegs, but kegs made for dispensing soft drinks. Cornelius was a company that made kegs for Pepsi, and people tend to call all pop kegs Cornelius kegs, but a number of companies have made them. Homebrewers use them.

This guy said he had ball lock kegs, and he would sell them for $75 per pair plus shipping. “Ball lock” refers to the orifices that let CO2 in and beverages out. Most homebrewers like ball lock kegs.

He sent me 4 kegs, and they turned out to be pin lock kegs. Pepsi used ball locks, and Coke used pin locks. The hardware used to connect to them is different.

I complained, and he told me to keep the kegs. He refunded everything except about $37. Under Ebay’s terms, he was supposed to refund everything, and I was supposed to send the kegs back at his expense. I let it go, because I found a way to turn pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs. I bought some parts. For around $55 plus $37, I should end up with 4 good kegs, and that’s a great price.

In case a homebrewer is reading, turning Cornelius-brand pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs is very simple. Just order new gas and beverage posts for Cornelius kegs. Cornelius used the same thread on pin lock kegs and ball lock kegs. The story is not so simple for other brands like Firestone and Alloy Products. You’ll need to buy conversion kits. Right now, they run about $15 per keg. Different companies used different threads, so be informed before you buy.

Back to my problems. In the meantime, I had ordered more used kegs–ball lock–from another company. So when the smoke clears, I should have 8 ball lock kegs. Do I need 8? No. Let’s see. I can use 4 in the keezer and one in the fermenting fridge. That means I need 5 kegs. But it’s conceivable I may want to do a other things in the future, and Corny kegs, as they are called, never do anything but appreciate.

Ball lock kegs are thinner than pin lock kegs, so they will make my keezer less crowded. For that reason, I plan to make as much use of ball lock kegs as I can.

I hate to say this, because it’s just like me, but I could see getting a second keezer. Not a real keezer with taps. Just a small freezer for the garage to hold kegs of finished beer until the ones in the house run dry. As things are now, I will be able to store one new keg, but it will have to go in the fermenting fridge, so I won’t be able to brew anything else while it’s in storage unless I want to ferment at room temperature.

A second freezer would also let me store beers that benefit from aging. I make a stout that tastes too fruity for a few weeks, and I made a tripel-style ale that became transcendent after sitting in a freezer for months.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have developed a new appreciation for beer, and that’s saying a lot.

The only beer I’ve kegged so far continues to amaze me. The head is like the head on a Kirin, except that it has some color and tastes good. Kirin is like Budweiser made by Japanese brewers; an extremely well-made version of something no one needs. My beer is a little darker than a typical lager but not quite orange. When you smell it, multiple aromas come at you. They seem to pulsate. First you smell one, and then then another, and so on.

There are odors of spice, iced tea, caramel, and other things I can’t name. It’s hard to believe I didn’t throw a handful of spices into it.

Every glass seems to taste a little different. Some seem sweeter. Some more bitter. It’s like looking at a gem in different lights.

I have realized something interesting about beer. It differs from wine in that you don’t want to swish it around in your mouth. Not all beers are this way, but most of the time, swishing a beer around detracts from the experience. You smell it carefully. You taste certain things as you put it in your mouth. Then you taste and smell other things as you swallow it. If you hold it in your mouth, it feels uncomfortable.

Wine is not like that. If you don’t hold wine in your mouth for a little bit, you miss out on half the experience.

I am no connoisseur, but I can tell bad wine from good wine. I can tell Macallan 15 from Macallan 18, which isn’t as good. Maybe I’m not fit to judge, but I think beer is just as rewarding and interesting as wine. We think of beer as unsophisticated because we are used to bad beer, not because beer can’t be complex or refined.

Beer is a lot harder to make than wine. To make wine, you press grapes, ferment the juice, and put it in bottles. Done. Beer requires you to choose different malts, a yeast, one or more hops, a mash schedule, a fermentation temperature, a carbonation level, a serving temperature, and possibly other things like flavoring additives.

I am thinking of making mead because it’s so simple. It’s wine made from honey. Dissolve honey in water, add yeast, wait, and you have mead. So easy.

We are living in a golden age of beer. The big boys are still dominating the market with swill, but we now have more breweries than we did before Prohibition. It is now impossible for anyone to say he has tried everything. You can no longer be familiar with every beer sold in America. Even competition judges only get to try some of it.

There are 4 breweries in my rural Southern county, not including homebrewers. I don’t know if all are legitimate. There are probably people in America cashing in on the craft beer wave by offering crummy Bud-like beer in settings that resemble real breweries. It’s still impressive, and one place near me has won a statewide competition, so I would guess it’s the real thing.

In 2000, people here were probably suspicious of anyone strange enough to drink Heineken. Look where we are now.