I just love buying cool new dealies and widgets and whatsits to try on my next brew. DME? Toss some in. Crazy liquid yeast? Yes please. What the hell is a refractometer anyway? Just bought one. But I've gotta figure out how to fit all of this in my little one-bedroom apartment. Though it feels sometimes like every home brewer lives out in the boonies, 2 hours from the nearest city, buying their grain in 50-lb sacks and brewing in a 20 gallon keg in their back yard, I know I can't be the only one working within these constraints. Here are some tips.
1. Brew half batches. I mentioned this already. Mr. Beer kegs are just PET plastic fermenters, just like Better Bottles but in a different shape. They fit on shelves, in your closet, in your refrigerator or in a cooler with ice when it gets too hot out for your fermentation. They are dark-colored to keep out light,and they have a spigot for easy racking and 'sample testing'. Three-gallon carboys (plastic or glass) also work, but don't get glass. You'll regret it on the way to the emergency with massive shards of glass in your testes. Standard 5-gallon batches can be cut exactly in half, either by hand or with brewing software like BeerSmith.
2. Bottle, don't keg. Every home brewer who thinks he's a homebrewer figures if he doesn't keg, he isn't a real man. Where do you plan on putting these 5-gallon cornelius kegs that you spent $100+ on (each)? Your refrigerator? I didn't think so. At this point half of the closet and cabinet space in my house is full of full or empty beer bottles, to my wife's chagrin and my delight.
3. Get a 5-gallon spigoted bottling bucket. I got one for batch priming, only to find that I could store literally all of my beer-making equipment inside the bucket, put the top on and stick it out on the balcony. Zero indoor space used. I find more uses for the thing every time I brew - batch priming, hold brew water, temporarily holding wort, sanitizing equipment and even measuring liquids.
4. Make sure you live near an LHBS. You aren't gonna be buying in bulk - you have no room to store that stuff. You also don't want to spend $5-10 shipping on every half batch when the ingredients are less than $20 in the first place. Drive out to your homebrew supply store and make a day of it. Have a chat with the guys there, buy way more neat equipment than you need, grab some craft beers, whatever. I go to MoreBeer in Concord, CA, which happens to be next door to a craft brewery (Ale Industries), two blocks from a Costco and two miles from a Fry's Electronics: it's hours before I manage to make my way home.
5. Make lots of ice and keep it in the freezer in the week leading to brew day. You're going to be cooling your boiled wort in the sink in an ice bath, so you need ice.
6. Do full boils. Why not, your full boil is the same size as the five-gallon brewer's partial boil. And while you're at it, you can switch to tap water instead of distilled water, because you're boiling it all (no worries about topping off with tap water filled with bacteria).
7. Fuck it, go all grain! An all grain half batch is nearly identical to a five-gallon brewer's partial mash. Just mash your grain in your standard five-gallon stock pot at 152 for an hour, rinse it a couple of times with hot water and dump the grain. Boil and you have beer for $10-$15 per case. Don't forget to invite someone over and have some drinks during the mash - it's pretty uneventful.
8. Don't worry about buying too many hops at once. They're cheaper if you buy 2+ ounces at once, and unlike grain, hops take up virtually no space and keep for months in the freezer. Plus, you'll almost never use an entire package of the same hops all at once when doing a half batch.
9. Get a food scale that can measure in grams. You'll be using it a lot for hops, because you can't use the entire package at once. Also useful for weighing priming sugar, water additives, etc.
10. Wash your yeast. As you get more advanced, consider re-using your yeast. This is the only place where you can't 'cut your ingredients in half'. You'll still need a full vial or packet of yeast for your half batch, so you're spending twice as much on yeast. So, re-use it.
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