Upgrading from Mr. Beer

So, you have a few batches of Mr. Beer under your belt, but it just isn't enough. You're on a limited budget, with limited space, and have all this Mr. Beer equipment sitting around. What do you do?

1. Get a hydrometer. Duh. You're not a geek if you aren't taking detailed measurements of your beer's gravity and alcohol. These go for $5-$10, and you have no excuse for not having one. If you really want to go nuts, get a refractometer.

2. Get a nicer stock pot, five gallons in size. Bigger than five gallons is hard to boil on a stove-top, while smaller makes it hard or impossible to do full boils and all grain. You might already have this. Make sure it has thick walls and bottom, and is stainless steel. Get a nice, big stainless steel spoon to go with it.

3. Get a bottling bucket. As I said in my last post, you can store all your junk in there. It also lets you batch prime, which is actually less work and more sanitary. You can use it to store and treat your water with campden (if you have chloramine) and brewing salts, hold your wort while sparging in all grain and put all your crap in to sanitize.

4. Get an auto-siphon/easy-siphon, tubing and bottling wand. Moving your liquids around is suddenly trivial. I recommend 3/8" ID tubing, because it fits the bucket spigot and bottling wand, and you don't really need the fat 1/2" ID tubing when dealing with smaller batch sizes. You can rack to your bucket by attaching the wand to your Mr. Beer locking spigot and connecting the hose to that, or siphoning directly through the top. Bottle by connecting the bottle and wand to your bucket spigot. Transfer wort from the kettle to the keg with the easy siphon. Easy.

5. Upgrade your ingredients. Mr. Beer recipes really aren't bad, as long as you follow some important rules. The problem is, they are expensive and limiting. Get some DME. Get some steeping grains. Get some hops. If you do nothing else, for the love of god upgrade your yeast. You don't have to use Mr. Beer ingredients just because you're still using the keg. You'll want some mesh grain and hop bags, also. Don't forget to refer to step 10 before you go on a shopping spree.

6. Make 2.5 gallons at a time. Mr. Beer recipes are designed to make 8.5 quarts, and the kegs are marked as such. Measure out 10 quarts of water in your keg and mark the level, then design your recipes around that final volume. Be sure to pick up some FermCap-S to put in during fermentation, which will prevent the krausen from overflowing or blowing the top off of your keg. It costs about a penny per batch, there's no reason not to.

7. Get BeerSmith. It is only $22 and lets you model both your old Mr. Beer recipes and your new non-Mr. Beer recipes. You'll need it once you start designing your own recipes, and the ability to customize your own equipment and process and scale other people's recipes to your setup is invaluable. Plus, it has a Brew Log that you can sort by date, to keep a detailed record of every beer you've made (and where you fucked up).

8. Get an ice chest. It only needs to be big enough to fit your keg. A big problem with fermentation in the first few days is letting the temp get out of control (75+). This is especially true when using a full pitch of yeast on a half batch. Put your keg in there and put some ice in to keep your beer fermenting around 68, or whatever your recipe calls for.

9. Switch to full boils. Why? A full boil with a lower gravity wort increases hop utilization and reduces the amount of scorching, leading to a lighter beer. It also guarantees that any nasties left in your extracts are killed. Finally, it means you can use 100% tap water without worrying about infection because you will boil every last drop that goes into your beer. Also, why not? A full boil for a half batch is the same size as a partial boil for a 5 gallon batch.

10. Make lots of ice! With more water to cool in a full boil, you'll need to cool it down. Cooling your wort down to pitching temp asap is important because it reduces the time your wort spends in the danger zone, where your wort is the ideal temperature for bacteria to settle.

Also, when you're doing all grain you want a good 'cold break', which happens best when your wort cools fast. This allows a large amount of trub to settle out of your wort instead of transferring into your fermenter.

Because you're doing half batches, you don't need a wort chiller. A really good ice bath works just as well, and saves you $60-$100. Make ice over the course of the week before your brew day. Try to accumulate at least a gallon of ice.

11. Get a fermometer. It lets you keep an eye on your keg's temperature without opening it. Every keg should have one, no excuses.

12. Learn, learn, learn! Get some books (How To Brew, Designing Great Beers, Brewing Classic Styles). Visit some forums (www.homebrewtalk.com, www.mrbeerfans.com). Listen to some podcasts (The Brewing Network). This step is what separates the beer geeks from the pot-bellied, neck-bearded alcoholics.

13. Have a beer and invite a friend over on your brew day. This is what separates the happy, well adjusted beer geeks from the ones that brew alone in their basement and die quietly from carbon monoxide poisoning. If you're lucky, he'll get addicted to the hobby and you'll have someone around that isn't completely annoyed by all your beer talk.