Seven Things Making Beer Taught Me about D&D

kosmos1214 · February 27, 2016, 02:51:11 PM

Quote from: JesterRaiin;881530snip cools snip

ah thanks interesting

S'mon · February 27, 2016, 04:21:08 PM

Quote from: The Butcher;881688Who wants to pair games and beers?

American läger for D&D, English porter for WFRP, IPA (eww) for Traveller, barley wine for Runequest, dunkel läger for Vampire? What RPG goes with a nice Witbier?

I tend to drink cider while GMing as I find it gives me more of a high-energy buzz. As a player I drink what fits the PC - ale for Barbarians, wine for Paladins, whisky for dwarves... I had ale today playing Labyrinth Lord and that felt right. Last night GMing Classic D&D Karameikos I had too much rose wine - it fitted the Palaces & Princesses setting, but not my GMing...

Spike · February 27, 2016, 08:48:53 PM

Quote from: kosmos1214;881389cool i love mead my self iv been thinking of looking in to how to make it

Boil about a pound of honey for every gallon of water and scoop off any film. Let it cool to a bit warmer than room temp and add a packet of champaign yeast (the dry stuff costs about a buck and a half a packet, the liquid stuff is more fragile and costs about ten bucks a 'vial', go with the dry.)

Pour it all into a nice sterile bottle (I use an iodine wash), and cap it with a ballon if you're cheap. Stick it in a closet. After a couple of days (or weeks if its cold in your house), pour it into a new, sterilize bottle, leaving the dead yeast sludge behind. Keep doing that until the alcohol content kills the yeast (look for bubbles...). Generally a couple of weeks (or again: Months if its cold in your house...).

If its weak, you can distill it by freezing and make, essentially, mead brandy.

Its really only 'ruined' if it gets contaminated from foreign bacteria and tastes... off. Metallic, or musty or acidic...

Boom. Done.

So much simpler than beer, really.**

** Disclaimer: I've never even attempted to brew beer, and almost everything I know about the process comes from Sam Adams commercials. I think it involves large horses, though.

Opaopajr · February 28, 2016, 12:15:21 AM

Quote from: Spike;881839** Disclaimer: I've never even attempted to brew beer, and almost everything I know about the process comes from Sam Adams commercials. I think it involves large horses, though.

The horse piss known as Budweiser requires Clydesdales apparently. That's probably for the mass production though.

Daztur · February 28, 2016, 05:18:17 PM

Quote from: Spike;881839Boil about a pound of honey for every gallon of water and scoop off any film. Let it cool to a bit warmer than room temp and add a packet of champaign yeast (the dry stuff costs about a buck and a half a packet, the liquid stuff is more fragile and costs about ten bucks a 'vial', go with the dry.)

Pour it all into a nice sterile bottle (I use an iodine wash), and cap it with a ballon if you're cheap. Stick it in a closet. After a couple of days (or weeks if its cold in your house), pour it into a new, sterilize bottle, leaving the dead yeast sludge behind. Keep doing that until the alcohol content kills the yeast (look for bubbles...). Generally a couple of weeks (or again: Months if its cold in your house...).

If its weak, you can distill it by freezing and make, essentially, mead brandy.

Its really only 'ruined' if it gets contaminated from foreign bacteria and tastes... off. Metallic, or musty or acidic...

Boom. Done.

So much simpler than beer, really.**

** Disclaimer: I've never even attempted to brew beer, and almost everything I know about the process comes from Sam Adams commercials. I think it involves large horses, though.

Few comments about this coming from a beer-making perspective:
-Spike's recipe is going to give you mead of a beer-ish strength and very dry, a lot of mead is more of a wine-ish strength. Listen to Spike, mead fermentation can be a bit finicky from what I've heard and a lower alcohol mead will be easier to manage, need less aging and have fewer off flavors if the yeast don't co-operate.
-Mead probably isn't going to taste like what you think. It's often quite dry (unless you put a shit-ton of honey in or remove/kill the yeast and then sweeten it which is annoying to do on a homebrewing level, a lot of commercial mead is heavily backsweetened, think the difference between crappy commercial cider that's half apple juice and real traditional cider) and tastes more like a less acidic white wine than honey because the yeast is going to be very efficient at eating up the honey's sugars.
-The variety of honey REALLY REALLY REALLY matter. A lot of honey is adulterated so beware.
-Balloons work fine for small bottles, but if you're making it stronger or going with a larger batch use an air lock to let the CO2 out.
-Champagne yeast works that yeast is great about sticking to the bottom of the bottle and not floating up, there are specific mead yeasts though.
-Champagne yeast has a pretty wide temp range but if it gets too cold it'll go to sleep and if it gets too hot it'll give you nasty hot alcohol flavors. Try to stay within 15-24 degrees Celcius and note that fermentation itself produces heat so the fermenting mead will get hotter than the room around it.
-The yeast sludge an the bottom of the fermenter isn't dead and the alcohol won't kill it, dead yeast have a HORRIBLE flavor and doesn't happen during normal fermentation. What happens is the yeast go dormant and sink once there's no more food for them to eat or if there's more alcohol than the yeast can stand (a pound of honey per gallon isn't going to do that to champagne yeast). You don't want to keep the fermenting stuff on the yeast trub TOO long but keeping it there a little while lets the yeast metabolize some fermentation byproducts and give you a cleaner flavor. What I'd do is keep the mead in the original bottle for a few weeks then transfer it to whatever you want to drink it out of (maybe sticking it in the fridge for a day to "cold crash" it and make any remaining yeast sink down). If you want add a bit of sugar to carbonate it (1-1.5 tea spoons/liter is a good rule of thumb depending on how much carbonation you want) and seal it.
-With mead you probably want to add some yeast nutrient, not as many yeast nutrients in honey as in beer wort.
-With stronger mead you've got to age it for a while, generally at least six months with regular beer of weaker mead you can drink it faster.

Beer making isn't THAT hard basically it works like this:

1. Make sweet wort. This can be done by getting extract and adding water or cooking some ground malt in water of a narrow temperature range (bad things happen if you go over this temperature range and nothing will happen if you go too much under) for an hour so. Then separate the grains from the wort (number of ways to do this).
2. Add hops. This can be done by getting extract and adding water or throwing some hops into the sweet wort and boiling them.
3. Cool the wort. I just put it in the bath tub for a while.
4. Put it in a fermenter with an airlock after cleaning the everliving fuck out of everything to prevent a bacterial infection.
5. Add yeast.
6. Keep it at the cool end of room temperature (depending on the yeast strain, you can get to damn near sauna temp with saison yeast and lagers and generally brewed colder) for a few weeks.
7. Bottle with with some kind of food for the yeast in the bottles (so they carbonate it), I use plastic liter bottles and reuse them with different sealable plastic caps each time.

Basically if you can:
-Follow a recipe.
-Keep things clean.
-Maintain basic temp control.

It's pretty damn easy to make decent beer. You don't need much equipment either, the minimum if you're doing all grain instead of extract is:
-Fermenter with air lock.
-Big-ass pot.
-Huge strainer bag.
-Thermometer.
-Bleach (there are better cleaners but bleach is cheap).
-Bottles to put the beer in.

That's really it.

If you reaaaaaally push it you can make a drinkable beer in ten days, usually takes a few weeks though.

kosmos1214 · February 28, 2016, 05:33:42 PM

Spoiler

Quote from: Spike;881839Boil about a pound of honey for every gallon of water and scoop off any film. Let it cool to a bit warmer than room temp and add a packet of champaign yeast (the dry stuff costs about a buck and a half a packet, the liquid stuff is more fragile and costs about ten bucks a 'vial', go with the dry.)

Pour it all into a nice sterile bottle (I use an iodine wash), and cap it with a ballon if you're cheap. Stick it in a closet. After a couple of days (or weeks if its cold in your house), pour it into a new, sterilize bottle, leaving the dead yeast sludge behind. Keep doing that until the alcohol content kills the yeast (look for bubbles...). Generally a couple of weeks (or again: Months if its cold in your house...).

If its weak, you can distill it by freezing and make, essentially, mead brandy.

Its really only 'ruined' if it gets contaminated from foreign bacteria and tastes... off. Metallic, or musty or acidic...

Boom. Done.

So much simpler than beer, really.**

** Disclaimer: I've never even attempted to brew beer, and almost everything I know about the process comes from Sam Adams commercials. I think it involves large horses, though.

Quote from: Daztur;882061Few comments about this coming from a beer-making perspective:
-Spike's recipe is going to give you mead of a beer-ish strength and very dry, a lot of mead is more of a wine-ish strength. Listen to Spike, mead fermentation can be a bit finicky from what I've heard and a lower alcohol mead will be easier to manage, need less aging and have fewer off flavors if the yeast don't co-operate.
-Mead probably isn't going to taste like what you think. It's often quite dry (unless you put a shit-ton of honey in or remove/kill the yeast and then sweeten it which is annoying to do on a homebrewing level, a lot of commercial mead is heavily backsweetened, think the difference between crappy commercial cider that's half apple juice and real traditional cider) and tastes more like a less acidic white wine than honey because the yeast is going to be very efficient at eating up the honey's sugars.
-The variety of honey REALLY REALLY REALLY matter. A lot of honey is adulterated so beware.
-Balloons work fine for small bottles, but if you're making it stronger or going with a larger batch use an air lock to let the CO2 out.
-Champagne yeast works that yeast is great about sticking to the bottom of the bottle and not floating up, there are specific mead yeasts though.
-Champagne yeast has a pretty wide temp range but if it gets too cold it'll go to sleep and if it gets too hot it'll give you nasty hot alcohol flavors. Try to stay within 15-24 degrees Celcius and note that fermentation itself produces heat so the fermenting mead will get hotter than the room around it.
-The yeast sludge an the bottom of the fermenter isn't dead and the alcohol won't kill it, dead yeast have a HORRIBLE flavor and doesn't happen during normal fermentation. What happens is the yeast go dormant and sink once there's no more food for them to eat or if there's more alcohol than the yeast can stand (a pound of honey per gallon isn't going to do that to champagne yeast). You don't want to keep the fermenting stuff on the yeast trub TOO long but keeping it there a little while lets the yeast metabolize some fermentation byproducts and give you a cleaner flavor. What I'd do is keep the mead in the original bottle for a few weeks then transfer it to whatever you want to drink it out of (maybe sticking it in the fridge for a day to "cold crash" it and make any remaining yeast sink down). If you want add a bit of sugar to carbonate it (1-1.5 tea spoons/liter is a good rule of thumb depending on how much carbonation you want) and seal it.
-With mead you probably want to add some yeast nutrient, not as many yeast nutrients in honey as in beer wort.
-With stronger mead you've got to age it for a while, generally at least six months with regular beer of weaker mead you can drink it faster.

Beer making isn't THAT hard basically it works like this:

1. Make sweet wort. This can be done by getting extract and adding water or cooking some ground malt in water of a narrow temperature range (bad things happen if you go over this temperature range and nothing will happen if you go too much under) for an hour so. Then separate the grains from the wort (number of ways to do this).
2. Add hops. This can be done by getting extract and adding water or throwing some hops into the sweet wort and boiling them.
3. Cool the wort. I just put it in the bath tub for a while.
4. Put it in a fermenter with an airlock after cleaning the everliving fuck out of everything to prevent a bacterial infection.
5. Add yeast.
6. Keep it at the cool end of room temperature (depending on the yeast strain, you can get to damn near sauna temp with saison yeast and lagers and generally brewed colder) for a few weeks.
7. Bottle with with some kind of food for the yeast in the bottles (so they carbonate it), I use plastic liter bottles and reuse them with different sealable plastic caps each time.

Basically if you can:
-Follow a recipe.
-Keep things clean.
-Maintain basic temp control.

It's pretty damn easy to make decent beer. You don't need much equipment either, the minimum if you're doing all grain instead of extract is:
-Fermenter with air lock.
-Big-ass pot.
-Huge strainer bag.
-Thermometer.
-Bleach (there are better cleaners but bleach is cheap).
-Bottles to put the beer in.

That's really it.

If you reaaaaaally push it you can make a drinkable beer in ten days, usually takes a few weeks though.

thank you thank you both very much as to the honey i do know a guy localy who keeps his own bees and is it beature for the honey to be liquid or crysaline

raw or cooked

Spike · February 28, 2016, 11:38:46 PM

Well, I lament the loss of the buckwheat honey I tried, due to back-contamination from my gas trap, but to answer your question:

Honey doesn't really spoil, so the state of it isn't really important. Step one is to cook the honey in the water to make the must, so crystalized honey will melt. Boiling is actually a bit over the top here, but if you don't cook it down you're good. With 'beekeeper' rather than commercial honey the skimming of the foam off the top during the cooking process is more important. Lots of impurities, like bee's wax and stuff in the natural stuff, while commercial honey is cleaner.

I don't really get the raw or cooked question. I'm strictly amateur here, but I suppose if you were really patient you could create the must without heat. Just add water and mix, slowly. Don't know why you would, though unless you were trying to do it in a zombie apocalypse without drawing attention???

I've been getting my honey from my brewer supply store, but my first batch of mead, which was awesome if a bit weak (in the watery sense...) was made with off the shelf honey from the local big chain grocery store.

My current batch is being done hand's off, which is sort of weird. Cold house, so the yeast is mostly dormant, no one around for weeks at a time to check on it, but aside from the slow as molasses pace, its doing great.

But thats the sturdy, dry, champaign yeast. The wet yeast went two batches in and did nothing at all due to the cold.

Daztur · February 28, 2016, 11:59:33 PM

Too much heat too long will drive off some aromatics. The only time I used honey I dumped in a kilo or so my grandmother in-law got from a beekeeper into a 5 gallon batch of beer right at the end of the boil bits of wax and all and it gave the beer a wonderful flowery smell.

That`s a lot less then you`d use for mead but shit seemed to settle down pretty well before bottling.

Spike · February 29, 2016, 12:31:38 AM

yeah, I did make that mistake with this batch. Not ruined, but its going to be a bit less flavorful than it could have been, seeing as I boiled it down about 20%. Definitely lost some flavor there.

But then my palate ain't exactly refined. I keep going back to Angry Orchard instead of the far superior craft ciders that I dabble in, even though I can't drink more than two bottles in a row before my taste buds quit and just tell me everything is some sort of nasty rotten apple flavor.

Which is one reason I vastly preferred the dry, but that's gone from 'hard to find' to 'seriously, we don't make that anymore', near as I can tell.

Which reminds me that my next 'batch' of mead will probably be a cider instead. I gather the process is reasonably similar, except you are starting with solid apples.

I may need to do some research.

Daztur · February 29, 2016, 07:21:30 AM

Check out homebrewtalk.com, it`s mostly beer but a lot of people into mead and fruit wine with a huge amount of knowledge. Pretty decent board culture as well.