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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  4mo ago (text post)   723 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 19, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I’ve made mead before, and beer. It’s not a regular thing.

Is beer worth it? IIRC I tried some homebrew in college and it was very okay. It seems like you'd need to invest in some nice equipment and fancy ingredients to make something that would actually be better than even mediocre craft beers, and it also seems easy to screw up and make something undrinkable.

I've heard nothing but bad things about mead. What was your experience with it?

IME ‘ok’ is a good outcome from home brewing. Mead has tended to turn out better than beer, though.

  • I also did basic homebrewing in college, in this case to get around being too young too buy beer myself. I used low-tier equipment and a low-tier process. With the focus and knowledge of cooking I've gained since then, not to mention the vast amounts of information, I think you would get great results and it would be fun.
  • Mead is in between winemaking and brewing in that you are a bit more restricted in terms of ingredients, so execution is paramount. The guys I know who do it are generally more focused and weird than brewers, and you'll sometimes get sick of drinking your own stuff. You need other people who can drink your product.
  • I investigated home distilling for a bit, which has fewer resources than brewing because of its illegality. My read after watching some videos is that it's far more difficult, has a far longer time between effort and analysis, and requires more specialized equipment. I love whiskey but plan to leave this to the professionals.

Is beer worth it? IIRC I tried some homebrew in college and it was very okay. It seems like you'd need to invest in some nice equipment and fancy ingredients to make something that would actually be better than even mediocre craft beers, and it also seems easy to screw up and make something undrinkable.

My experience is that it's nearly impossible to make something worse than a mainstream (European) store-bought quality beer. Whether they measure up to a craft beer is a matter of taste, mine is arguably quite primitive, and I don't actually like most craft beers. Screwing up in my experience is far from easy, the only place where it can plausibly happen is when you deviate from a recipe, but if you just follow the instructions you'll be fine.

If you have a big pot at home (10+ litres, but the bigger the better) and just want to try out to see if this is for you, you won't need a lot of equipment - there are starter kits in the $50 range with all the ingredients and basic tools. If it turns out you enjoy it, you can start buying extra equipment as needed. For me the gear is less about the quality of the end product, and more about making the production easier - one downside of this hobby is that it's pretty time consuming, especially on the day of brewing.

Due to local taxes, the ingredients for 23 liter batch of beer and the equipment to brew it costs a little bit less than 23 liters of beer does. If you feel like really cheating, there are companies that will "help" you brew and bottle "your own" untaxed beer or wine for a small fee.

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