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Good memory Bunny =)

Yeah I brew....I've been doing all grain brewing for about a year and a half, (did 4 extract batchesbefore that) and have done 15 or more AG batches. Still learning! There's a lot to know to make great beer. I've made a few great ones, quite a few good ones, and some that I managed to mess up one way or another.

You *cannot* ferment in the bottle - your bottles wil explode! And that is not only messy, but dangerous. Plus you'd have gobs of yeast in the bottom of the bottle.

You can brew good beer from the kits - there's a few things you can do to improve things *vastly*
1) Make sure you have fresh malt extract, not years-old extract. Fresh ingredients make better tasting beer!
2) Do a full boil, not a concentrated boil. Various reasons, from hop utilization to flavor, and even sanitation. You want all the water to boil with the sugars. This will really improve the flavor of the beer.
3) Oxygenate/Aerate the chilled, boiled wort well. I use a 0.5 micron stainless steel "stone" and pump pure Oxygen through it for a minute or two in the fermenter. Yeast need Oxygen to reproduce, and boiling has just driven off most of the O2. You can also use aquarium pumps and a stone as above, but will need to do it a lot longer (10 mins? dunno) I bought the O2 kit from Morebeer.com and then used the $7 bottles from a hardware store. Since then, I have inherited a bunch of medical O2 bottles and use those - one will last 60 or more batches. Having enough O2 will help the yeast get off to a good start.
4) Pitch enough yeast! Those kits usually come with an envelope of dry yeast. That's not really enough though. Pitching enough yeast is very important, as the yeastie-beasties go through a couple phases in the fermentation. Check out the "Pitching Rate Calculator" at MrMalty.com.
5) Don't let your fermentation get too hot! Someday I will have a fridge and temp control to control my ferm. temps, but until then I put my fermenter in a big rubbermaid storage container and fill that up with cold tap water. The water acts as a heat sink to keep the ferm temp down closer to the temp of the surrounding water, which will be your room temp. Most yeast packaging gives the optimum ferm temps - get too high, and you produce more fusel and hot tasting alcohols. This is why Lagers are usually more clean-tasting....Lager yeasts ferment much cooler and slower than Ale yeasts - so Ales usually have more estery and fruity tastes from the yeast.

As far as your secondary fermentation - Typically I wouldn't bother. Brew, let it sit in the fermenter for 2 weeks, then put it in a bottling bucket, prime and bottle (providing your fermentation is done which it will be unless you've had a major problem). There will be enough yeast in the beer to carbonate in the bottle. Leaving it in the Primary for 2 weeks gives the yeast some time to clean up after themselves. When I started, I did primary for 1 week, then secondary for 2, then bottle. It's just extra handling though, and the 2 week primary thing works really well for me.

If doing something very high-gravity, then I might consider doing a secondary to let it age a little and calm down some of the hot alcohol tases.


As far as my setup, I have a double-burner turkey fryer, and 3 15.5 gallon kegs that I cut holes in the tops of.

One I use for a mash kettle - I heat the water in it, then use a big stirrer to add in the grain at the right temp. The keg holds the heat really well even in the Winter in my open garage. I have a stainless braid in the bottom connected to the drain valve. I batch sparge rather than fly sparge. I can heat the mash with the burner if I wish, as long as I constantly stir it.

The other two kegs I use as as HLT/boil/Fermenters - while the grain is mashing on the keg on burner 1(which is off), I heat water up to sparge temp in this keg. So I drain the wort from the mash, and add this hot water, then put the wort in this keg for boiling. I have fabricated a couple glass lids that just rest on top of these kegs, the lids have a bead of silicone and just sit there while the wort ferments. So it isn't technically sealed, but bugs can't get in during fermentation.

Then I siphon (get an "auto-siphon" if you don't have one, I reccommend the 1/2" model) into bottling buckets, prime, and bottle. Soo I will get into kegging into 5-gallon kegs though - it's like sanitizing ONE big bottle rather than 50 some. Bottling gets to suck after you've done so many batches. I'll probably always bottle at least a few from each batch though. And I'll probably bottle Barleywines, Russian Imp. Stouts, Old Ales, etc - really big beers that I want to age and not take up a keg for a long time.

Wow this is a little longer than I expected....

Feel free to email me (my LSN name) at Gmail. Or just reply here - I'll be checking in from time to time.