The Board

The best thing you can do ennio is to put your feelers out and see if any of your extended friends are into it. You'll learn a lot from watching them brew. My flatmate has a really good recipe book that I believe has basic method in it too. But with regards to the method you're probably best searching home brewing forums etc. There's not just one way to skin a cat as they say.

Andrew,

I can make some recommendations based on the types of beer you want to brew if you want.

Randy Mosher's book Radical Brewing is a really good book.
Brewing software like beersmith makes life really easy for tweaking volumes and the like, and you can get recipes online which are based around known beers if you have one that you like.

The key is do you want to make cheap beer or do you want to make beer that impresses people? Extract kits are cheap and make OK beer, but whole grain brewing makes excellent beer. Happy to help if you need.

Campbell

Forgive my ignorance, what are the grain requirements? I'm actually in a pretty good position to grow some!

Doesn't the water make a huge difference too? I have tap water here which is drinkable, but also well water and there's some extremely clean water in some local mining lakes. What are the tests?

Me I like bitters and stouts. In the 5-8% mark.

I'm liking the idea of having Latohegy Bitter!

You could conceivably make 'beer' out of a lot of different things (and people do, to cater for coeliacs etc), but really it's malted grains like barley, wheat and occasionally oats. I've no experience of the actual kilning process as my grains arrive in big old sacks. I really like the idea of being able to produce pretty much everything you need for beer though - would make the final product that bit more satisfying. I'll hopefully be putting in a hop vine soon, although I'm slightly hesitant to do so because I'm always on the move at the moment.

I think you would be best off growing hops, they would look great hanging from the cabin. As Jack mentioned, its all about the kilning and malting of the barley. I would just buy it in.

Bitters ( and super aromatic IPAs) are easy to make and they are usually ready to drink in 4 weeks. Stouts are easy too. You just need the gear now. Having seen the pics of your plumbing skills , I am sure you could knock something up easily from stainless steel beer kegs if you wanted....

Campbell, Jack

Thanks for your responses. It transpires that I have a brewing shop 4 miles from home. I'm sure that between the shop and Randy Mosher's book Radical Brewing, the only reason I won't be enjoying a home brewed IPA in a few weeks is my own laziness

Andrew

No worries, Andrew. Feel free to ask any questions you need. I'm still learning a whole heap about brewing, so any questions you ask will probably help me to learn too!

And just enjoy the process. It should be fun. And extremely satisfying once you get that first taste of something you made. One other thing I'd say is that the quicker you get into all grain brewing the faster you'll learn...BUT, in saying that, you can learn a lot of the basic stuff regarding sterility, fermentation process, bottling, carbonation etc by using a kit. So if I was you I would do one or two kit brews first and then jump straight into all grain.

I'm not sure what the temperatures are like around you, but I find that (unless you have complete control of the temperature you're fermenting in) you're better off to err on the cooler side (say around 18c) during fermentation as it's less likely to produce off flavours.