Equipment

Grains, malts, hops, yeast, water and other ingredients used to brew. Recipe reviews and suggestions.

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marklew NJ
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Location: North West New Jersey

Equipment

Post by marklew NJ »

Can anyone recommend what equipment I should buy and maybe suggest a vendor or site?

Bottles
Caps
Kettles
ETC ????
Any help you can give me will help.

Thanks

Mark
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wottaguy
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RE: Equipment

Post by wottaguy »

Hi Mark!

Are you just starting out? How much do you want to make at a time...5 gallons...?? All grain...or extract...or mini-mash?? Here's what you should do...
I would recommend that you invest in Charlie Papizian's wonderful book "The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing". It is called the brewers "Bible" and is an excellent resource for all brewers...new or seasoned. I have had this book for over 20 years nowand I still refer to it on occasion. From this book you will learn of the equipment and processes involved and can then decide what equipment to invest in. The only advise about equipment i would give at this time would be to purchase a Stainless Steel boil kettle large enough to handle the biggest volume you will make plus a minium of 10% extra space for liquid expansion.Personaly I have found that if doing 5 gallon batches, a 10 gallon kettle works out great! And for a 10 g batch..a 15 gallon kettle. I guess what i'm saying is think hard about what you want to do..then don't scrimp on the boil kettle..as it does most all of the work!
Good luck and welcome to the wonderful world of HomeBrewing and to the BeerTools forums!

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slothrob
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Post by slothrob »

I also heartily reccommend "How to Brew" by John Palmer. It's very up to date, and the new edition, released last year is fantastic. It'fs full of info for getting started and for progressing to more complicated techniques.

Bottles: Drink beer and save the bottles or go to a liquor store and offer to buy a few cases of returns. These methods will be cheaper than buying new bottles and it's better than recycling. Get brown bottles that do NOT take screw on caps. Ones from microbreweries or Sam Adams work well.

Caps: You can buy them from a homebrew shop, which you probably have in your area somewhere, or from places like Northernbrewer.com, Midwestsupplies.com, ebrew.com, austinhomebrew.com.

Instawares has a lot of nice pots to choose from for good prices. The one I linked to is a heavy duty aluminum pot that I use for 5 gallon batches. It doesn't come with a cover, so you'd have to order that from them as well, if you want a cover.

You can get beginners equipment packages that will give you most of what you need to start from a LHBS (local homebrew shop) or one of the above specialty companies. Some have fixed shipping, like austinhomebrew, that might help if buying a kit that will cost a lot to ship.
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marklew NJ
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Joined: Mon Apr 16, 2007 6:20 pm
Location: North West New Jersey

How to Brew

Post by marklew NJ »

I was able to obtain a copy of the e-book "How to Brew" on e-bay for $.99 :lol:
Any help you can give me will help.

Thanks

Mark
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billvelek
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Re: How to Brew

Post by billvelek »

marklew NJ wrote:I was able to obtain a copy of the e-book "How to Brew" on e-bay for $.99 :lol:
No reflection on you, but I sure hope that that wasn't a pirated copy; that would be unfair to John Palmer who has already been very generous in making much brewing info available on his website for free and is certainly entitled to be rewarded for all his hard work. It's just that $.99 is dirt cheap and I presume that it would be very easy to make lots of copies of a computer file for resale.

Cheers.

Bill Velek
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slothrob
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Post by slothrob »

I imagine it's a packaged version of the free website Howtobrew.com, so John's probably just out the advertising hits he'd get if you visited the site.

It's got a lot of valuable information. If you like it, buy the new edition. It has a number of updated techniques that reflect the current thoughts on best methods of homebrewing, and some new equipment how-to's.

It's a great book, I open it at least once a week.
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