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Old 11-28-2007, 11:25 AM
RunDownHouse RunDownHouse is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Nashville
Posts: 10,810
Default Re: any homebrewers?

Bald,

I live in a pretty small apartment. There's hardly enough room in the kitchen for two people, and I'm still able to make beer with minimal problems.

The thing is, the boiling part of the beer takes stove-top space, and the fermenting part takes... well, however much beer you made. If you make a 5 gallon batch, you're going to need just a bit more than 5 gallons worth of space. Maybe you've heard that Mr. Beer takes up less room, which is true, but that's because the fermenter is 2 gallons. Making small batches is fine, but 1) if you have room for the mostly-horizontal Mr. Beer fermenter, I bet you have room for a 5-gallon bucket, and 2) there's a reason most homebrewers eventually move to doing 10-gallon batches: it takes a minimal amount of extra effort to make 10 gallons as it does to make 2.

When you're doing extract, as in a Mr. Beer kit or most other starter kits, you basically boil your water and extract, adding hops as you go, cool it down so the yeast you throw in don't die, and then sit it in a corner for a couple weeks. Seen that way, how much space you need is dependent on how much you make and how much will fit in your corner, not whether you use Mr. Beer or whatever.

For me, it comes down to whether I want to spend a few hours making 2 gallons of beer or 5 gallons or 10 gallons. If you buy a Mr. Beer fermenter and a food-grade bucket, and use the same process and ingredients, theoretically you'll come out with identical beers (after all, Mr. Beer's gimmicky brown plastic barrel is just a food-grade bucket). The difference is that you'll have 2 gallons of said beer coming from the Mr. Beer setup, and 5+ from your other setup.

Besides negligible or non-existent differences in footprint and difficulty, there are a number of reasons you'd be better off with a starter kit like the one linked from northernbrewer. But in any case, spend a few minutes on basic research, and then go to your local shop and talk to somebody. They'll be more than happy to help.
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