New to Homebrewing. Need advice.

If you're that picky about commercial beers, I fear that you're likely to be very disappointed in your initial homebrewing efforts. It takes some practice to become good at this hobby.

If you decide to go forward, read how to brew by Palmer. An edition is free online.

 

First off, welcome to the BA site, pullen0, and to this great culture of good beer. From the beers that you list that you really like, I'd say that you are new at the craft beer scene since all of them are light-flavored beers without too much hops.

I agree with @kellyst that you could be disappointed in your initial efforts. If you choose to try to brew the styles that you mention above, those are the most difficult to brew because of the beer's light flavor being unable to mask some brewing errors. (And you will very likely make mistakes on your first batches.) I think that you are on the right track to brew small batches while you learn to brew so that you don't lose a lot of money if you have to dump them, so I'll suggest that you see if porters or stouts might be to your liking and then start with standard recipes of those styles before you go too far.

John Palmer's book that is mentioned above (howtobrew.com) is free to read online, although a newer edition is available in print. This book talks about equipment as well as the ins and outs of how to brew, and is an excellent source to get you in the right mindset to decide if you want to go farther with this great hobby.

I hope you do decide to join this hobby and continue to be a member of this forum. It is a great place to learn brewing while reading between the lines for the things that are not said in the books. Welcome.

 

Welcome to homebrewing! I agree with @Mothergoose03's advice, but I want to emphasize that you absolutely don't have to like hoppy beers to be a successful homebrewer. There are very few hoppy beers that I enjoy, and I still get a lot out of brewing. Actually, you're in luck: hefeweizens are great beginning brews. More on that in a minute.

Coming to this site is a great start, and I think John Palmer's book is rightly regarded as the best book for a new brewer. For recipes, it's hard to do better than Jamil Zainasheff's and John Palmer's Brewing Classic Styles. You can be assured that those recipes are well-designed, so if you brew one and the results are bad, it is not the recipe's fault. Another great and often overlooked resource is @OldSock's blog, The Mad Fermentationist. He's best known for brewing sour/funky beers (he wrote a book about it), but he brews plenty of clean beers too, and his blog posts give very helpful descriptions of his recipes and processes, as well as the thinking behind them. He also includes tasting notes so that you can get a sense of how his recipes turned out. Click the Recipes for Beer tab to see the beers he has written about.

You might want to consider doing batches that are in the 2-3 gallon range. I have found that to be a good balance. I get about 24-30 beers from a brewing session, which is enough to make it worth it but doesn't leave me with an overhang of beer I don't want to drink. (It helps that I use unwanted beer in my chili recipe—you might want to look for an outlet like that, just in case.) 3 gallons can fit comfortably in a 5-gallon carboy (I use a Better-Bottle), and a 5- or 6-gallon kettle should be big enough (5 gallons is slightly too small for me sometimes, though... 5.5 would always be enough). Another advantage is that in a typical medium-gravity beer, you can just add a single pack of Wyeast, with no need to do a starter. (A starter is a process in which you culture up your yeast to attain a higher cell count before adding it to the beer, which is advisable for most 5-gallon batches.) Some people may advise you that a starter is a good idea in any case, to make sure the yeast are healthy and active, but I've had good luck without doing starters for my 3-gallon batches. However, note that I never brew highly alcoholic ("high-gravity") beers, which tend to require higher cell counts.

Now, in terms of starting out, here is what I advise. I personally don't have the discipline to stick to a single recipe for very long. But if you do, it's a great way to get a sense of how the variables fit together and dial in your processes. And luckily, it appears that hefeweizen is a style that can be brewed very successfully with malt extract. Here is a good description from @OldSock. Here are his tasting notes. If I were you, I would brew that recipe 3-4 times (scaled down to your batch size) and see if you can dial it in to something you really enjoy drinking. (Don't worry too much about the hop variety, by the way... any "noble" hop from continental Europe should do the trick. Hefeweizen is not a hop-forward style.)

Final thought: if you live in an area with an active homebrew club, that is a great way to learn from people with a lot of experience. Ideally if you could find someone to tag along with while he/she brews a batch or two, you would pick up a lot of techniques and avoid a lot of beginner mistakes. But if that doesn't work out, I think you can have a great experience with the books and websites I've mentioned, and with help from this site.

 

A 1 gallon batch is as much as work as 5 gallons. I brewed 2.5 gallons the first couple batches to get my feet wet but now I want to brew more than 5 gallons because I kill my 5 gallon keg in 3 weeks.

Read "how to brew", frequent this forum and read the common questions that come up, and get a good software like brewchiper, or Beersmith. There are a lot of great podcast like Beersmith and Brew Strong with Jamil and John Palmar to learn from.

The most important factor for me was good fermentation control. As soon as I was able to control that my beer improved dramatically. Also, be patient, have fun and relax...it's just beer.

Actually last thing is take good notes so you can repeat or diagnosis mistakes. Also, map out a good brew day plan to avoid missing things. Plus it helps ensure a smooth and effiencet day.

 

I will tell you this (as others have mentioned), buy equipment for 5-gallon batches from the start. I made a similar post early this year when I started to home brew just saying I would do 1 gallon batches but everyone kind of re-directed me otherwise... You do a lot of work, regardless of the volume you make. I end up giving a lot of bottles to friends/family and 4-5 gallons goes QUICK. Although for more "experimental" beers I would like to get a 3-gallon or 2-gallon carboy so I can do some smaller stuff.

As far the beer process itself, some tips/suggestions:

1.) Understand your water. Water makes up nearly all your beer, so if your water doesn't taste good, you beer will not taste good. Many homebrewers treat their water in some way, such as de-chlorination with campden tablets (easy to use, just use 1/4 tablet in every 5-gallon of water you use) or changing the water chemistry for specific beer styles... But no need to get that advanced from the start (the water chemistry stuff), I just start doing that two batches ago as I got comfortable with other things first. However, chlorine will cause off flavors and you should make sure to get rid of it.

2.) Ensure everything post-boil is sanitized to eliminate risk of infection. Before that, not important. But make sure all is clean and all soap residue and cleaners and such is rinsed off well before brewing beer in whatever vessel.

3.) Temperature control is very important. Having a chest freezer and temperature controller makes things easy and allows for other benefits (cold crashing, ability to lager, etc...). Not required if you have a cool basement, but remember, beer ferments a few degrees warmer than ambient air temperature, and most ale yeasts like to be at 66-68F or so (requiring a room of about 63-64F). Fermenting too hot will cause off-flavors and potential fusel alcohols (cause headaches and such).

4.) Use a program like Beer Smith to help develop recipes... This helped me a ton to see what effected ABV, IBU and color of the beer.

5.) I would suggest making sure you have the following three items, critical to making things easy... A digital scale with a capacity up to about 50-LBS, another scale for measuring ounces and grams for hops and such and a quick read, accurate digital thermometer. I would say the mini-scale and thermometer are requirements.

I really like using weight to calculate volumes over eyeballing the bucket markings... Water is 8.34 Lbs per gallon, so I just convert my volumes of my mash and sparge water to a weight. Very accurate this way. Once you mash though, you get sugar into solution and it becomes more dense, so your weight per gallon actually goes up... I am sure you can adjust for this, but I have yet to do so (I will read about that today, actually...). But at least if your mash/sparge water is on, everything typically follows. Since I have been doing that my last four batches or so, I have nailed my volumes all the way to bottling... Typically being +/- 2 bottles at the end when filling. That's pretty damn good!


I was really intimidated when I started 7 batches ago or so... But its actually pretty easy to be honest... Once you do it once and understand the process, it's very easy and so much fun. I have yet to have a bad beer, honestly, and my last few have been as good or better than comparable commercial beers.

Cheers!