Starting to brew at home

For my birthday a few years back my wife bought me a home beer brewing kit from The Good Brewer (http://www.goodbrewer.com/), since then I've brewed 3 malt extract beers - an Oatmeal Vanilla Stout, an IPA and a Coffee Stout.  As you can tell I'm quite fond of darker beers and so is my wife.  Since I've started my brewing en-devours there are a few things I've learned...

1. Always clean and sanitize your gear properly.
2. If you are bottling and plan to recycle those bottles, make sure that you wash your bottles immediately after usage as it's a pain to come back a week or two later and then scrub them out.
3. If you are like me and only drink 1 - 2 beers a week, then make sure you pick beers that you love and want to have around for some time.  A single brew can make ~50 12oz. bottles, at 1-2  a week by yourself that's ~6 months.  Of course you could share with your spouse and friends - I do.
4. Cost.  If you think brewing your own beer will save you money, that's not true - it might eventually, I know folks that are down to 50 cents a beer, however, when you start out with the basics you'll probably be around the $1 - $1.25 a bottle, which is just under the average cost for a decent 6 pack.  So remember, you are in it for the fun of brewing not for the cost savings.
5. Boil over - chances are you will experience this, so make sure you get yourself an outdoor burner and do your brewing either in the garage or outside - you're wife will thank you for it.

Where do I plan on going next?  

Improving my equipment

As I don't have a lot of cash to put into my hobby, I'm going to be slowly expanding my basic equipment - for example I got a dedicated beer fridge, just bigger than a dorm fridge, a few months back and for Christmas I got a wort chiller - no more ice baths :).  My next investment, a kegging system, so that I'm not pure bottle based - though I do love the bottles as they are easier to share and give gifts, so I'll probably always do a few from each batch prior to kegging.

Brewing strategy

While I would like to start moving into mash and/or partial mash brewing, that requires more equipment, that I don't have and don't have the money for right now.  So I've recently been thinking I might start experimenting in creating my own brews vs. following someone else's recipe, but like most I don't want to waste the time and $ in brewing 5 gallons of what might be slop.  This is where the 1 gallon brew's come in.  I did some quick google searching and turned up the following cool site with some details on how to do small batch brewing - http://www.razebrewing.com/go2/small_batch_brewing/ - I think I'm going to run a simple experiment for my next batch doing this. 

It may be awhile, but I'll update this post with any followups on the success/failures I have in the small batch brewing process.

For those interested the malt extract recipes I used were from The Good Brewer and you can/should be able to purchase them from their website.  

• Screwy's Vanilla Oatmeal Stout
• Good Brewer IPA
• Santa Cruz Stout