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Hi Everyone,

I'm Andy looking at starting up a craft Brewery in South East in the next 12 months. Hoping Beoir can give me some guidance.

The sunny south east gets all the breweries these days for some reason... something in the water?

Hello Everyone,

My (mis)adventure with beer started five years ago with an unplanned visit to the Brussels Beer Festival. I had a great time sampling the many regional and craft beers. I now go every year and recently got back on Monday. This year's highlight was walking in and picking up a Westvleteren (total amateur so don't know if was 8 or 12) without having to queue up and beat the scrum. Other highlights was St-Bernardus Abt12 and Triple. We came home via Amsterdam and loved sampling Dutch craft beers, especially De Molen and Emelisse.

On Tuesday morning amongst other things I had an epiphany. Why pay big money in Ireland for quality beers when the prices in the local countries are so reasonable. After kicking the idea bucket around (slowly) I decided to investigate home brewing and I'm glad I did. Beoir is a great site and has given me the confidence to believe I can brew good knock-offs of my favourite beers in the near future.

Right now my main task is to identify a functional and reasonably priced all-grain setup (I know I'm reaching here but youtube videos made it look relatively straightforward). No doubt I'll have a lot of questions in my Equipment section.

Anyways, hope to talk and meet the members soon.
Sean(Ardee)

Welcome aboard Sean! Once you've perfect a De Molen-style imperial stout I can give you an address to send it.

"Seanardee":2u5pselk wrote: (I know I'm reaching here but youtube videos made it look relatively straightforward). [/quote:2u5pselk]

Welcome Sean, the process is straight forward, the equipment takes up a good bit of space and it takes a long time to do a batch. But saying that it's very rewarding. (typically 40 pints <!-- s;) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!-- s;) -->)

Introduce myself? Very well. I've been brewing for the past two years on and off, mostly, it needs to be said, off. It was the BeerNut himself who gave me my first recipe via Boards.ie, the results of which turned out to be eminently drinkable until my 'experiments' led me down the well-traveled orange peel and coriander route. Suffice to say that fair-weather adherents deserted me, but aficionado(s) clung on, namely myself and a beer-snob friend of mine. I ended up with three variants, of which only one was given the epithet 'undrinkable (in the company of a fellow beer snob)' Since then I have been responsible for the follies enumerated below:

1. Mead. Oh dear.
2. 'Turbo' cider. It seems that 'turbo' is merely an indicator of the rate of consumption, not an indication denoting accelerated maturity.
3. Red wine. This resembled alcoholic grape juice and was swiftly dispatched down the nearest sink.

My next project may be an extract/grain hybrid, the likes of which is theorized to drop an enraged elephant in its rather wide tracks. We shall see.