I love brewing, and sharing knowlege with brewers.

Within my advice, you will get my response as an experienced brewer and passionate beer afficiando. You will never see a self-serving advertisement or pitch to shop our store.

This forum is appropriate to 'toot my horn' and tell you a little about our store.

http://www.folsombrewmeister.com/
916-985-7299

I build equipment for our shop... not all of it, but a healthy amount. I also custom smoke malt as Alder, Maple and Cherry wood types. We are constantly improving the range of yeasts, malts and hops.

Yeasts are White Labs, Wyeast, Fermentis, Lalvin, Lallemand, and Doric.

Grains by Great Western, Briess, Rahr, Castle, Dingemans, Wyerman and Cargill.

We're located in the Historic District of Folsom, CA, with hours from Wednesday to Sunday.

Kevin Pratt

Kevin,

Quick question for you. Those kits that you sell at your place seem to be a great deal. I'm thinking of getting a few of them. About the pale ale, it say that the kits don't come with base or malt extract. How much of that will I need for a 5 gallon batch of pale ale? What about for English Bitter?

Matt

All of the kits are built around 6.5# of liquid bulk extract. We've chosen to use Alexanders bulk pale in most cases. We also really like the Alexanders Pilsner extract for lagers and Belgians.

We have designed enough specialty grain in them to get proper color and flavor. We did this for 2 reasons: 1) Greater flavor control, because we (or more properly, the brewer) can control the specialty flavor profile. 2) this easily converts the recipe to all grain since it is pure base malt.

For recipes with higher gravity, the kits have light DME to extend them. This is Coopers Austrailian Extra Light. For big dark styles, we use Amber DME.... Yeah, it breaks the above rules, but we gotta use the stuff somewhere!

Personally, I would recommend asking us to throw in some yeast nutrient on recipes that are big. We don't add it automatically because the results are satisfactory and we don't want new brewers to think it needs to be a part of every beer, especially when they try partial mashes and all grain. I just think that extracts attenuate better with a little bit of it.

Kev.

Thanks Kevin,
I'll be making an order here soon.
Matt

Hi from a fellow Folsom resident. The "old" Brewmeister was the store that got me into homebrewing over 10 years ago and I'm glad to see it's going through some changes under the new ownership lately.

I stopped by to pick up a spoon for this last weekends batch and had the chance to meet Erik, as well as try a sample of the stout on tap. I also noticed the grains, extracts, hops and yeast were much fresher than in years past which was the primary reason I switched stores long ago.

I look forward to the changes taking place that Erik spoke of as well as once again making Brewmeister my close-to-home homebrew shop. I am also looking forward to learning more about the all-grain brewing process to move my skills to the next level.

Thanks again,
Rich

Thanks, Rich!

And I hope you enjoyed the Smoked Stout.

Kev.

A beautiful beer indeed! I can definately tell the diff between all-grain and extract in that one. Beautiful color and head as well. Once again, thanks.