New brewer

Evening,
Brand new to brewing, just done my first mash and boil and everything bubbling away nicely.

My aim is to come up with a clone to my favourite beers, Adnams bitter and ghost ship. Have seen a few recipes that I will use to start.

I much prefer the 'fresh' beer on draft or the poly barrels and mini kegs over the bottle conditioned. Fresher flavour, a bit weaker making them great session beers and less carbonated.

My question is, how or can I achieve this as a home brewer. Do I miss out the second fermentation, bottle and leave or uses an easy keg? Really don't know where to start.

Sorry if it's a basic / silly question, but a real novice!

Thanks in advance.

Secondry fermentation will happen in your chosen packaging (mini keg, poly pin, whatever you choose). If you want that pub cask ale experience a mini keg is just a very small version of what you get in a pub. They're very popular here on the forum. I myelf use them.
We also have a humungous thread on mini kegs http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=57568

As far as cloning a beer. It can be quite difficult to do, even if you've got the exact recipe As there's a myriad of other variables that go on during the brewing process at a particular brewery that you need to mimic exactly. If your serious about cloning Adnams bitter/Ghost ship as close as possible. You'll need to get hold of the Adnams yeast strain which is a dual strain. The best way to do this short of getting some from the brewery is buying a mini keg of Ghostship and harvesting the yeast from it

Welcome to the forum :

Thanks for the reply.

With a mini keg would I still add sugar for the 2nd ferment as if bottle conditioning?

Would the beer still carbonate with this method?

Appreciate what you say about the yeast, will have ago.

Thanks again

Welcome to the forum.
Well done on the brew🍺

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Welcome to the forum!

Just a thought: please don't write off bottled home-brewed beer because you don't like the commercial product. One of the huge advantages of brewing your own beer is that you can change pretty well anything and everything to suit your own palate :)

Take me to a pub and there's no way I'm going to order a bottle of beer - like you I vastly prefer draught beers and I can't stand over-carbonated fizziness :twisted:

But, nowadays, all my own beer is bottled.
Want it a bit weaker? It's your beer, make it so. If you like a low level of carbonation, don't add much priming sugar - if the bottles are lightly carbonated, they'll taste very much like cask ale, I've found.

There's no "right" way, only what suits you. Personally, I use bottles. Lots of people prefer barrels.
What I will say, though, is that if you want to emulate good-quality commercial beer, then be prepared to take time over your brew. Ferment it for a couple weeks, mature it for a couple of weeks, then package it in bottle/barrel/whatever. Once packaged, it will continue to improve. I doubt if you'll get the best possible results unless its been packaged for couple of months - but try it at different ages & see what you think :smile:
The great thing about homebrew is that it's yours! You are free to produce beer that you want to drink, not what people want to sell you. At first, you won't know exactly how to do that. But that's also a huge part of the interest - having ideas about making your next brew even better than the last one! :thumb: