Let the Brewing Adventures Begin.....

Welcome to my new blog format. Or focus, either way we are headed on a Beer Brewing Adventure together. As I looked around to all the beer brewing sites and forums, I've noticed that a lot of the people you may come in contact with or read their views and such, are really eager to help out others and get them into the fine and fun art of brewing beer at home. I'm no exception, I love to brew my own beer and I'm really excited to share what I know with others. Make no mistake, I'm no expert, but hope to one day be considered in the same group as Jim Koch (owner of Boston Brewing Co, maker of Sam Adam's Beer) and Charlie Papazain (Author, and considered in my opinion as one of the foremost knowledgeable authorities on home brew/brewing). One other thing I've noticed though is the fact that most of the websites and forums is that everyone talks as though you already have some sort of idea as to how to do this and what the terms all mean. I'm still learning, and I've brewing beer and making mead for 6 years now.....so I want to help you out if you don't have any idea, and maybe get you interested in this wonderful and rewarding hobby....the easy way.


Well folks here we go. Above you can see what will hopefully be my last "extract" brew. Well, actually its not mine. I did the brewing, but it was with ingredients from a good friend of mine. I showed him how the process of home brew went, and he got really excited about it and started coming up with some good recipes of his own. This beer is a red honey wheat, he calls Garrison's Red Cap. He was unable to brew with the ingredients he had because he was moving from where I am in Alaska to where he is now in Minot, North Dakota. So while its not my last extract brew, it was hopefully the last extract beer that I'll brew. That's right, I'm embarking on the All-grain adventure. And I'm going to take you along for the ride, that is if you are interested in Beer, Brewing Beer, Drinking Beer, and pretty much anything else there is to know about beer. Speaking of, my buddy started two websites completely devoted to beer and beer brewing. One is his blog http://www.homebrewingdepot.blogspot.com/ and the other is a one stop shop for beer brewing equipment and ingredients, http://www.beerbrewersdepot.info/ I highly recommend you go and check out his sites as well.

Well, on to the good stuff. Above you can see Garrison's Red Cap in the fermentor just after I pitched the yeast.

Lesson #1- Terms. I will try and explain terms as I talk about them, or if you have specific questions on something I may have missed, or would like to add to the post, please comment.

Pitching the yeast is just a fancy term for adding the yeast to your wort for fermentation.

There are some more words/terms.

Yeast is the GOOD form of bacteria that converts sugars to Ethyl alcohol, or the alcohol that we can drink.

Wort is the term given to the liquid that becomes beer, before fermentation, or the conversion of the sugars to alcohol.

I hope I'm not going to fast.

Your basic process for brewing an extract beer goes something like this.....

After choosing what kind of beer you would like to do, you need to ensure you have all the right equipment for the job. A burner of some sort to heat your brew kettle, a brew kettle (something to boil your wort in), a thermometer, a fermenter (someplace for your wort to transform into beer), 5 pounds of extract (the thick molasses like syrup bought from your local home brew store), yeast, hops (the "spice" of beer, amount will depend on your preference and recipe), and water. For the sake of an easy lesson, lets just say we are doing a 5 gallon batch of amber ale.

Depending on the size of your brew kettle and burner, you may be able to either add all of the water for the batch or add water to it later, simple math I'm sure you can figure out for your situation. First and foremost you want to make sure all of your materials are clean and sanitized, the introduction of BAD bacteria could ruin your beer. Next you will want to add water to your brew kettle to about half of what your kettle can hold and heat your water to about 158-165 degrees and remove it from the heat source. Then you will add your extract and mix it in careful not to burn it on the bottom of the kettle. Place the kettle back on the heat source and heat to a rolling boil. Here is where extract brews can get messy. The extract in reaction to reconstituting itself with the hot/boiling water, creates a foamy mess that will boil up and over if you are not watching or paying attention to what you are doing. An easy solution is to continuously lift the kettle straight up, so its still in the heat but not on the heat, and keep doing this until the foam settles and stays down. So as not to lose any of the wonderful hop essence, I always waited until the foaming settled to add my hops. Again, depending on your beer and preference, this is your first hop addition. Play with it until you get your preferred method and measurements but for me it was always a 2-1 ratio. If I added 2 oz. of hops at the beginning, I'd add 1 oz. at the end. For this we will add 2 oz. of hops at the beginning, and once the hops have been added and the extract is mixed in, you will start a 60 minute boil. You now have wort. This boiling helps to ensure a clean and sanitary beer as well as prepares the sugars in the extract for fermentation. For the next 40-50 minutes, there isn't much else to do but monitor your wort, and have a beer while you wait :) Either 20 minutes or 10 minutes, again based on your preference, you will need to add the second installment of hops. For our purposes its a 1 ounce, and then continue the boil. At the conclusion of the boil, your main focus is to as quickly as possible, cool your wort to 60-75 degrees. This is done because the yeast need a temperature in that range to start working to ferment the sugars to Ethyl alcohol. And the quicker it is accomplished the less of a chance you have of adding something potentially harmful to your beer and it will also prevent whats called "chill haze", or cloudy beer. A simple way to manage this the cheap and easy way, is to fill your sink with cold cold water, and place your brew kettle in the water, stirring the wort around and measuring the temperature consistently. Now depending on whether or not your beer store representative gave you some insight to hop bags, you will need to filter your beer to remove any bits and pieces of hops or grains or what ever else might be lurking in the wort. An easy way for me was to stretch a dish cloth over my fermenter, and slowly pour the wort through it. (For an cheap and easy Fermenter you can make yourself, see below) Once you have poured your now chilled wort into the fermenter, you can pitch the yeast on top, and seal it up. Your bubbler, or air lock on the fermenter, will keep bad air and bacteria from entering your fermenting wort while still allowing the release of gasses from the yeast converting sugars to ethyl alcohol. You will want to let that sit now for 14 days, and in that 14 days you will need to gather, 3/4th of a cup of corn sugar, a racking tube (or basically a siphon with tube), bottle caps, approximately 48-50 pop top bottles (my favorite way to get bottles is to drink store bought beer with pop tops, wash them out real well to use), and a bottle capper. After the 14 days are up, you will need to condition your beer, note I didn't call it wort, cause its beer now. To condition your beer it would be best to take 1 cup of water and add the 3/4ths cup of corn sugar and heat to a boil. This will add just enough fermentable sugar to restart the yeast again, so when you bottle, it will carbonate itself with the pressure, or finish. Once you add the corn sugar and water to your beer, stir it in a couple of times to mix it in but don't stir too much as to disturb the gunk at the bottom. This gunk is a mixture of yeast and such called slurry. The bottles you have collected will have to have been sanitized before you add your beer, but fill them to about 2 inches from the top, and cap them. You will want to place them in a cool dry place to finish/condition for about 14 days. After 7 days you can open one to see if your beer is properly carbonated, if they are, you can start to chill and drink them, otherwise wait another week, chill and enjoy. When you do finally get to enjoy the fruits of your labor, there will be some of that same yeast slurry in the bottom of the bottles you won't see with some domestic beers, its ok if some of this gets consumed, its actually loaded with vitamins, but some don't like the taste so you can wash it out of the bottle and keep the bottle for the next batch.

That was a lot of information, but its easier than it sounds, and you will be itching to get your next beer going soon.

Now onto uncharted territory------The All Grain Brew

I have yet to even start my first All Grain Brew, but I've been reading up and believe I may have an idea as to what to do. My first endeavor was to make a Mash/Lauter Tun (MLT). Mash is the process of extracting the fermentable sugars from the grains that will be used in the beer, and Lautering is the process of separating the sweet wort from the spent grains. A Tun, is just the container used to do it in, at some point was actually a unit of measure equal to that of a ton in gallons/quarts. An MLT is essential to the all grain process, without it there would be no wort to boil and convert to beer. I decided I would make my own instead of buying one, hence doing it the cheap way. Heres what I did......

First you will need to find a cooler, buying a cheap 5-10 gallon cooler will work, just make sure there is a spout on it for drainage, you could buy one for$17-25. I used a 10 gallon Coleman cooler I already had.

Next get about 5 feet of Stainless Steel Braided tubing, like the kind used for dishwashers and washing machines, depending on what you can find, mine was $9.00.

You will also need a couple of hose clamps, I got a set of two for $1.20.
And lastly you will need some sort of valve, I'm using a ball valve that already had the connections for the size of tube I bought for simplicities sake but it cost me $8.50.

In total I spent a little over $19.

First thing I did was clean out the cooler really well to include the spout that was already on the cooler. Next I removed the spout by unscrewing it and then set it aside. Next I went to removing the stainless steel braid from the hose by completely cutting one end off the tube and carefully severing the braid from the tube at the end that still had the connector. Then i measured a 10-12 inch piece of the tube from the connector and cut the rest of the tube off. This portion of the tube is more for stability and the connection of the stainless steel braid and for carrying sweet wort out of the MLT into your brew kettle. Next I took the spout from the cooler and pushed it onto the tube leaving 8 inches to where the inside of the cooler would be. Of those 8 inches the last 4 i cut a slanted groove, making a sort of spoon like tray opening the hole on the tube. Next I crimped one end of the stainless steel braid by folding it over and then using a hose clamp, placed the other end of the stainless steel braid over the tubing and closed the clamp on it and the crimped end of the stainless steel braid to make a loop. As seen below, I fit the connector end of the tubing from the inside of the cooler to the out side with the braid attached, added duct tape (just a personal preference) and screwed the outside of the cooler spout back on.

I noticed that my tube was not water tight, so I added some simple bathroom caulking to the openings surrounding the tubing and let dry before trying again for water tightness, and even added boiling water because you will be adding some pretty hot water to the MLT and it will need to work with that.

Next I screwed the valve onto the connector end and, its finished, a homemade Mash/Lauter Tun!!!

When I actually get to the brewing, I'll get into the process, just so I can sound smarter than I really am and get some more research under my belt.

Below is the cheap and easy way to make a fermenter for less than $15. I made mine for $7.

Materials you will need:

5 Gallon bucket with lid that is air and water tight---any hardware store can sell these, I got mine for $3.

Caulking- don't need much, spend what you want to on it. I spent $3.

Tubing- like the kind you would use for air in a fish tank. I got 10-15 feet at a fish store for $1

and an old Medicine bottle----just grab one you have lying around that's not needed anymore.

All you will be doing is dealing with the lid so set the bucket aside. Next drill a small hole just big enough for the tubing to fit through snugly, Then take the medicine bottle and do the same to the side of the neck of the bottle. Remove any threads or mechanism from the cap that would restrict easy removal of the bottle lid from the medicine bottle for ease later. Cut a 8-12 inch piece of tube and insert it into the lid so the opening would be in the bucket, about 1 inch and caulk the tubing to the lid on the top and bottom careful not to get caulk into the tube. see below

Next push the tubing to the bottom of the medicine bottle.....you can also attach the medicine bottle to the lid but its not really needed.

And there you have it, a cheap and easy way to make your own fermenter and MLT. I hope you will enjoy and continue to read this blog and new post about my Brewing Adventure continue....

Until Later.....

RDWHAHB

Relax, Don't Worry, Have A Home Brew