All Grain Brew

After 5 or so years of making beer kits up I decided to look around at more complex brewing techniques. The step up from Kit Brewing is Extract Brewing. Which essentially allows you to take malt extract and boil it with hops to make your own beer. The next step is all-grain brewing, which means you start with malted grains, steep them and then add and boil your hops. So your beer is fresher, and more personalised. Now, all Grain brewing can be complicated and use a lot of equipment that wouldn't fit in my house. It was then I discovered the world of Brew In A Bag. This technique was invented by the Australians, and it allows for the brewing of beer in a single vessel.
So, I only really needed two additional things to my usual brewing equipment: A big stock pot and a large bag.

 
The stock pot I found on eBay for £20. For the bag I took a shortcut and bought a sheet of Voile (£4) which I cut into a circle, no sewing, no seams to rip.

Brew in a bag is a surprisingly simple, but long process. First thing to do is add water to the stock pot an bring it up to temperature, in this case around 70C. It's a 19 liter pot, but I also want to add grains and also leave room for the water to boil, so I used 15 liters. I did an experiment the night before the brew and my hob took approximately 2 and a half hours to get to this temperature. So on brew day I cheated and used the kettle to speed the process up. Shortly before 70c was reached I put the Voile in the pot and tied it in place.

Really, I was aiming to step at around 67C, the reason I aimed for a temp of 70C was to allow the water to cool when the grains went in. I wanted to do a really simple brew using one type of grain and one hop, known as a SMaSH recipe (Single Malt and Single Hop). For this I was using Maris Otter grains, in they went.

Once they were in the whole thing has to be left to steep for between 60 to 90 mins, this allows the sugars from the grain to dissolve into the water. I left them for 60 mins, wrapped in a towel to help keep the temperature up. I was concerned about losing too much heat, but I only lost 2C in the end.

Once the steeping had finished (technically called Mashing) it's time to bring the whole lot up to boil. This took about 30mins on my hob. Once the wort was boiling I added the hops. I was using Fuggles as it's a hop I'm familiar with and I wanted to see what it tasted like in a SMaSH. 28g went in to boil for 60 mins.

This amount of hops should bring some bittering to the very sweet wort. With 15 mins of the boil left I added another 15g of hops for flavoring.
Once the boil was done I needed to cool the wort as quickly as possible. To achieve this I put it in our sink with cold water and ice.

The ice melted really fast and the water soon heated up. I discovered I could run the cold tap and the sink overflow at the back would take care of any excess, so I left the tap running for about 30 mins. I then needed to transfer the wort into a fermenter. I placed a colander with a sieve in it into the top of the fermenter and used a jug to transfer about half of the wort. After that I was able to lift the pot and pour the rest in. From 15l of water to start with I ended with 10.5l in the fermenter, not too bad. After that it was a simple case of sprinkling on the yeast and putting the fermenter in the beer cupboard for a couple of weeks. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out...

Get a Brew on!

I've been making homebrew for about 6 years. For the last 4 years it has been a continous process. Meaning I've not been in a situation without some beers I've made ready to go. Over the years a few people ask me how it's done so I thought I'd write the process up. For this I'm going to be using a Coopers Stout kit. Coopers are an Australian brewery and have a selection of kits. Their Stout and Australian Pale Ale are two staples of my homebrew cupboard. In addition to the kit itself I need two other things for the recipe: -Brewing Sugar. (I could use normal sugar, but for reasons I'll go into in a future post brewing sugar is better.) -Dried Malt Extract (also known as DME). This is also additional and replaces some sugar 1:1.

Beer Kits, Sugar, DME

There are some bits of kit I'll also need: -a fermenting bucket. This is a 40 pint white bucket that the beer is put in to, er, ferment. -a kettle. -a spoon. I have a 'brewing spoon' but a wooden spoon will do. -access to clean water. You probably have this. -a Campden tablet. Again you don't need this, it's used for neutralizing the taste of chlorine in tap water. -Hydrometer and testing flask. Only needed if you want to know how alcoholic your beer is.
-Some sort of sterilizer. A good cheap one is called VWP. There are better ones, but VWP is a good start.

So, the first and most important thing is to clean and sanitize everything that will come into contact with the beer. It's also good to clean everything in the surrounding area. At some point you'll need to put your nice clean and sanitized spoon down, it's good to have a clean place to put it.
Now is probably a good time to discuss the difference between 'clean' and 'sanitized'. Clean means it looks clean. Sanitized means you've killed all the bacteria. When I'm brewing I clean with water and a sponge. I then sanitize with Star San, which is a 'no-rinse' acid cleaner. I just spray it on the item to be sanitized and leave it. It is the single best product I use for Homebrewing and I'll write a post about it in the future.

Cleaning

At this point I stick the kettle on. I need about 2 - 3 liters of boiling water. Then I pour the beer kit, 500g of Sugar and 500g of DME into the fermenting bucket.

Sugar, DME and Beer Kit

Once the beer kit is mostly poured into the bucket (it's pretty gloopy) I pour the kettle into the can. This dissolves the last of the extract.

Delicious Malty Drink

..and pour that into the bucket (I do this twice, wearing oven gloves as the tin gets hot!)

Bucket full of goo.

Then I stir. I stir a lot. DME takes some effort to dissolve. Stir, Stir, Stir. About 5 minutes of stiring. Once my arm is tired I top the bucket up to about 20 litres using cold water (beer kits advised topping up to 23 litres, but brewing short makes a stronger beer). Then I add a campden tablet.

Once it's topped up I take a sample for measuring the alcoholic content (ABV).

About 1.044 OG

And then sprinkle yeast over the top...

Finally, put the lid on and hide it in a cupboard for a couple of weeks...

It lives here to ferment. After a day or so it will kick off into really vigorous fermentation, and then settle down. I usually leave it for 14 days but anywhere between 7 and 14 days is good. Once it's fermented it will be bottled or kegged. So come back soon for a breakdown of the next bit of the process. 

Get a (slightly more complex) Brew On!

So, hopefully you will have read my previous entry in which I made a straight up Coopers Stout kit.

The thing about kits is they work well as a base, but the condensing and storing of a kit means they lose a bit of edge. It's pretty easy to jazz them back up again though. One simple way is to introduce more hops. Coopers make a kit called "Australian Pale Ale" (APA), which is great for experimenting with. I quite often hop it up with this simple process.

Firstly you'll need to get yourself some hops. Generally these come vacuum packed in 100g pounches.

 
 100g is, however, a lot of hops. Given that the kit is already hoppy, we only need to use 25g in this brew.
The packing process means the hops are super clumped together so I break them apart into 25g clumps. I then bag these up and put them in a plastic container and stick them in the freezer. They'll be good for...I dunno how long, I've always used them up. 

I'm just weighing Hops, Officer.

So, after I've weighed out 25g I put them into a hop bag. It doesn't matter about it being sterilized as it's about to be boiled.

Once they're in the bag I tie it in a loose knot. It then goes into about 2 litres of boiling water, and simmers for around 15 minutes.

Now, the process for brewing is exactly the same as for the previous kit. However this time after I've put all the ingredients in the bucket, instead of just using hot water out of the kettle I use this "Hop Tea". Then stir, top up with cold water and ferment. Easy.