It starts at 9AM, sanitizing and then filling up a couple of gallon pitchers full of filtered water, and chilling it in the fridge.
Time to get my yeast out of the fridge while I'm at it.
Then, three more gallons of filtered water in my 5-gallon brew pot.
While I waited...and waited... and waited... and waited for the water to get up to the required 150-ish degrees, I grabbed my sack of grain...
... and turned it into a sock of grain!
Sock of grain goes into the pot to steep for 30-40 minutes. In "real" home brewing, the start-to-finish kind that makes you a master of the hipsters art in your skinny jeans and ironic T-shirts, you'd actually have pounds and pounds of grains and soak them for hours and then drain off the sugary liquid for your beer... and I might go that route someday. Seriously, no kidding. It can be up to 25% cheaper to go that route, although it is a bigger mess. The upshot is that you get a richer flavor... which is why you go ahead and steep a small amount of grain even when you're using the dried malt extract. Speaking of which...
SIX POUNDS OF DRY MALT EXTRACT!!! My first batch of beer was with the liquid extract, which comes in a can and is a very thick syrup. The dried stuff is a little easier to deal with, since you don't have to separately heat up a can to loosen the syrup and then rinse the cans out with boiling water to get all of the sweet sugary goodness into the pot. After the steeping is done, you take the sock of grains out of the water, and mix in the dry malt extract. After a bunch of stirring, my wort looks something like this:
**Not pictured: what it looks like when the pot boils over, spilling sugary badness all over the stovetop.
After my little... mishap, I added in a cup or so of liquid extract to make up for the spillover loss, and to raise the sugar levels overall. That becomes important later. Also at this point, I added the first of the hops. Hops are cool!
**Not rabbit food, or rabbit poop either.
The hops are sort of ground up and dried into little pellets that dissolve in the wort. You add one type at the start, a different sort at about midway, and a third type for the last few minutes. Stirring regular and avoiding boilover helps at this point. After about an hour, the boiling is done, and the pot goes outside on the back porch. I've got a cheap metal tub from Target that I fill with ice water that sits outside in the cold. I take the brew pot and stick it in the tub to cool down the work for fermentation.
While I'm waiting for the wort to go from boil to room temp, I start sterilizing my fermenting bucket and lid, and the airlock that goes in the lid. Adding the previously chilled water helps hasten the process. When that's done, I pour the wort into the bucket through a strainer, which gets rid of the boiled hops AND helps at air to the liquid. Gotta stir and stir and stir to get plenty of air in the wort, although some people use an aquarium aerator... me too someday, I've got it on the list!
At this point, I take a cup of wort out of the bucket and put it in a beaker with the hydrometer. Should have taken a picture, but my wife dropped a broke the hydrometer minutes after taking the reading. No harm done... anyhoo, the point is that you measure the specific gravity (density) of the wort. At the end of the fermenting process, you check the specific gravity a second time, and the difference in the two numbers plus some math lets you know how much sugar was converted to alcohol by the yeast, which is how you get the Alcohol By Volume figure. My first beer came out to about 4.5%... but this time I added extra malt extract, remember? More sugar in the bucket means more food for the yeast, which means more potential alcohol production. By my calculations, I should wind up somewhere in the 6-6.5% range by the end of the fermentation. SWEET!
At this point, I dump in the yeast, give it a swirl, snap the lip on and insert the airlock, and I'm done. The bucket sits on a chair, with a couple of magazines propping up one end of the bucket. As the yeast does its work, the older yeast dies and settles to the bottom. Having the bucket at an angle makes it easier to siphon off the beer while leaving the dead yeast and whatever grain/hops crap might be left in the bucket. After twelve hour or so, the airlock is full of bubbles, which means the fermentation is going well and I'm done for a couple of days. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
3 comments:
**cue Loretta Lynn accent**
And I helped!!!
Do you ever wonder, when working a complex procedure like this, who the hell thought this would be a good idea? Like, I wonder, who decided that lobster would make a good dinner (certainly not *I*!)? Who figured out that if you put all these things together and let them sit, something good would come out of it? How much of this stuff happened by accident?
Thank you dear... and you owe me a hydrometer!
@Chili: I'm guessing beer came from baking. The sugars from barley and other grains is a good food source for yeast, and I figure some baker realized that his yeast farm was sort of yummy on its own. As far as lobster, if you've seen Andrew Zimmern on the Travel Channel you know that people eat EVERYTHING.
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