With all my beer from the previous batch gone and holiday season fast approaching, I realized I better brew another batch or get stuck serving store-bought to my guests. Foo to that, so Sunday afternoon and evening was spent slaving over the brew pot.

I actually really enjoy brewing beer. I’ve talked about some of the reasons I brew in other posts, but I’ll recap here anyway. Aside from the simple fact that home-brew tastes great, it’s also an interesting hobby with an amazing history and broad appeal. In addition, it’s also a very social activity in that people seldom turn down a home brew and some actually even want to help make it! If you have trouble making friends, try home brewing. Seriously though, brewing is a fun activity that I think more people would participate in and enjoy if only some of the mystery and fear of the unknown was taken out of the process.

So, in order to serve the end of education - for the greater good of society, mind you - I’ve taken and will continue to take pictures of my latest batch of home brew as it moves along in the process. Today was brewing day, so that’s what will be covered below. Fermenting is happening now, and will continue for about a week or a week and a half. Following fermentation will be bottling, with the beer carbonated and ready to sample a couple days after that (though it might be a little “immature” yet).

A couple notes before we begin. I am still a beginner, so I am “extract brewing” my beer. This means that I am getting my malt content from extracts/concentrates rather than from manually steeping the grain, a process called “full-grain” brewing. If what this means is unclear to you, simply understand that it means that I’m doing this the easy way. It’s the difference between an eight hour brewing day and a two to three hour brewing day.

Also, if you’ve been thinking about trying home brewing but are afraid you might produce something dangerous, don’t worry! The hops and alcohol in beer will kill any known pathogen - your beer might not be great, but it won’t kill you. What you do after you drink the beer is a different story. Don’t be like this guy:

Go ahead and give brewing a try - you’ll be glad you did. Let’s get started.

The Materials

I’ve got a pretty basic setup and keep my procedures simple. You can certainly go way higher budget than me or get more complicated, but as a beginner I’m trying to minimize the number of things I can mess up and not throw money in at things I might decide I don’t need later. Here’s the gear I’ll be using today:

(Click images for larger versions)

Here is just about everything I used for the brewing today: fermenting bucket with air-tight lid and grommetted hole for air lock, said air lock, stirring spatula, boiling pot, hydrometer, thermometer and ingredients kit. Not shown is my sterilizing agent and some random common kitchen tools. Some people say that using an aluminum pot for the boil is a bad idea (imparts a bad flavor) but I think that’s snobbery. My pot is stainless steel but I’ve read of plenty of good results achieved with aluminum.

The Pot in closeup.

Here’s a close up of the air lock without water filling it. Later you’ll see a picture of the air lock correctly set up, filled about half way with water. The air lock is composed of three parts and it is very important that you have a properly working air lock. This is not something I’d suggest making or improvising. The airlock works to let the considerable amount of CO2 that is created during fermentation escape, while preventing bacteria-laden air into the vulnerable mixture. Air locks that get plugged lead to explosions in the case of glass fermenters.

The ingredients kit. Ingredient kits exist for all manner of beers, from stouts to pale ales. I prefer Pilsner-style beers, so this is the variety I’ve used and have received compliments from my taste testers.

What’s going into the beer

Any beer that’s worthy of the name is a combination of water and grain malts (usually barley or wheat) that has been “bittered” with hops. Yeast is introduced into this mixture and consumes the sugars in the solution, turning them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The ingredients from the package that I used today are malts in three forms - spray dried malt (powder), malt extract (syrup) and crushed malt (grain), two flavors of hop (one for bittering and one for aroma) and the yeast packet. The priming sugar will wait until bottling.

Note that both the spray-dried and extract malt are highly concentrated and can be very messy. The spray-dried malt has a tendency to absorb lots of moisture really quicly and become tacky and difficult to work with once the package is opened. Since boiling pots tend to be steamy don’t open the bag until the last moment.

Actually getting started for serious

My kit contains actual grains that need to be steeped for 20 minutes prior to adding the malt. The grains are placed in the cloth bag as shown below and placed in the pot to steep (not boil) at 160F to 170F. Room is left in the bag to allow for expansion of the grain during steeping.

My recipe calls for two gallons of water in the pot but I put in three. I’ve read that more water doesn’t alter the taste of the end product significantly and makes your pot less likely to burn on the inside. I bumped the amount in the pot up to three gallons, so we’ll see.

You don’t need to get bottled water for brewing - unless your water is exceptionally bad where you live (has really offensive odors, or you live in Texas), you should be able to use tap water with no problems.

With the grain bag in the water it’s time to get the temperature up for steeping. I found that setting the dial on the stove to 6 would get me there in about 15 minutes. Here’s what the thermometer looks like when it’s in the pot. The thermometer is designed for use in liquid and is weighted so that it will always keep the temperature gauge facing upward. Handy.

I forgot to lay down foil on the stove beforehand so I had to remove the pot, wait for the heating element to cool, foil the stove and resume the heating to steep the grain. I don’t think there was any harm done, as I don’t think the temp had raised in the pot much above 100F when I removed it. If you are going to be brewing inside make certain to do this to your stove, as a boilover of the sticky malts later in the brew can be a real pain to clean up.

The smell of the grain when it is steeping is much like Cream of Wheat or Malt-o-Meal. The color of the water, and the clarity, is much the same as chicken broth at the end of the steeping.

With steeping finished it is time to remove the grain bag. Notice how the grain has swollen to fit the entire bag.

In preparation for adding the malt extract, I heated it in a bath of water for approximately 10 minutes. This ensures that the liquid will come out easier. Think of the extract as honey - it is sticky and hard to manage, but will be easier to deal with if warmed.

The malt extract is very dark and thick. The water that the grain was steeped in now needs to be brought to a boil before the malt extract and spray-dried malt are added.

Boilovers are most likely to happen right after the malt extract and spray-dried malt are added to the mix. Note that the side of the pot shows that the mixture reached pretty high before I was able to subdue it. Adding the remaining malts will cause the mixture to cool enough to stop boiling, but it should be brought back to a boil as quickly as possible. With the mixture brought back to a boil, the bittering hops are added.

My kit includes hop pellets. Hops have an amazingly strong aroma. I like it, but many don’t, and find the part of the brewing cycle that involves hops (most of it) to be offensive. This is true even among people who like the taste of beer.

With the bittering hops in the pot and boiling away, it’s time to wait. Fifty five minutes seperate the introduction of the bittering and aroma hops. The aroma hops are added with only five minutes left in the hour-long boil. If the aroma hops are added any earlier they lose their aroma character.

The color of the mixture was darker than I expected when I started brewing. The color changes somewhat over the process of aging and also due to settling of solids that were in suspension.

With the boil complete it’s time to cool the mixture as rapidly as possible. Various proteins are brought out of solution if the mixture is cooled fast enough, resulting in clearer beer. Additionally, and most importantly, beer is very vulnerable to bacterial infection between the mid and low hundreds farenheit. The quicker the beer is brought through this danger zone, the better. I filled the sink with cold water and ice and stirred both the beer and the water in the sink to cool things off. Note that even if your beer is infected, it will not hurt you. The worst that can happen is that the bacteria eat most of the sugar and you are left with a brew that’s not so alcohol and has a bad taste.

Once the mixture is cooled to about 70F and enough water has been added to bring the total to five gallons, it’s time to add the yeast. Here is the yeast, sprinkled over the beer.

Brewers use a different yeast than bakers (though I understand one could be used for the other in dire circumstances). A traditional pilsner will use a bottom-fermenting “lager” yeast, while an a ale uses a top-fermenting yeast. The yeast that came with my kit is an ale yeast, so my beer won’t be really authentic, but ale yeast gives me the benefit of not requiring super strict temperture control of my beer. While I don’t want to subject my fermenting beer to extreme temperature swings, as those could “shock” the yeast and cause them to die or pause in their fermenting, I don’t have to keep the beer itself very cold like I would have to with a lager yeast.

And finally the lid is on and the air lock set. It’s all in God’s hands now.

After Action Review

Every time I do this I run into things that I wish I would have done differently than I had. For example, it took longer than I had hoped to get the beer cooled after the boil. I think this was partly due to the fact that I was trying to cool 50% more beer than I have in the past (I had three gallons in my boil instead of two). Also, I didn’t get a bag of ice to help cool things down like I was planning and so only had ice from the ice trays. Lame. I also have cooled the mix in the steel pot in the past, and don’t feel that cooling in the plastic fermenter was a good idea.

Other than those cooling related woes and the issue with the foil on the stovetop, everything went exactly to plan. I didn’t touch on cleaning, though it is very important. Maybe I’ll deal a bit with that during the week while we’re waiting for the fermenting to happen.

One thing I didn’t get a picture of was the hydrometer in action. The hydrometer reads the “specific gravity” of water - in this case the hydrometer tells me how much sugar is in the beer ready to be consumed by the yeast. Beer recipies have “original” and “final” gravities, with the final gravity allowing you to know that the ferment is over and the different between the two measures allowing for the calculation of alcohol content.

Next big post will be when the ferment is over and the bottling can take place, but I’ll post video of the air lock “bubbling” when that starts happening (about 24 hours). It’s fun to watch.

Update - the beer is bubbling!

Some links to learn more

Wikipedia - Hops
Wikipedia - Beer
Basic Brewing - very well done audio and video podcasts
Maryland Home Brew - my materials and ingredients supplier