Last Saturday my roommate and I brewed our sixth batch of extract home brew. A quick explanation on extract home brewing. Basically instead of making the beer out of all grain, we skip a step in the process and use some grain plus a syrup (the extract) to make the wort. The wort is the sugary liquid that is the beginning of your brew. This is the kind of brewing that most home brewers begin with. We are hopefully going to transfer over to all grain brewing soon. For this batch we decided that we wanted to make a stout, this time with our own recipe. A few months back we made a pretty good chocolate stout, but we used a recipe for that one, so now it was time to test our recipe making abilities.
All in all it was pretty successful, even though we missed our original gravity reading by a whole point! So basically we use this website called beer calculus which helps us formulate all of our recipes. After we input all of the grains and hops we are going to use for the upcoming batch, the website spits out all of the vital information. It tells us approximate, alcohol by volume (abv), the color of the brew, the IBUs (international bittering units) which is a measure of how bitter the beer will be and it also tells us the expected original and final gravity of the beer. With these two gravity numbers we are able to estimate what the abv will be. So....back to the original point I had, the website told us that the original gravity should have been around 1.087 and in actuality we only ended up with 1.074, whoops! All this means is that we were not able to extract enough of the sugars from our grains, which will turn into alcohol during fermentation. Therefore our beer will probably only be in the 6.5%-7.5% range for alcohol content, oh well, as long as it still tastes good.
The first rule in home brewing is to always sanitize anything that will come into contact with the beer after it has been boiled. Before and during the boiling process you do not have to be as careful because the boiling will kill anything foreign that may get in to the beer. This first picture is just that, the primary fermenter (the white bucket) is filled with water and iodine and then everything else that needs to be sanitized goes in. This all sits until we need it.
The first step in all of this is extracting fermentable sugars from our speciality grains. The grains we used for this stout were chocolate malt, coffee malt, roasted barley and crystal 120. This was actually a pretty huge grain bill, especially since we also used about 10 pounds of dark extract.
In order to get the sugars we need out of these grains they have to steep them all in a pot of approximately 155 degree water for around 30 minutes. As you can see these grains almost didn't fit!
Once the steeping is finished we have to transfer the liquid from this pot into the other pot that contains more heated water. The second, larger pot, will be where we make our wort with the extract.
After all of these ingredients have been combined, it is off to the garage to start the boil. The reason we work in the garage is because the stove is not powerful enough to boil this larger amount of water in a quick time frame. Outside we have a turkey fryer with a propane burner that does the trick. The next step is to transfer our wort into the fryer pot. The reason why we are straining it is because we spilled some grain into the wort earlier. This is not a typical step in the process.
At this point it is just a waiting game, the beer must boil for 1 hour. Once this starts to boil we have two hop additions. Hops, for those of you that are not familiar, are what are used as the standard bittering agent in beer. Along with bittering ability, hops also provide flavor and aroma to the beer. For those of you that have ever had an IPA, you know of the floral, piney and sometimes citrusy flavors and aromas that hops can contribute. If hops were not used, the beer would not be as balanced as it should be, and could potentially be undrinkable. Since this is a stout and we do not want the hop flavors to be too overpowering, we used 2 ounces of Perle and 2 ounces of Willamette. The Perle were added as soon as it began to boil and the Willamette were added with 15 minutes left in the boil.
This is how the hops are shipped to us, vacuum sealed to keep freshness. Sorry I forgot to take a picture of what they look like, but I grabbed this one from the internet to give you an idea. This is a pellet form of the hops. The flower is compressed down to make these pellets, which are much easier to store and ship.
Unfortunately I did not take any pictures for the rest of the process, we were kind of in a hurry, but I will explain what we did. After the boil is finished, the beer needs to be cooled as quickly as possible to around 120 degrees. In order to do this we use a wort chiller. Basically it is a coil of copper tubing that has an input for a hose and an outlet for another hose. All you have to do is turn on your garden hose and let the water flow through the tubing, really simple. After the cooling is done the beer is transferred into the primary fermenter (the white bucket from the previous picture) and the yeast is added. Also, since this is extract brewing, we only brew 2.5 gallons of the 5 gallon batch. The rest of the liquid is just standard distilled water that we added directly into the fermenter. The yeast eats up the fermentable sugars in the beer and creates the alcohol. Right now the beer is being stored in our house, awaiting transfer to secondary fermentation and finally into the keg! This baby should be ready to drink in another 4-6 weeks depending on how all the flavors meld together. As the process continues I will keep you all updated with more blogs and more pictures.
Hope you enjoyed this exclusive look inside 747 Ale House, haha just kidding it's only our house, and a look inside the home brewing process. Sorry this post is extremely long, but it might give you something to read if you get bored at work!
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