Idiot's Guide to Making Incredible Beer at Home

even if I have to do this we both the same Wow many of you know that I've been rather obsessed with fermenting food over the last two years just been trying to take in as much information as possible learn the basics and spread that wealth to you guys so when I'm walking through a bookstore and I see a book called the fermented man of course I'm going to pick that thing up and it's about a guy named Derek Dillinger well he wrote the book he's the author and he wrote about his year of only eating fermented food super interesting stuff but what really caught me about that book was the chapter on beer making I really never thought I was going to make beer but the guys talking about how rewarding it is and I could relate because I just really taken a liking to sourdough bread which is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done in the kitchen so this guy was very convincing and that really pushed me over the edge I said I got to do this so it turns out Derek is actually the brew master at a micro brewery about three hours from my house so I contacted him looking for that little jumpstart to get me into the brew game and he obliged so I headed up to Kent Connecticut midwinter to really get a taste of what brewing is like Derek started his brewing like many of us as avid home brewers he had a blog that was really popular and then he got this job as the head brew master at a micro brewery which is pretty cool because it turns out American brew culture and beer culture is the fastest growing beer culture in the world mainly because there's so many avid home brewers out there so these people are taking their skills to the next level they're opening up micro breweries and they're spreading their craft which is incredible maybe you guys can even to open that microbrewery who knows so when I hung out at Kent Falls brewery for the day I was learning pretty much all the operations of a classic micro brewery everything from milling the greens to mashing to boiling to adding the hops I even learned how they creatively named their beers and of course we had to do an extensive taste test there also sent me home with about 12 different styles of beers so it's pretty exciting for the next few weeks in my apartment as I indulged and learned about all the different styles of beer flavorings one of my biggest takeaways from Kent Falls other than of course learning how to make beer we're learning about the extensive variety of beers that you can make there's really endless opportunities when it comes to brewing beer because you've got so many different variables you've got the green type you've got the types of hops you've got the different strains of yeast you've got the additional flavorings you can add you've got the fermenting temperatures there are so many options out there and I think that's why beer making is spreading so much because people are really just starting to get the taste of it at least over in America people are opening up to all of these varieties getting away from those stupid light beers reinventing the beer culture so of course when it comes to making beer you got to get your equipment so I took another little field trip over to a local place in Brooklyn called bitter and Esther's and I talked to the owner John and he gave me the rundown on beginners equipment and this place is awesome because not only do they have beer making classes but you can pick out custom recipes from bitter nesters and then you can weigh out your greens you can also just pick extracts if you want that and when it comes to the actual growing kiss of course they have a ton of different options at all price points I actually ended up going with the cheapest option which is basically to converted five gallon buckets and it also comes with everything else you need to glue and bottle the beer other than the glass beer bottles themselves you have to order though separately my favorite are those little pop tops that you can get on Amazon those things are reusable and they work great the full kit cost me a little over a hundred bucks and you can buy similar kit online Amazon has a great one I'm actually going to be giving one away so click in the description for the details on that contest so you can start brewing immediately once you have your beer-making equipment you've got to get your beer making ingredient and there's two main categories of ingredients that you're going to be dealing with one is all grains which I'm going to be showing you how to do which is actually taking the grains cracking the grain putting them through a mashing process which releases all of the sugars in those grains so you can convert those sugars to alcohol that is the more difficult process but I really enjoy it because you're doing it from scratch I like the entire process if you want to skip a few hours on brew day if you don't have a you know the entire day to actually brew beer you can just pick up an extract which completely takes out the mashing process it's basically the extracted form of what we do in that mashing process and it honestly takes out about three hours on brew day so you can pick from those two things so one other note about the brewing process is I'm going to be using a brew in a bag method which is become extremely popular recently with home brewers mainly because you're skipping the entire sparging process which is this entire filtering process kind of complicated takes a little longer and the actual end result is not going to be that much different so I highly suggest getting one of the blue bags if you are first-time brewer they've worked great for me and that's the technique I'm going to be using in this video so let's start out on the actual mashing process and first you got to whip out your brew pot I've got a four and a half gallon brew pot and that's perfect because I'm only making two and a half gallons of beer which is about a case of beer which is plenty for me of course if you want to make five gallons you got to get a bigger through pot so you're going to need four gallons of water there's marks on the side of my pot which makes it super easy and if you're using tap water just make sure it's not too chlorinated I'm using a mix of half water and filter water so the reason you're adding an extra 1.5 gallons of water is because it'll be displaced and that's going to happen when you're brewing in the bag along with the evaporation of when you boy your wart later on the process heat up your water according to your actual recipe for my IPA I'm heating it up to a hundred and sixty degrees and then I'm going to take my brew bag which works just like a tea bag you put it around the edges and then you start pouring in all of your cracked green make sure you stir your grains around so they don't clump together because again you don't want them to clump in flower balls or you won't extract the maximum amount of sugar from your grains so the water started at one hundred and sixty degrees because we added all the grains it's going to drop down to about a hundred and forty eight degrees and the goal is to maintain that temperature for thirty minutes so what I do is I put the lid on and I check it every now and then I give it a stir to make sure it's not clumping and if the temperature has dropped to low if it's dropped by like ten degrees just turn the heat on for about a minute to heat it back up through that range whatever your recipe says since there's so much water and all that residual heat I normally don't have too many issues with keeping a steady temperature just keep that lid on give it a few stirs and thirty minutes will fly by after that half hour the water should completely change colors and the smell is going to be amazing you've got this sugary multi barley water now just like a tea bag take your brew bag and it's going to be a little hot so you can wrap a towel around the top and just pull the blue bag straight from the liquid and let it all drain out make sure you don't actually squeeze the bag once you take it out of the liquid you just want to let it naturally drain till it stops dripping you might get an undesirable bitterness if you squeeze the beer and we're already accounting for all of that displacement so you don't have to squeeze out any extra liquids this is now what they call the wort which is basically your liquid from the mashing process pretty much too sugary barley water another great part about the brew bag process is now you've got your strained out beer there you don't have to answer into any other pot you're ready to boil your beer and the boiling process is going to destroy all the bacteria in there so you're basically starting at a blank slate for a yeast to come in and do it fermenting and also during the boiling process that's when you're going to start adding hops for flavor now hops are magical flower and when you smell them you instantly understand why hoppy beers like IPAs have such a distinct tasty flavor and there are a ton of different varieties of hops they come in pellet form for convenience since I'm going for a more tropical vibe with my beer the hops that we're adding have a ton of natural citrus tones which should pair perfectly with the mango when you add your hops of the beginning of the boiling process you're going to get more bitterness because you're boiling the heck out of a flower so it's going to taste a little bitter when you add them towards the end you're going to get more aroma and then there's a dry hopping process which we'll get into later the IPA that I'm making uses both techniques for adding hops so first I'm going to bring my wort up to a boil get it at a nice rapid boil just like this and right away I'm going to add about half an ounce of my hops to the boil for the full 60 minutes just make sure you stir the wort every now and then so it doesn't boil over and then once that hits 45 minutes I'm going to add another point five ounces of hops and then I'm going to boil that for another 15 minutes once the sixty minutes of boiling has finished I'm going to turn the heat off and then I'm going to add 1.5 more ounces of hops now we've got to cool the wort down to room temperature because if you add yeast to hot water you will destroy it and there are a million different techniques to cooling your actual wort I'm going to use probably the most low-tech method which is basically taking your work putting it in the sink and filling up your sink with cold water that cold water is going to start to lower the temperature of the beer once the outside temperature is really warm I drain that off fill it up with more cold water and then add ice to that water and then I would say in a half hour you should have room temperature ward at this point everything that comes into contact with that wart other than the yeast needs to be sanitized because we've got our blank slate we don't want to be adding any weird bacteria or something that's going to spoil the beer first we're going to sanitize our fermenter so just follow your instructions on your sanitizer and fill up that fermenter with sanitized water once it's all sanitized you can actually save that sanitizing liquid and pour it into your bottling jug and save that for bottling day when you pour off your sanitizing liquid don't worry about the extra bubbles just keep those there they're not going to harm your beer and then just dump in your wort to your sanitized fermenter now you're ready to pitch your yeast which basically means just add it to the wort and once that yeast is added you pretty much have beer well sort of you gotta wait two weeks for that to ferment now I'll give you a fermenter a few vigorous shakes back and forth which is going to oxygenate your wort so you're going to hammer on that lid and cool it in a dark place for about two weeks temperature control is one of the most important parts and also one of the most difficult parts about home brewing you want to keep it at a nice regulated temperature or you can throw off a lot of things in the process for me it's about to be summertime and I really don't have much air conditioning in this place so I actually ordered this brew bag this refrigerator brew bag so I can put my entire fermenter in the bag and I can just switch out some ice packs every now and then and that should keep it at a nice regulated temperature around 65 to 70 degrees if you have a really cool basement in your house you could definitely try a lager and if you have a really hot house and you've got no way of cooling it try a saison this is an optional step but a lot of beer making kits come with a hydrometer which is basically a way to measure the sugar levels in your beer which will ultimately tell you the alcohol levels in your beer so you can fill up a little container with your beer and take that hydrometer reading I'm not really going to get into how to read it but I will put a link in the description below that will explain everything you need to know and just remember if you are trying your beer during the fermentation process which I suggest you do you're not going to have a tasty product in the beginning it's going to be a little bitter it's going to taste weird in the very start but the flavors are going to develop and it's going to get better but even after two weeks when it's done fermenting you still have warm flat beer so don't get discouraged if is not perfect that end product once is carbonated it's going to be light Gear's tastier than what you have there you might have seen the term dry hopping on a beer label and what that basically means is adding hops to the fermenting process not actually cooking the hops in the boiling process my IPA has a dry hopping process so once the beer has fermented for seven days out of the 14 days total you're going to take a muslin bag and make sure that bag is nice and sanitized you're going to add another one point five ounces of hops and you're going to throw that right into the fermenter for the last seven days I thought it'd also be a good time to add the mango as well they say it's best to give the yeast just a few days on its own to develop then you can start adding the flavorings it's very crucial that when you're adding any flavorings to beer and the ferment a process that you do heat those things up so you kill off all the unwanted bacteria so that's what I did with the mango I heated it up to a hundred 70 degrees I also froze the mango installed it out a few times and what that does is starts to break down the cell walls which will release more of that flavor so I added the mango to a muslin bag and I let the hop and the mango ferment for another seven days so it's been two weeks and the last step I'm going to do before bottling is put my fermenter into the fridge and what this is going to do is kill the beer and a lot of that sediment and yeast is going to pull down to the bottom ultimately giving you a cleaner final beer product because it's going to be stuck at the bottom so when you actually go to bottle the beer all of the sediment will stick to the bottom the first thing we're going to do for the bottling process boil 2 cups of water with our priming sugar to dissolve that up nicely and your recipe will tell you exactly how much grinding sugar you need the sugar is there to actually carbonate the beer and the cool part about making beer is you're adding a very specific amount of sugar so once the yeast eats up the sugars and turns it into co2 your beer is done carbonating that's why beers can sit on the shelf forever and not explode hopefully not explode so next take whatever bottles you have and just make sure you give them a little rinse with some soap and then we're going to add in all of that sanitizing liquid that you reserved from the first phase your kit should come with a tube that has a liquid release valve to make this process really simple so once you've filled up all your bottles you can dump out all that sanitized English lid and again don't worry about any of those extra bubbles just keep those in there don't try to wash those out [Music] now this is a very important step we are going to rack the beer into the sanitizing bottle and bucket make sure you do this very slowly because you're going to see we did such a good job with getting all of that muck on the bottom they actually call this the trub and you want to pour off the liquid so you're leaving a lot of that trouble on the bottom so it doesn't get into your final product now you can start bottling your beer follow the same process as we did with the sanitizing solution and what I found is if you fill up the bottles completely to the top once you pull out the actual rod you'll have the perfect amount of headspace for your beer because you do want to leave a little room in your bottles if you're using bottle caps make sure your bottle caps are sanitized and a lot of the kits will also come with a bottle capper and that is this process but again these little pop tops they work great and it's a much easier process to make sure these are sanitized as well the pop tops now you're going to store your beer away for at least two weeks I would say 2-3 weeks would be on the safe side and keep that at about 65 67 degrees if you can and then you want to make sure you chill your beer my recipe says chill it for a week I mean that's a pretty deep chill but make sure you chill your beer for at least a few days before you drink it so it is extra crispy delicious we get jauntily alright I am I'm five weeks older than when I started this like it took to make this and is it worth it I brought over Derrick Lucci and then my other friend over here my name is rat Kylie are you actually a brother no no so we're going to try this guy's this is a mango mango IPA so IPA obviously heavy in the hop game so a lot of hot flavor and then I tried fruit for the first time so this head and this is the crisps now what we smell what Mel likes mango or something really oh so I pay attention International pancake association in association with I already don't drink and drive kids even if I have to do this oh we both the same Wow how do you get the mangle in there already here you can do a little more oh this smells good little he's melting guys incredible so fruit how do you get to mangle on the chair I can watch the video but I want you'll have to watch oh nice and crisp this is good great you know that the I'm not gonna lie it I've tasted one of these I've already had this weekend I drank like two of them the the hoppiness it's the first time I went for the full I have done just the pale else it's a little more bitter it's definitely having more than enough so the fruitiness is there you like squeeze in something to do this you really want to know how you get the mango this is a name is a feel of what you like squeeze in some orange or something see that I think would actually do a great job with the bitterness a little bit of orange too the bitterness is so welcome better to answer your question you'll watch the video it's good it's fine whenever I like taste the homemade beer I'm expecting it not to taste like beer yeah even the carbonation on this one to me homemade beer it tastes incredible but there's just a freshness that you don't get when you taste regular beer unless it's like coming straight from the tap from the brewery I'm telling you guys it's really not that hard to make beer all you got to do is follow the instructions every single time I've done it three times now and it's worked out perfectly every time you've tasted it yeah every gear I this is like the combination on this here yeah some different nomination yeah really is that maybe you're right you're right it's like kombucha I think with the fruit you might get a little extra carbonation I like that I was like when you're making you know I I love beer I've always loved beer but like I don't really drink much these days so I appreciate like just having it good like you don't need money it's like your shitty beard is agree with both of them well as five it is I would take all Josh myself a great jobs up a good point because I don't really drink too much either and it's not like you have to be some heavy although a big part of the the beer making is there's a lot of drinkers but I don't I don't get drunk I like drinking a beer every now and then so this is the perfect way you make you know 24 bottles a month and then you know you come back after a long day you drink one of these and it's more like drinking just a fresh like soda that gets you a little tipsy but you know I'm not trying to get wasted so that is something to know you don't have to be like a huge thank you for that beer yeah I'm gonna get you guys home I must be drive and drink guys right out yeah auspicious you

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 2,130,118

Keywords: enzyme tire spunk, fruit beer, mango beer, mike greenfield, how to brew beer, simple beer recipe, fermenting, IPA recipe, brewing beer at home, bottling beer, idiots guide to beer, all grains, beginners beer making, amazing beer at home, home brewing beer, beerk kit, home brewing, brothers green, beer set up, how to bottle beer

Id: dMYGOcLwtQk

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2017