The Basics of Brewing

hi my name is Josh Weikart I'm the off of author of the beer simple blog and a contributor to craft beer in brewing magazine and we're here today to talk about the basics of brewing I got started in brewing because I wanted to make a beer that wasn't going to be available anymore and I decided I'd try to make it myself and that was almost 10 years ago now and since that time of brewed 351 batches and to make sure I've got the last two in there it's not as hard as everyone makes it out to be brewing is pretty simple when you get right down to it you can get into as much detail with it as you want but to get the basics right is actually pretty straightforward so that's we're gonna be talking about today there are two main mechanisms for getting getting barley sugars into into work to make beer you can use an all grain process where you're mashing your own grains and steeping them in water and extracting your shirt converting and extracting your sugars that way the other option is to buy premade malt extract where there's a large factory they convert big huge batches of grain and then they convert that into work and then essentially reduce it down into a syrup that you're going to add into your kettle now both mechanisms both methods are going to produce work and you're still making your own beer it's really just a question of how much control you want over that process extract brewing is a lot faster and in many ways it's simpler and most people do start with extract brewing all grain brewing takes a little more time but it exert it allows you a lot more control over what you gather the finished product and there are a few beers that are much more challenging to make from an extract as opposed to all grain beers even if you do convert from extract to all grain I would encourage you to go to double back to extract growing now and again for a couple of reasons first of all you'll be surprised at how little difference there is in the finished beer most people mistakenly think that oh all grain brewing is so much better because I started an extract now if your auger and my beer is a lot better but that's really more a function of you just being a better brewer if you go back to extract growing now and again you'll find that the beer quality is at least as good and as your all great beers some of them are even going to be better and it's a quicker process it's a shorter process you'll be more likely to do it more often and the more you brew the better you'll get at it so every once in a while pick up a couple extract kits or design your own recipes and revisit extract a word about all grain brewing and its advantages I meant it gives you a lot more control but that's not all it gives you when you're using extract you're counting on the folks at the extract Factory having had a good day that day and producing their extract but every once in a while you'll get a product that's slightly oxidized in production or maybe it was sitting on the shelf as an extract for too long the big advantage of all grain is that since we're making the the sugars were since we're doing our own conversion and extraction we get exactly what we want and there are also a few beers not many but a few beers that simply cannot be made effectively with extract things like a classic German rauch beer of smoked beer doesn't really work because that relies on a large contingent of smoked malts which isn't something that the manufacturers really produce and sometimes higher gravity beers if you're making them with extract take on cidery flavor so what sometimes people call extract flavor simply because there's such a large dose of fermentable sugar in it so there are times when all grain brewing is going to produce a better beer but for the most part for 95% of the beers you make you can make extract or all grain it'll turn out well either way if we're talking about all grain brewing it really starts in the mash which is the process where we convert grain starches and grains sugars and that really starts by finding a mash tun something that you can put your grain in the warm water in to do that process and you can start with something as simple as a cooler many Brewers start with the big five or ten gallon orange beverage coolers this is just a standard beverage cooler the octagonal variety but as you can see here what we end up with is simply just an empty vessel with some sort of a screen in the bottom and with that screen you're going to get a filter out the liquid ball leaving the grain behind because it's going to be crushed and milled up and so you want to you need some way to separate it from the liquid these assemblies the bazooka screen that I just showed you and the ball valve and other other mashing tools and then you know gadgets and assemblies are usually available from homebrew supply shops but they're also step by step descriptions online to build your own and it'll save you a couple of dollars or you can just buy and preassembled the first step is to heat up some water to add to your grains you want to start with usually well it's going to depend on the amount of grain that you use but so you do some of the range of two to four gallons of water for a five gallon batch and what we do is heat that to a certain strike temperature that strike temperature is going to be a temperature that when calculated along with the temperature of the grain the volume of the water the weight of the grain that said the temperature of the mash tun is going to land you at the right mash temperature mashing to convert starches into sugars happens in a fairly narrow range of temperature between about one hundred and forty nine degrees in 157 degrees at that temperature what happens is that the enzymes that are already present in the in the in the barley in the grain are going to convert the starches into sugars and we leave it soak for a period of time somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes usually people just go with 60 minutes and hours usually plenty of time to convert all those starches and sugars and in that process or during that process we're converting all of the starch in the grain into sugar and then when we drain off which we'll talk about in a second when we drain off we've essentially pulled all the sugar right out of them out of the mash so that grain when you empty it all is going to taste like nothing at all it's going to taste completely bland the way we do this we heat the strike water usually if we're shooting for 152 degrees for our mash temperature usually we're landing somewhere around a hundred sixty three hundred sixty four degrees on the strike temperature but you're brewing software will help guide you there we add the strike water to the to the mash tun simple is lifting it up and dumping it in if you have a if you have a pump you can use that you can if you have high temperature tubing you can siphon it into it if you can't lift it up but if we're only talking about a five gallon batch usually it's possible to just lift up your your cattle and just dump the water in after you dump the water in you then add your crushed and milled grain to the water now there are people who will tell you is you should do it the other way at the grain first and pour the water over it I doubt it makes much difference but for what it's worth I always add grain to water I find it easier to stir in so you stir that grain into the water the crushed grain and we call that doing in and once that's finished you should take a temperature you should always have a thermometer on hand when you're brewing this is called the thermapen it is instantaneously accurate it takes about a second and a half to get a proper temperature reading and you still have to wait for it to build up but honestly any thermometer will usually do even just basic meat thermometers since the temperature of mashing grain is actually kind of the same temperature rage we're looking at when we're when we're cooking you know beef so any thermometer will do so add the strike water add the grain give it a stir and then take a temperature and you should land right around your target mash temperature whatever that is and like I said 152 degrees Fahrenheit is typical after we're done mashing after about 60 minutes in the mash all those starches are converted into sugars and we need to get the sugary liquid out to do that we have to get the liquid flowing at a rate that will extract as much sugar as possible and at the same time we want to give the liquid an opportunity to clear so what we do is something called voir loughing and in the voir law what we do is we open up the valve minimally and let us slow and obviously there would be tubing coming this don't just pour out of the naked valve you connect a tube to the end of this and you would open up the valve so that you're running out about one pint of liquid every minute give or take so you're going to drain off the liquid into a pint glass or a small pitcher or something like that and the goal of this is to let it start to clear and as you drain more liquid off you'll notice it's getting clearer and clearer and clearer during that process it's helpful to have two pitchers or two vessels so you can you know convert you know move it move the tubing from one to the other and dump that back into the mash tun and once your flowing clear through the tubing then you can just let it drain right into the kettle and you can drain it completely dry and that's called Lau during after we louder some people you get one option is to put enough liquid in here that you're going to drain off the full volume of your boil but as another option you can do a second water addition to the grain and that's called sparging sparging is used to wash out the last bits of sugar out of the out of the out of the mash and the advantage that that offers is that you're going to increase your mash efficiency a little bit you can get a little more sugar out of it now there are a couple of methods for doing this first of all it is not necessary sparge you can simply add the full amount that's called a no sparge method and you're louder then is just going to drain all of the liquid that you need if you haven't done that you can do something called batch sparging which is when you add a fixed amount of liquid that your software will compute for you and simply add all that liquid give it a stir let it settle for about 10 minutes and then after that you louder just like you drain off just like you did during your louder or you can do something called fly sparging which is when you're slowly adding water to the grain bed you would fill the grit you put enough water in here to cover to the top of the grain bed and then as you're draining off you add liquid to the top so there's always just a small scheme of water on top of the grains and you're finished sparging when you fill your kettle any of these methods will work they all have their own little tips and tricks and I'm sure we can talk about it another day but the long story short is you should end up with if it's five gallon batch something between five and a half and six gallons of work out of the mash tun if you're not doing your own mashing and converting your own sugars and you're using extracts you still have some choices to make there are different varieties of extract available on the market and starting with the most basic you can buy a can of pre hopped malt extract this is basically just a beer in a can you're going to take it you're going to warm it up to you know reduce the viscosity as you can pour it out more easily and that's true of all the extracts by the way it's good to just soak them in hot water it makes them easier to pour out but pre hops malt extract is just what it sounds like you were going to take this pour it into water stir it up to dilute it into the volume of water that you're making into beer and you are not going to add hops or grains or anything else to it it is the most entry-level form of burner is in perfect fairness it does not make great beer most pre hot malt extracts will make acceptable beer it's a good way to learn the process and one of the big advantages of extract brewing in general is it does let you focus on the cold side of the process fermentation which is where the real magic happens anyway but pre hops malt extract I think is a little too simple but if that's where you're starting there's nothing wrong with that it's still probably going to make solid beer it might might not be the best if you ever make though beyond that what most people will use is multi extract and then add their own now the the extract process is still the same you're going to again like I said take the can or jar or whatever it is a multi extract let it sit in hot water for a couple of minutes to loosen it up unscrew the top pour it into water stir it up to dilute it and then bring it to a boil which we'll talk about a minute during the boil though you're going to add your own hops so that's going to give you a degree of control over what the flavor and bitterness level is after pre hops malt extract in terms of complexity we have extract with specialty grains not every beer requires this but a great many would benefit from using the malt the liquid malt extract just as a base and then adding some flavors and some character using some crystal malt or chocolate molds which don't need to be mashed so we can just soak those right in the water the way that would work is you would take your water your kettle you would heat the water to about 150 degrees you can steep your specialty grains in a small bag like this this one is actually I use for hops but they make larger versions for malts and the advantage of these is that you just put what it put them especially grains in tie it off drape it over the edge of the of the kettle and tie it off and just let it hang there in the water and after about 15 or 20 minutes you can just pull it out let it drain and that's it whatever flavor was in those specialty grains you're going to get exactly the same flavor just like as if you'd had them in the mash tun and after that you add your extract is normal stir it up and again you're off to the boil and then finally the most complicated way to do this is something called a partial mash beer this is when you are not using only extract you might not even be using extract at all small enough batch you're actually doing a match right in your boil kettle but the reason I say this is more complicated is because now temperature actually matters for steeping the specialty grains you can start at 80 degrees Fahrenheit and just bring the temperature up and if that takes you 15 minutes you just pull it out when it hits about 160 170 degrees all you need to do is avoid getting the water too hot once the grain once the water hits 170 hundred seventy-five degrees you might be extracting things out of especially greens you don't want so you want to stop it there but for the partial match you need to hold it at a specific temperature it has to be right at 152 degrees usually for about half an hour and the reason for that is because we're doing in the kettle exactly we would have been doing in the mash town we're converting starches into sugars and for those alpha and beta amylase enzymes to do what they need to do they have to be held at a steady temperature so if you can't hold your temperature steady for a good 25 minutes to 30 minutes then partial match might be off the table for you but if you can it's a good way to make some of those beers that just can't be made with extract again my German rauch beer just the classic German smoked beer is maybe 97% rauch malt which is really just base malt just you know good old-fashioned pilsner malt that's been smoked over beechwood or cherry wood or oak you can't really just steep that you have to soak it and convert those starches and sugars so if I were making a one or two gallon batch of my rouse beer I would have to do a partial mash it wouldn't possible to do the extract unless you want to use liquid smoke but you don't want to use liquid smoke it's terrible it don't use peat smoke malteaser it doesn't work that no beer should taste like peat when it comes to extract brewing the most important thing is going to be freshness if there's one thing we're already surrendering control by giving over to the extract makers control over your over your work you don't want to use something that's been sitting on the shelves for a long time so when you when you buy malt extracts get it from a place that pulls through a lot of product a large homebrew supply shop a lot of the online shops are great because they they move a lot of volume and it guarantees you're going to get something that has been sitting around in the warehouse for a few months so fresh is better not many of the producers will put you know produced on or best by dates on on the cans or jars but at the same time you can usually tell if there's dust building up on it don't buy that move on to the next one another option is actually fused instead of liquid malt extract you can use dry malt extract this is just a container of it here I'm being real careful because it gets everywhere it's like it's like really really really sticky flour when it goes flying across the room but dry malt extract has the advantage of course of being dried which makes it a little more resistant to oxidation you can make beers with 100% dried malt extract the reason we don't do more of that is simply because dry malt extract is kind of a pain to get into suspension in the beer liquid malt extract dissolves a lot more easily more readily another advantage here is to make sure you're doing full volume boils you want to boil all of your work all at the same time lots of recipes especially extract recipes will tell you to make a two and a half gallon batch of water dissolve your extract into it boil it and then add water to it to dilute it later that's not ideal if possible you want to boil at exactly the gravity that you're going to end up at if you can't boil all of your work all at once because your kettles too small or because you want to make ten gallons and you only have a five-gallon system then what you can do is simply add half the extract during the boil and then add the rest of it at the very end of the boil because that way your work concentration level is going to be consistent the whole time you can use simple sugars to increase your gravity just plain old table sugar is fine if you want to add a few points of gravity and you you're running low on extract or you don't want to add the color but using more than a pound or two into a five gallon batch runs the risk of creating some interesting all flavors that you probably don't want it to make it taste apple cider II these specialty grains the extract with specialty grains recipes are your best friend they allow you a degree of control they let you choose what flavors go in you're not relying solely on the people that are making the extract and the best part is that it it opens up the whole range of recipes to you you're not dependent just on what the extract can get you and beyond that don't be shy about using you know other other types of sugars you can add honey and use that as a form of extract you can add simple syrup you can add maple syrup just don't expect that these flavors are necessarily going to carry through honey will add a degree of flavor depending on the type of honey but your more basic honey's just playing clover honey that comes in a little bear that's not going to add much in the way of flavor that's just adding sugar likewise brewers are obsessed with maple syrup as an adjunct sugar it's great they will add gravity to your beer but you can't make a beer tastes like maple by adding maple syrup to it it is flatly impossible it cannot happen it will ferment off completely and you'll just be left wondering what happened to the maple syrup once you've got your sugary liquid which is all we need to start brewing it's time to boil it and during the boil there's not much we need to do you're going to bring the temperature up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit that's obvious during the boil the only interaction you're going to have with your beer is to do one of two things one is going to be to add hops and the other might be to add some kind of clarifying agent hop additions tend to come in at specific intervals depending on what we want to add to the beer if we're just looking for bitterness we would add the hops early in the boil because the longer they boil the more of those alpha acids that form the bulk of the flavoring elements in the hops the more those are going to be isomerized and once they're isomerize they start to taste a very bitter instead of fairly resonate so we're adding bitterness through that process however we in that process we're also boiling off and volatilizing all of the essential oils in the hops which is the other half of what hops will add which is flavor and aroma but if hops are boiled too long we lose all of that so a later hop addition will let us add flavor and aroma specific to that hop to the beer itself so maybe if we're boiling our bittering hops for 60 minutes at 20 minutes we're only going to isomerize maybe a third of the alpha acid so you're gonna get less bitterness out of it and some of those essential oils are going to survive into the finished beer and they're going to add flavor and aroma and the later in the boil we get the more we're going to get flavor in aroma and the less we're going to get bitterness now there is no rule that says you have to add your hops in the beginning to get your bitterness if you want 20 IV use in your beer you can get all of that with late hop additions if you want you're just going to need a larger volume of hops which might be what you want anyway if you're making an American amber ale or an IPA or something like that we want lots of hop flavor and aroma those big late hop additions are going to be good for you when it comes to hops we have a couple options you can use whole leaf hops which look like just whole flowers and they've built you know they're exactly they sound like you could also they use pellet hops which are what you get when you take whole leaf hops kill them dry them you know pulverize them and then compress them into small tiny pellets that look like you know fish fruit or rabbit food the advantage of pellets is that you get more surface area contact on the hop and so you can get more bitter instead if they're also easier to store they frequently come as this one is vacuum sealed and and if you store them in the freezer they will effectively last forever the less they'll live longer than you will but and they in terms of storing hops you can always just sort of press all the air out of a package and put the back in the freezer so don't be shy about buying lots of pots especially if you find one or two that you like but you take your hops and you add them to the to the boil you can either just toss the hops in directly into the end of the kettle there's nothing wrong with that just so long as they don't mess you up when you're getting the beer out of the kettle we'll talk about that in a minute or you can use a hot bag just a muslim' bag like this if you use a bag if you bet if you bag up your hops you have to realize that you're going to lose some utilization out of the hops there's not as much liquid flowing over the surface and as a result you end up with you know a need for slightly more in the way of hops to get the same bitterness and same flavor but it's totally up to you both are perfectly viable methods also during the boil we might add a clarifying agent something like Irish moss sometimes it comes in a powdered form like this sometimes it looks more like like ground-up fish food but essentially it's just a form of seaweed that aids in the formation of coagulation of proteins so when we add that into the boil as it boils it starts to collect a lot of those proteins that are actually in the boil and what it causes them to do is clump together a drop out of suspension so when we drain the beer off we're not taking that with us so it just aids in clarification down the line that's really all we're going to add during the boil the boil does a lot of great things for beer but luckily it's something we don't have to monitor all that closely just so long as we're not boiling over you want to maintain a healthy boil it doesn't have to be leaping out of the kettle as long as you're getting convection if you're getting as long as you're getting the beer moving sort of up that pillar of heat and then dropping back down then you have oxygen you have oxygen coming out of the work you have a lot of volatile chemicals or volatile volatile compounds that we don't want in the beer coming out things like like DMS and and all that stuff we'll just boil off boiling beer - some people doesn't smell that great because a lot of what's coming out is things we don't want the pier in the first place so it does serve a purpose but luckily this is one of the simpler parts of the brewing process just get a good healthy boil going even if it's just a little you know active simmer at the top it's always getting bubbling then we're going gas exchange and that's kind of all we need after the boil it's important or maybe not but we'll talk about that in a second it's important to chill the beer and get it cold enough for the yeast to survive in when we touch them in in order to have yeast in a viable environment the temperature needs to be down below that 80 degrees Fahrenheit and you're going to be fermenting cooler than that but just so we don't kill these when we pitch them directly into the beer we need to make sure that we cool the beer off there are a few methods for doing this of varying speeds and varying mechanisms the simplest way honestly is just turn the heat off and move the kettle to a cold place if it's snowy day you can take it out and put it in a snowbank pack snow around it though you'd be shocked how long even that takes because it forms actually a little little barrier of air around it as that initial snow gaps or sort of forms from the hot kettle you can also just put the beer in the kettle in a in a sink and with just an ice bath and that'll cool it down we also now sell product specifically for chilling beer things like an immersion chiller which is a long coil of copper or steel usually copper the steel ones they're actually not for chilling but you can use in that way in a pinch but along a long coil of sea of copper using around 50 feet with hose fittings on each end and what happens is water passes through that copper and it forms a little heat exchanger it draws the copper takes the heat out of liquid conveys it to the water the water exits and you're getting a constant flow of cold water going in and hot water coming out now and after about 15 or 20 minutes that will chill the beer down to whatever temperature that groundwater is another option is something called a a plate chiller and plate chillers work in much the same way they form a little little heat exchange here but what will happen is that work will go in one side and out the other and we will also have water groundwater or you can use a pump to pump chilled water through it as well water coming in one side and out the other and running counter to each other and this thing right here even just using ground water will get your beer from boiling down to whatever that ground water temperature is in the span of just a couple of seconds so you're really only limited by how fast you can get the liquid out of the kettle this this kettle here with the ball valve wide open will drain 4.7 gallons of beer in about seven or eight minutes maybe upwards of ten minutes and that's it it just passes through the plate chiller and it's at the ground water temperature already and you're ready to pitch I'm a big big big proponent of plate chillers and they come in a variety of sizes and thicknesses and you know the bigger it is the more plates you have the faster it will chill this is probably the cheapest one on the market and I find that for our purposes of home brewers it is more than sufficient professional breweries might need the you know the 200 plate mega chiller we can get away with a lot less and if you find that your beer is not getting as cold as you want simply slow down the rate of flow out of the kettle and you'll find that you know it gets right down to that groundwater temperature almost immediately there is a school of thought that says you don't actually need to chill your beer the conventional wisdom is that you need to chill quickly because it helps form cold break which is a coagulation of protein so it helps clear the beer some people argue that you need to chill the beer quickly because it reduces the likelihood that that the work will reabsorb that DMS that we've just been boiling off but there there's an entire continent of people really down in Australia who do something called no chill brewing they take their beer dump it into just a plastic cube a clear plastic cube seal it it clamps down and that's it they just let the hot work sanitize that cube and after a day or two or sometimes as long as a week they will pop it open and pitch the yeast and so it there are many approaches to brewing and don't let anyone convince you that their way is the only way to do it and be willing to challenge those conventions alrighty now that things are cold we have entered the danger zone what I mean by that is that everything that touches your beer from here on in has to be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized because the old joke goes that everything loves beer as much as we do and so as soon as that work is cool you now have a sugar based solution that is capable of being home to any number of microorganisms that we don't want the only thing we want a beer is ease is yeast but there's always going to be other things that will grow in there in small amount so we want to pitch east as quickly as we can but we also want to make sure we limit contact between anything that has been probably cleaned and sanitized and the finished beer the finished worked all right which means we need cleaners and sanitizers now when it comes to cleaners we have a couple options we have alkaline based cleaners things like PBW which is very popular alternative there's any number of these though we have oxygen based cleaners like like one step and it silk and each of these cleans in a different way that you don't need to worry about it has to do with odd sounding words like surfactants but point is that what these will do is clean soils off the surface of anything that we're going to put into the beer whether that's spoons or the surface of the fermenting vessel itself the bucket the cardboard or whatever it is so we need to clean effectively and then after we've cleaned we also need to sanitize cleaning and sanitizing are not the same process cleaning removes any soils from the surface of whatever it is sanitizing now kills anything that's living on that surface and you have to do both because if you don't you run the risk of sanitizing just the surface of a soil and that doesn't sanitize very well and there may well still be things living under there that you don't want sanitizing works by lowering pH or creating such a hostile environment pH for that matter and to the point where we've created such a hostile environment than other bacteria and including yeast by the way simply can't live on the surface of whatever's been dipped into it and one of the easiest ways to sanitize anything is just alcohol I keep a spray bottle of the world's cheapest vodka in my brewery at all times you can fill your some star sand or something else but I like the reliability of just super cheap vodka and if there's something I need to sanitize in a jiffy or and if I'm out of sanitizing solution I've already dumped it down the sink or whatever it is I can always pull out that that vodka bottle and just give it a quick hit and now the surface of whatever that is is sanitized we just want to make it show make it so it's a relatively sanitized environments and nothing to live on the surface of it because that way anything that touches our cold beer is now not conveying additional microbiota that we don't want there's no joke of the top ten things that can go wrong with beer eleven of them have to do with sanitation so make sure you've cleaned and sanitized everything that's going to touch that cold side beer including the vessel that's going into but after you've done that and you've drained the beer into your ferment in vessel whatever it is it's time to add yeast and let the yeast go to work let's talk about pitching for a second that's what we call it when we add yeast to beer your pitch rate is the amount of beer that you need to excuse me the amount of yeast that you need to add to beer in order to get a healthy and active fermentation your beer will ferment even with a very very very small amount of yeast but that's not going to produce beer that often tastes very good because the yeast of our having to struggle to keep up and consume all that sugar so there's a certain amount of that we want to pitch in luckily the major homebrew commercial yeast companies have provided us with a ready-made size you can buy a snack pack or a vial and there's enough yeast in there to ferment most any beer that you've made once your work temperature drops below about 80 degrees it's not safe to pitch that yeast in and even though that temperature is higher than the temperature you're going to be fermenting at you're still fine the yeast have to wake up get acclimated they go through a growth phase and then they start consuming sugar so we have some time so let's say you're at about 75 degrees Fahrenheit you can just go ahead and pitch your yeast in at that point you also want to add some oxygen oxygenated work is is good for the yeast because the yeast will use oxygen as they as they grow and bud and divide and they'll consume any oxygen that's left and let's not forget we just boiled all the oxygen out of that work so adding in some oxygen oxygen is a good idea for them now the good news is there's easy ways to do this it can be as simple as stirring the work to renow its beer if you've added your yeast stirring the beer thoroughly just sloshing it around picking up the carboy and shaking it I mean almost anything will work so one of the things we can do is add pure oxygen directly to the beer and you know this little valve here will simply push oxygen down through the tubing you just insert this into the headspace of the beer usually you submerge it a little bit under the surface of the liquid but all we're really doing is trying to fill the headspace of the fermenting vessel with pure oxygen because as the yeast consume the oxygen in the liquid that oxygen will absorb down into the beer and they'll have habit to use as well and this can be a very simple process 30 to 60 seconds with this valve fully opened is more than enough oxygen to keep your yeast healthy and you'll find that it gets fermentation started a lot and you'll end up with with cleaner beers as a result all right now that we've added oxygen and we've added yeast it's time to ferment and the name of the game when it comes to fermentation is temperature you want to ferment at a temperature that provides the yeast with an environment in which they're happy and healthy a temperature at which they're going to produce the flavors you want but at the same time not produce flavors you don't want and that's going to vary from geese strain to yeast strain if it's a lager yeast it's going to want to ferment at about 50 to 53 degrees Fahrenheit or about 10 or 11 degrees C if it's an ale yeast it's generally going to want to ferment in the mid-60s Fahrenheit or around 16 C don't tie yourself to those numbers you can ferment lager yeast warmer and get more character out of them you can ferment ale yeast cooler and sort of restrain some of the characteristics they might produce but as a general rule lager yeasts are going to produce cleaner beers with fewer fewer secondary flavors fewer fermentation characteristics whereas ale yeasts are both more likely to produce things like fruity esters and clovie phenols and things like that and at the temperature they ferment at they're also more likely to produce them so essentially you're going to have to pick a temperature based on your yeast ring let's talk about something else you can add in your in your fermentation process you can actually add hops as a dry hopping process dry hopping is just taking a whole leaf or pellet hops adding them to fermented beer or fermenting beer and what that will do is it will now extract a lot of those pure essential oil flavors that you can also get by boiling the hops but now it's just going to come out because the hops are sitting in this alcoholic solution called our beer the various of the dry hopping is it gives a big bright hop aroma to your finished beer it will though also smell like you've added pure hops to there because that's exactly what happened and if there's too much if you overdo the dry hopping you can end up with a very sort of chalky or resin II taste in the beer or mouthfeel and you can also overpower existing flavor so you're going to dry hop start with small amounts for just a couple of days and sort of build up from there as you start to dial in your recipes also make sure you're adding your dry hops after the completion of fermentation because otherwise the fermenting beer is off-gassing all kinds of co2 and it will carry away a lot of those aromatics just in the process of fermentation so wait until the beer is more or less completely done fermenting so there's very little activity in the airlock and then go ahead and add your dry hops this is also a time when you can add finding agents clarifying agents to your beer if you didn't use the Irish moss for example now is the time when you can add things like like ice and glass which is actually just dried fish swim bladder you can add things like gelatin and what these will do they all work in basically the same way by extracting proteins and enhancing klarik clarification because now there's just less sort of hanging in suspension in the beer also over time your yeast will when they're finished will also drop out of suspension which will also clear the beer and some yeasts are higher flocculator than others flocculation is the tendency of yeast to sort of clump together and drop out of suspension once they get big enough then once they form a big enough clump some geese flocculate very rapidly others will sort of hang in suspension forever that that hazy color you see for example on Hefeweizen is mainly just a function of the fact that the yeast will just stay in suspension almost forever and so it's not always going to be the case that the yeast will just drop out but they will give it enough time some people will also tell you that if you're going to leave your beer in the fermenter for a long time that you might want to move it to a second fermenting vessel to get it off the yeast bed that's going to form at the bottom after the yeast flock out after they drop out of suspension there is a large contingent of Brewers though that will tell you that secondary fermentation is probably not worth the risk the danger you're trying to avoid in secondary fermentation or moving it's not even secondary fermentation unless you have your sugars but into moving into that second vessel the danger you're trying to avoid is that yeast if they're left long enough in beer can essentially die and the the cell walls break open and they can impart a meaty flavor or soapy flavor to the beer through a process called autologous which is when the cell is just sort of die of their own volition the issue is that you know that this is a problem that's much more common for commercial Brewers and home brewers for us there's not nearly as much pressure pushing down in that yeast bed from the liquid above it I mean if you have you know 30,000 gallons pressing on a yeast bed that's a lot of that's a lot of pressure that's a lot a lot of temperatures as well and the hydrostatic pressure there just from the beer pushing down on a yeast that puts the yeast under a lot of stress we don't have that we only have five gallons and it takes a long long time for that process to manifest itself but if you transfer your beer from one vessel to another even if you clean and sanitize your tubing and your racking cane and everything else you're still exposing your beer to oxygen and contaminants and it's probably not worth the risk I tend to tell people just to leave their beer in the primary fermenter until they're ready to package it almost no matter how long that is or what they're adding to it if you're adding fruit if you're adding hops if you're adding finding agents whatever it is it's probably not going to be so long that you can't just leave that on there with very very little risk of autologous but if you transfer it you are introducing a very real risk of oxidation when it comes time to package up your beer once fermentation is finished and you're ready to go there's no activity in the airlock you've added everything you're going to add it's time to put your beer into something that will serve it okay and we effectively only have two options here we have bottles and we have kegs most people start out with bottling the bottling process is pretty simple you take a bottling bucket and what you're going to do is add a sugar solution to it and there are any number of calculators online they can tell you how much priming sugar to use and I have what dilution but the short version is you take somewhere like you know two to five ounces of any sort of priming sugar it can be cane sugar it can be dextrose it can be honey for that matter or brown sugar you're going to take some weight of sugar dissolve it into liquid and boil it for a few minutes just to stare just to sterilize it and you're going to add it to this bottling bucket and then rack your beer out of the fermenter into the bucket after that you're just going to be again connect tubing and a bottling wand and you're just going to fill each bottle individually and then cap them up and once you've done that once the cap is on the yeast that are still alive in that beer even though it's totally clear there's still plenty of yeast in there the yeast still alive on the beer are going consume that little sugar addition that you made and it's going to add a negligible amount of alcohol but it's going to add carbon dioxide and since the co2 can't get out of the bottle it goes into suspension in the beer or in this excuse me in the solution in the beer and voila we have carbonated beer some people will tell you they don't like bottling that it takes forever you have to sanitize a bunch of bottles it's a slower process some people prefer kegging because it's faster and more convenient one quick word in defense of bottling it doesn't have to take that long and also this way it is readily portable and also once you've clamp down that cap that beers finished there's nothing more than go wrong with it which I really like but tagging is an option even for home brewers and what we can do is a source kegs from a homebrew supply shop or maybe a local beverage distributor and these are often called corny kegs or Cornelius kegs they're old soda kegs and luckily the market is completely flooded with these because once you know the soda industry converted those you know mylar bags of syrup they were left with millions of these kegs laying around so they're still available as used kegs on the market kegging is pretty simple you're not going to add any priming sugar I mean you can you can prime in the keg if you want to do it that way but mostly you're going to use four co2 but you simply rack out of your fermenting vessel into the keg seal up the keg connected to a co2 tank a co2 cylinder and set it to a certain pressure or co2 and that's going to pressurize the keg it's going to carbonate the beer and deciding on that level of carbonation is really just a matter of looking at a chart that will give you a specific psi level at a specific temperature for a certain amount of carbonation it is simple it is easy but it does introduce some challenges which is now your beer is under pressure if you have a leaky valve on the keg if you have a leaky valve on your co2 tank you could end up with a totally flat keg and just you know an empty co2 cylinder also kegs have lots of small parts they're in many ways a kind of a pain to sanitize and clean whereas bottles obviously are just glass so they're they're very easy to clean sanitized so there are trade-offs for both having said that there really is almost nothing that is more gratifying than walking over to your own tap pulling the handle and having your beer come out of a out on draft it really is pretty pretty incredible after you've packaged you're going to want to let that beer condition in bottles you have to keep the room temperature for about a week or two to get make sure the eastern environment where they can actually ferment if you put them directly in the fridge it's going to be too cold and they're not going to produce that that co2 that we need so keep them at room temperature or even a little warmer for a week or two and that should carbonate them up sufficiently and for kegs it's going to take a couple of days for the for the pressure from the co2 cylinder to force that co2 into solution so even that takes a couple of days in kegs we can speed the process along a bit by shaking the kegs and agitating the surface and what that's going to do is is encourage the co2 to drop down into solution all of your finished beer though should live its life at or near freezing the colder you keep your beer when you're done with it the longer it's going to last because whatever you've done wrong it's going to grow and go wrong in that beer whatever you've done wrong is going to go wrong a lot slower the colder it is so if you if you had a beer at room temperature and left it out you know for two weeks and it tasted you know sort of sour or tart because you had some sort of contamination in the bottle if that same bottle had been in a near-freezing fridge that same process might take as long as 16 weeks and 16 weeks later most that beer is gone so it's just another little safeguard you end up with a more flavor stable beer when it's stored cold and some styles like your lager is also benefit from extended ageing as more and more things sort of drop out of solution so think about making beer even after you've packaged it you're still making it it's it's still evolving the whole time and you always want to drive it towards the outcome you want the biggest difference that we have between all grain and extract growing is really just a question of control and time extract brewing is going to give you less control over what goes into your boil kettle but the same amount of control over the boil process and the cold side and fermentation which by the way is where most of the problems tend to crop up anyway so you're still becoming a better Brewer by managing your own fermentation process the advantages you get out of going all grain is that you get to choose the exact wrists that goes into that that extract that sugary extract and at the same time you can guarantee the freshness of your of your ingredients you can buy a sack of unmilled grain and store that in a cool basement or in a dry garage for months as long as it hasn't been cracked open and if you have your own milled you can just scoop out as much as you need mill it and soak it and that's always going to remain fresh whereas extract like I said you're counting on a can or a jar of extract that might have been sitting on the shelf for a long while and if that's oxidized then you might be hurting yourself down the line even if you do everything else right but the biggest advantage for extract is it's faster and brewers who can brew in less time are probably going to brew more and the more you do the better you get added you can incorporate those lessons you've learned from one beer to the next you can experiment with multiple recipes you're identifying faults and not only that you are producing more beer which sometimes matters not everyone gets the chance to brew two or three times a week so the more you brew the better you'll probably be at it so if extract brewing means you can brew more frequently you're probably better off burned with extract more often than all grain once a month or once every two months thanks for tuning in keep a look out for more classes at craft beer and brewing and Cheers

Channel: Craft Beer and Brewing

Views: 43,344

Rating: 4.9185185 out of 5

Keywords: Homebrewing, Making Beer, Brewing, Beer, Craft Beer

Id: bpJoqApdRm0

Length: 43min 8sec (2588 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2017