The Beginner's Guide to Making Home Brew

bringing the people behind our food to life today we're going to demonstrate the basics for brewing your first batch of home brew if you've never done this before we're going to show you the easy way to do it at home the best way to brew your first batch of beer is to pick up an ingredient kit from your local home brew supply store most Homebrew Supply stores will carry what we might call a box kit that has all the ingredients you'll need to brew your first batch of beer um with instructions so you'll find mold EXT ract in your kit this is a liquid mold extract a bag of crushed specialty grains you should have some hops they might be vacuum sealed uh like these are in this foil pouch and here I have a package with my muslin bags for steeping my hops a package of yeast for fermenting the beer a warlock tablet to clarify this beer and an example of the instructions to brew this kit the first step is to steep your specialty grains to add specific maltt character to your batch of beer you might use any range of specialty grains to get different characters in your beer so you might use a caramelized grain or even a roasted grain for dark flavors that you might find in a stout or a porter the first thing I'll do is steep My grains in hot water in this 5 gallon Kettle that I have here a 5 gallon Kettle is the ideal size to use and I have a stainless pot here which is less corrosive and easy to take care of than other metals and that would be an ideal material for the kettle that you'll use so the first thing to do is to check that your water is approximately 150 to 170° I'm using a simple stainless thermometer to check the temperature there I've placed the crushed specialty grains into this muslin bag and tied a knot into the top of the bag to hold them in and now that our water is at the correct temperature the first step is to steep them if you have a flame on your pot you'll want to turn it off at at this point so that your specialty grains when they sink to the bottom of the pot won't Scorch against that flame and that heat so you'll want to stir the grains periodically and you'll see in just a few moments how much color and flavors steep out of those grains once you've steeped your grains for approximately 30 minutes you'll want to remove them from the water place them in a strainer or colander and rinse the EXT EXT ra flavors and sugars and color from those grains with a small amount of hot water and you can see that we've extracted most of what these grains have to give us once you've rinsed your grains you won't need them in your beer anymore but you can use them to compost or they have many B baking uses the next step is to add your mold extract to the water which is the extracted fermentable sugars from malted barley this mold extract is quite concentrated and very thick and syrupy so you'll want to stir the pot very thoroughly and make sure that you mix everything in very thoroughly once we add M extract to the water it's commonly referred to as wart which is a Brewer's word for unfermented beer it's important to get all the mold extract out of the jar and into your wart so I usually rinse the jar out with hot water and scrape the insides of the jar to get the rest into your pot once you've mixed your mold extract thoroughly into your wart the next step is to bring everything to a boil this can be done on your kitchen stove at home but for demonstration purposes today I'm using a propane burner when your ward is approaching a boil it's important to watch the pot and nurse the boil to a calm comfortable rolling boil carefully without allowing it to Surge up and boil over just like a pot of spaghetti you might want to control the heat or your flame just to make sure that we don't boil over and make a big sticky mess all over your stove or burner once you've reach to calm comfortable boil it's time to start your bittering addition you'll want to take your hops out of their bag and place them into your muslin bag tie the Hops off in your muslin bag so that none of them can escape in your boil add them to your boiling wart and begin your 60-minute timer to start a 60-minute boil as you're boiling your bittering addition you'll be extracting the bitterness from those hops to counter the sweetness of The Malt in your wart your recipe may call for a flavoring or an aroma addition of hops in the last 15 minutes of your boil so you'll want to add those hops as per the recipe and we have a 15minute addition to the pot here the 15minute mark of your 60-minute boil is also the time to add your worlock tablet which will coagulate the proteins that would cause a hazy beer and cause them to fall out after fermentation leading to a a beer with better Clarity and presentation so I'm adding my hops to the muslin bag and tying it off steeping them in the pot and I also make my warlock Edition at this moment at the end of your 60-minute boil you'll want to chill the wart down to a temperature that won't harm your yeast as quickly as possible at home you could submerge your pot in an ice bath in your sink to help cool it down today I'll be using this workart Chiller as a heat exchanger to coarse cold water through the coil and remove the heat through the water that's leaving it I'm going to place the wart Chiller into the wart for the last 10 minutes of the boil in order to allow the boil to sanitize this wart Chiller because it's important that there's no bacteria left in the wart that could cause off flavors in our beer once your boil is finished it's important to properly sanitize any equipment that might come in contact with your beer or wart these sanitizers are readily available at any local home brew supply store and most of them are no rinse sanitizers which means you can merely soak or wash any of your equipment for a few moments in the sanitizer allow it to drip dry and you can put it into your water or beer with no risk of contamination so I'm going to sanitize my car booy by splashing my sanitizer around and pour it back out a lot of these sanitizers create foam which is perfectly food grade and safe and you don't need to concern yourself with getting all of the foam out of your equipment but you merely need to make sure that everything everything that will come in contact with your beer has been rinsed appropriately with the sanitizer remove your hot bags from the wart and add your wart to the fermentor top the wart up to 5 gallons with cold water it's important to use a larger fermenter than the batch size that you're fermenting because as the wart ferments it Foams up a lot like what you can see here I have a 6 gallon fermentor here with 5 gallons of wart in it and lots of room for foam during during the fermentation once your wart is topped up to 5 gallons and about room temperature it's time to add the yeast the simplest yeast to use is a packet of freeze-dried ale yeast because it can be torn open and poured directly into the wart to begin fermentation so you'll want to sprinkle all of the yeast into your wart and there's no stirring necessary the yeast rehydrate themselves and begin to ferment your ward on their own after you've added the yeast attach the air loock with a rubber stopper to your car booy which will allow the gas from fermentation out of the fermentor but stop airborne bacteria from getting in here we have our fermenting beer and you can see there's a lot of foam coming up from the CO2 being produced and that CO2 is escaping through the airlock and this process will take a bare minimum of 2 weeks before you move on to bottling your beer here we have a fermented batch of beer that's ready for bottling in order to siphon this beer into my bottling bucket I need to raise it up to a level higher than the level that I'm going to be working from prepare a corn sugar solution by mixing 3 or 4 ounces of corn sugar with one or two cups of water and boil it until the solution is clear again add that solution to the bottom of your bottling bucket and siphon your beer into the bottling bucket on top of the sugar solution to mix it thoroughly in order to siphon this batch of beer I'm going to use my auto siphon here which is readily available at any home brew store and after sanitizing the auto siphon place the end of the tube in your bottling bucket place the siphon into the batch of beer and simply pump the auto siphon to Prime the line and get your siphon started so now that we have our batch of beer mixed with a small amount of fermentable sugar in our bottling bucket we're going to attach our bottle filler to the end of our Auto siphon place the auto siphon into your batch of beer Place one end of the bottle filler into the bottles and start your siphon when you press the bottle filler down into the bottom of the bottle it'll fill from the bottom without splashing cuz at this point once you have fermented beer introducing oxygen and splashing it into your beer will stale the beer and decrease the shelf life so we want to it carefully into our bottles without splashing when your bottle is full right to the brim we're almost there pull the bottle filler out of the bottle and that'll stop the flow you place that in your sanitizer if you'd like take a sanitized cap an uncrimped sanitized cap from your Homebrew Supply store place it on top of your bottle and use use your Capper to crimp the cap down onto the bottle and you have a bottled beer once you've filled and capped all your bottles you'll need to allow a week or two for the small amount of sugar that we added back to the batch of beer to ferment inside the bottles and create carbonation none of these processes are entirely hard I find the process to be fun and simple and the most important part is after time you can be creative with your recipes and you'll absolutely love the beer that you're making eventually you'll find that you can make beer exactly like you'd like it to taste beer that fits your own personal tastes beer that impresses your friends and beer like nothing you've ever tasted before I wanted to have a place that was like a the traditional public house it is like your living room what I learned over there my my apprenticeship in England was that um the public house is a is a people Centric [Music] business

Channel: Food Farmer Earth

Views: 2,461,991

Keywords: talks, promotion, organic agriculture, organic, ecology, small farmers, interviews, craft, DIY food, food stories, environment, farming, cooking up a story, cooking videos, food farmer earth, sustainable food, urban ag, artisans

Id: qCW-SVPCw4Y

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2013