Wheat Beer from Scratch | How to Brew Everything

Oh today beer is most widely consumed alcoholic beverage in the world it's also likely one of Kennedy's earliest prepared beverages dating as far back as a Neolithic era in many ways beer has a shared history with bread when humanity first domesticated cereal grains 10,000 years ago for the production of bread and other foods beer production quickly followed some theories even suggest that beer came first and was what first encouraged humans to switch to an agricultural lifestyle either way beer and bread share very similar ingredients and having previously made my own bread from scratch from my original sandwich that seemed like a good place to start traditionally most beers I made from the barley plant however since I use wheat in my sandwich I'm gonna attempt to make 100% wheat beer using my left or a wheat I grew up for my sandwich I ended up growing a fairly large quantity of wheat previously but for the most part has just been sitting around in my pantry so be great to find another use for it well previously I just needed to grind the wheat seeds to make flour there's actually an extra step necessary before I can start brewing the beer multi-multi is a process of causing the seeds to start germinating and sprouting by doing this the wheat seeds start to turn the starches in the seeds to sugars just what I'll need for my brewing tumult my seeds I soak them in water for several hours and then spread them out and let them sit for three days waiting for them to start sprouting while I let the wheat seeds malt there's still one beer ingredient I need that isn't involved in bread hops hops are a flower they're used primarily for flavoring and beer but also for its antibacterial effects that help preserve the beer it can impart bitter zesty or citric flavors depending on the variety of hops prior to the introduction of hops in the 9th century viewers flavor teasing collection of herbs and flowers called grouped hops usually grow best along 40th parallel north with Germany in the Pacific Northwest being some the largest producing regions hops are generally harvested in the fall however it's spring right now and I want my beer now so I went to visit round table hops to learn their unique solution to the limits of the hops harvesting season oh hi there welcome to round table hops you are standing in the world's first four season hydroponic hopped greenhouse this greenhouse allows us to grow fresh hops 365 days a year and supply them the Brewers when they normally wouldn't be able to have access to fresh hops in here we can cut that five to six month growth time down to about four months and we can manipulate those seasons with the lighting and temperature and nutrients that we provide to those plants so instead of one harvest year how many are you Lea each plant can be harvested about three times a year does it take you three years to grow your own plants we get full quality in the first harvest and about half the yield we get full yield in our second harvest which is about eight months after a new plant is brought in okay so being able to grow indoor and I'll control their things correct a lot more efficient right essentially that is because we are providing those nutrients directly to the rootstock rather than having the root stock have to go and search out those nutrients so our plants don't require the structure of a large root mass we can keep the root mass very very small and just feed those nutrients essentially intravenously so with the added expenses of having to build a greenhouse and heated everything is it as economical as just growing it in the field once a year it is in terms of our comparisons of soil grown crops we can reduce the amount of of water we use by 90 percent that's the big one hops require a ton of water and with our drain recirculating system we have zero waste water essentially so the only water that is waste for us is not even really waste it's just what's absorbed by the plants if you told a little bit more about the whole hydroponic system you have set up here so hydroponics is the growing of a plant without the use of soil so the nutrients for that plant come from a nutrient solution and are administered directly to that plant so in our case we have these buckets here there is a feed line here that administers our nutrient solution and this is just a drip ring that goes around so these nutrients come out of this drip ring trickle down through this material and then they exit this drain right here and through this pipe right here they flow back to our reservoir so it's just a completely recirculating system just artificially replicate the exact requirements that variety might have to grow in whatever climate it grows in but we can shift that timeframe to any point in the year and in terms of like hops anything specific for 100% wheat beers I need to worry about 100% wheat beer you're probably not going to have a very sweet beer wheat has a very grainy case at least in my experience so you're probably not going to need to rely on hops to a huge extent that being said not being able to add any complexity in your grain the hops are probably where you'll be able to experiment so bringing in a few different varieties that maybe complement each other or add some complexity to that beer would be a would probably benefit the beer at the end of the day thanks for the two-year facility yeah absolutely glad we could have you out and we'd love to get you guys some hops and get your brewing a beer all right awesome thanks yeah Cheers now that I have my hops the last ingredient that I'll need to make my beer is yeast I previously explored making my own yeast when I needed it to carbonate the root beer I'd made before for my beer I was gonna reuse a strain of yeast made from the headwaters of the Mississippi in order to get enough yeast for my batch of beer I added my remaining yeast to a sugar solution on a mixer which allows use to quickly grow over the next couple days meanwhile the weed seeds I had left moulting had started to sprout which means the last step is to dry them out in the oven such a lowest temperature with the oven door open the seeds will dry out over the course of eight to fourteen hours then they'll finally be ready to turn into beer not it collected my hops and yeast melted my wheat and I'll have everything to start brewing so here with Brad at Northern Brewer he's gonna show me how to make an all wheat beers definitely not a very traditional beer to make generally we're using 100% wheat it's going to gum up your mash tun a little bit so it presents a few challenges but I certainly think we can work through it so usually a wheat beer isn't all 100% we know normally in fact a wheat beer is somewhere around 50 50 % malted wheat and malted barley the barley helps to maybe make the mash a little bit more liquid so it doesn't stick up but in this case 100% wheat beer might be a little challenging but still doable still doable all right so for this one now generally you use a three vessel system to make an all grain beer but since the wheat is so sticky we're gonna go with the brew in the bag for that we'll make it real easy to filter the the liquid through the wheats and we can simply pull the bag out when we're done and we don't have to worry about sticking up any mash tuns the first step we needed to do was mill my malted beet cutting them up so that enzymes can break down the starches further then we fill the vessel with five gallons of water there we go perfect so now that we got the water heated to 125 what we're gonna do is go ahead and put the bag in and just kind of curl it over the edge of the kettle mm-hmm and this will allow us to to get the wheat in there without gumming up anything we'll stir the wheat in and we're gonna let it rest for about 20 minutes so what's happening right now why do we put it at this temperature well the reason we put it about 120 degrees here is to help the enzymes that are present in the malt to break down some of the longer chain beta glucans and proteins which are molecules present in wheat malt and those molecules are really what makes the wheat difficult to work with it can cause the mash to come up almost become a dough ball and when that happens it's really really hard to to continue on your brewing process so this rest that 120 will break those down make the mash a little bit more fluid a little easier to work with and it won't be so gummy so now it's been 20 minutes what's next well now we got this 20 minute protein rest done what we're going to do is actually go ahead and relight the burner and as we raise the temperature we get to 152 degrees which is in the temperature range of what's called the sacrificial rest and so the enzymes that are in the malt yet a whole different family of enzymes called amylase enzymes they are going to start to break down all the starches present in the wheat malt and turn them into fermentable sugars and that's what we add the yeast to to create beer okay and all these enzymes are naturally occurring in the wheat yes they do the malting process is actually what activates these enzymes which are already present in the weak so it's kind of a self-contained little package it's pretty fantastic so what we'll do now is just give it one last stir place the lid on it to try to maintain temperature as best we can now it's a waiting game all right so come back an hour exactly we'll check us again in an hour Benin ah we spent that at 152 degrees so that should have caused all the starches to give sugars so the next step is we're going to take the bag out let it drain for a while let any of the extra liquid drain back into the kettle and we're just going to put in this bucket here we're done with that and what we've got left is our work so let's get this fired back up and bring it to a boil all right Andy well we've come to a boil here after all we've done so far we're making real good progress and so now that we're boiling it is time to add the hops Oh God so what we're going to do here is boil for a grand total of 60 minutes so the fact that it's boiling right now the what effect is that happening on it so right now the boiling is actually accomplishing a few things first and foremost is making sure that this word is sanitary so the only thing that will ferment it is the yeast that we're actually going to add at a later stage the boiling action will convert certain compounds in the hops and turn them into bitter compounds so otherwise the bitterness is not really detectable by our palates but once we boil the hops make some molecules in the hops kind of change their shape and that's what we perceive as bitterness okay so we'll let this boil for a while and later on in the boil we'll add some more hops to get some flavor and aroma all right so we got 10 minutes left in the boil here we've been going for a while and at this point what we're going to do is add some more hops that's kind of lightest with some some flavors and aromas of the actual hop themselves so go ahead and add the hops and so if you add hops late in the boil instead of providing much bitterness it's going to provide a lot more hot flavor and hop aroma because they're not being boiled as long the compounds in the hop are not being volatize doff by the boil so it retains that in the word so when the beers done fermenting that hop flavor is really going to stick out and go ahead and stick the chiller in perfect alright now we've got 10 minutes left on the boil and the reason we're sticking the children in right now is just to make sure that it is sanitized because in the boiling liquid so we don't want anything not sanitary touching our beer after it's been chilled so let this boil for over 10 minutes we'll come back hook this up to water and chill the whole batch down and now that we've got it chilled we've pulled the chiller out we're sitting right about room temperature so the next step is open the valve and let her flow into the fermenter there's a little stranding device in the bottom of the kettle to make sure none of the hops come through into the fermenter okay so what do you think is causing it to be so milky well that's kind of a function of being a hundred percent wheat beer wheat in general has a pretty high protein content and despite our best efforts to to break them down at the very beginning of this brew a lot of them make it through into the fermenter but right now it's all being mixed up as it sits a lot of those will settle to the bottom of the fermenter and it'll clear up quite a bit it'll still be cloudy but it will clear up it looks like after a wet vacuum like you're draining it out boy that's a lot Noah Curnutt thought I was going to be alright well now that we're done filling the fermenter from the boil kettle go ahead and place our airlock on there that's basically just a little device it acts as like a one-way valve so it'll allow the the carbon dioxide created from fermentation to escape but nothing else is going to go back yet so we just pull the fill hose out put the airlock in next up is East we'll just dump that whole baby in now we put Easton this is technically considered beer even though that hasn't started to ferment legally is considered beer at this point okay so we did it all right who wants a drink so at this point it takes a couple weeks for different men men yeah this should ferment out within two weeks all right so you see a nice a head of foam start to rise on it and as fermentation subsides that that foam head will go down and eventually collapse on top of the beer and at that point we're ready for packaging we can go ahead and bottle guess I'll come back in two weeks to bottle it I'll be here you know where to find me after laying the beer ferment for a week we turn back Northern Brewer finish up the beer as you can see things have cleared up pretty nicely a little concerned that it was going to be a pretty pretty milky beer but excellent like a beer now yeah it does looks like a nice light wheat beer so we've drawn a little sample here we've got our hydrometer in there so we can check what's called our finishing gravity which is one number you can use to determine the alcohol content of the beer basically the density of the liquid which correlates pretty much to how many sugars are in solution and so right now we have a reading of one point zero zero eight if you put that through a little equation you come up with an alcohol percentage of this beer of about four point seven percent okay so that's right in line with normal wheat beer so weird biggest problem now is it's flat what we're gonna do today is get it into bottles and let it naturally carbonate we don't need to add any extra yeast or anything nope there's still plenty of yeast that's floating around in solution in the beer itself so what we do need to do is actually add a little dose of sugar and then put it in the bottles and then the yeast that's in the suspension now is going to ferment that sugar and cause these bottles to carbonate okay using some of the honey I've collected in the past we carefully measure the exact amount we needed edit some water and brought it to a boil to help sterilize it and if we had too much it might cause it to explode yeah if you had too much sugars the bottles will overpressurize you basically have a case of grenades and as we wait for this to come to a boil let's go ahead and start sanitizing all of our bottles and sanitizing all the the gear for bottling the honey out of oil now we added it to a bucket and then siphon the beer into the container as well then that sludge at the bottom that's all almost all yeast what does it taste like yeast has got a very interesting flavor to it yeah you want to taste it you can looks delicious that's sour like it initially tastes like beer and then super sour oh I would recommend that if you're all ready to go we could start the bottling process using a bottling wand we carefully filled all the bottles leaving just enough Headroom at the top and then cap them so all my bees bottle now yep we got it all bottled and been about two weeks the the honey that we put into these bottles will will cause it to carbonate and we should have a nice light delicious wheat beer wait two weeks in it wait two weeks exactly I can finally try my beer exactly all right that's a C in two weeks then sounds good hey Brad so it's been two weeks so putting my beers carbonated now we can only hope hopefully the fruits of our labor pay off here so yeah those labels you put down there Thanks I even brought some my homemade glass cups to try it in yeah let's see what we got here if everything went well we should get a little bit of a carbonated sound coming out here so let's uh sounds good I'd say we have success we've definitely got carbonation in there nice a nice really nice firm white frothy head smells nice and clean I'll lick here smells like beer looks like beer yeah must be beer cheers Cheers not pretty good it's kind of surprised it cleared up nicely it's a kind of a far cry from that really milky stuff we put into the fermenter yeah Wow I'd say everything worked out nicely nice light and color light and body a little bit under 5% alcohol well some people say 100% wheat beer can't be done but here's the proof nice light beer quite enjoyable cheers again just thank you Brad the crew at Northern Brewer and I on my wheat beer and I don't think the Dalton this would have been a success so be sure to check out the YouTube channel brewing TV we can check out other home brewing tutorials and how-tos such as they're all grain brewing episode with Wil Wheaton you

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 1,165,283

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Smart, Learn, Teach, Maker, History, Science, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, Agriculture, Textiles, Industry, Technology, Minecraft, Homebrewing, Beer, Brewing, alcohol, microbrew, craft beer, brewingtv, yeast, malt, malting, wort, all-grain, grain, wheat, hops, hydroponics, Wil Wheaton, diy beer, brew your own beer, make your own beer, homemade beer, home brew, home brew beer kit, brow tidy ox, mr brew, blue moon, orange beer, bottling beer, kit, small batch beer

Id: s-Izvb5j-pc

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2016