Beer Making

So a few months ago we started making our own beer. Bad beer like Budweiser, Miller and Coors is made mostly from rice and corn and has more in common with 7UP than it does with real beer. Even the worst homemade beer has more flavor and body than that. There are four things in beer. Wheat, hops, water, yeast. Well actually there are a lot of things in beer but you have to have at least those four. Until Louis Pasteur came to town you only needed the first three. But that was then and this is now.

The beers we are making are basic beers in that we aren't starting with raw grains but malt extract. First you need to sterilize, sanitize or clean everything. Anything that goes near or in the pot you will be boiling the goods in will need to be cleaned. Any equipment is going to be touching the boiled goods, also known as wort, will need to be sanitized. The bottles will need to be sterilized or as close to it as you can get. Cleaning: Standard dish washing will do. Sanitizing: Depending on the material chlorine bleach or OneStep should work. Bacteria level after sanitizing will be reduced to 99.9% of their original level. Sterilizing: Heat plus water or commercial sterilizer. Sterilizing means reducing bacteria to 99.999% of the original.

The equipment sitting in a OneStep solution

Grab pot, put water in pot. Do not use pure H2O, you need water with some extras in it. Minerals and what not will lend your beer flavor. The general rule is that if the water tastes good then it will work. So San Diego's lime water won't due and while filtered water may taste good it doesn't have the minerals that will help the yeast do its job. If you are doing a one gallon batch of beer you can do this on the stove, even an electric one. If you are doing a 5 gallon batch then you will need more heat than a stove will be able to produce. You will want a turkey frier. Massive BTUs for massive beer. Since the cost difference between 1 and 5 gallons is less than $25 and the labor is exactly the same the only reason to do a 1 gallon batch is for experimenting so you don't have to waste 5 gallons of beer if something turns out bad.

When a stove won't work

Once the water is in the pot crank up the heat till it boils. Let it boil for 10 minutes to boil off any of the chlorine that is in the water. Reduce the heat till is at a mild boil. Depending on the beer you are making you might be letting the water cool down to 150 degrees so that you can make a 'tea' out of your grains. Or you may be doing a wheat beer which doesn't require that so just remove it from the heat and add your malt extract. You need to remove it from heat so that the malt extract doesn't caramelize on the bottom of the pan and ruin the flavor of your beer. Then re-apply the heat. Keep an eye on things because the protein structures in the malt extract will make a boil over happen faster than you can reduce the heat. Bring it back to a boil. Just barely a boil. The absolute lowest setting that will get you a boil. Anything more will destroy your kitchen.

Depending on your beer this boil is going be between 15 and 120 minutes. Most beers will take one hour. Add your first batch of hopes. Set timer for 60 minutes but don't let your eyes drift from the pot because adding the hops is another excuse for the wort to boil over. Take this time to prep your cool down area. If you are using a copper chiller, explained below, it is time to use something like Bar Keepers Friend to remove all oxidation from the copper. If you put oxidized copper in your wort it will come out clean. Which is bad since all that oxidation is now in your beer.

When a stove will work

I am making a lot of one gallon batches of beer lately so I can play with with spices mixes in hefeweisen beers. This is the time to add them if you want a mild spice. If you want a stronger flavor from the spices add them during the last 15 minutes.

Some notes on spices. I have been using dried sweet orange peals and juniper berries. Both of these I have added at the same time as the malt. But in one batch I added star anise. This is a strong flavor and I didn't want it be boiled off so I added it that at the last 15 minutes. I made a batch with a quarter cup of crushed coriander. I wanted this one to steep for a while so it went in at the start. There are a lot of options so lots of experiments will be needed to find the right blend. Other things you can add are a lot of fresh ginger, a small amount of ground ginger, cardamom, hot peppers, garlic, pepper corns, cinnamon and clove. In short: if 400 years ago people were risking their lives to bring some spice or herb from one distant land to another then it will, in all likelihood, taste good in a hefeweisen beer if you do it right. Non-spice beers like porters or stouts will have their own rules.

Spice is nice.

Depending on the beer you are doing you will have other things to add at appointed times. More hopes, peat moss and all kinds of other things might get thrown into the pot to add flavor, body, texture or fermentable sugars to the final product.

Up next is the cool down. This is were cleaning makes all the difference between making beer or making an exploding bottle. You have just created a concoction that is meant to be a breeding ground for yeast. If it is a breading ground for yeast then it is also a breading ground for bacteria and you don't want that. So clean everything, clean it again and then put it near a geiger counter it to make sure its clean.

We don't have beer yet. We have boiling wort. Since it is boiling we know it is at least 216 degrees. If you add the yeast to that you will kill it. So we have to cool the wort. Cooling it faster is better since the less time it is cooling the less time it has to become contaminated with bacteria. There are lots of ways to cool this. Clean the tub, fill it with ice and water then place the pot in there and be careful not to splash since the ice or tub may not be sterile. We did this for our first two batches. After 40 minutes of keeping the ice water moving around the pot your arm can get rather sore. Chilling this way can can cause a geek to find a better way.

One coil chilling.

When I started doing the one gallon batches I took a page from the professionals. I coiled 20 feet of 3/8ths inch copper tubing and built an attachment to the kitchen sink. Filled the sink with ice and some water and chilled in 30 minutes with no arm problems. There were other problems I found in my first batch though. The hot water coming out of the coil is not going down the drain. Problem solved with a drilled sink plug and some duck tap. The tap water is 80 plus degrees and I want my wort chilled to 70 degrees since that is the prime temp for the yeast. So the tap water did its part and then the pot in an ice bath had to do the rest.

Modified drain plug for run off.

So I kicked it up a notch. I made a second copper coil. This one goes in a pot filled with ice water. So at this point we have a water flow of sink to ice pot to beer pot to drain. This chilled it in less than 20 minutes. In fact I over chilled one time. I had to melt all the ice and fill the sink with hot water to bring the beer back up to 70.

Now we have a fast chill!

Put the beer in your fermenter. This is either a glass bottle (carboy) or food grade plastic bucket you will be keeping the beer in for the next one to eight weeks. If you boiled off too much water then you will want to add some more water to get up to the volume of beer you want. This water should be clean. Boil it and chill it if you need to.

Now we need to aerate the wort. There are a lot of tricks to this. If it is a one gallon batch just put the cap on the beer and shake until your arms are tired. This will get you about 8-12 parts of oxygen per million parts of water which is where we want to be. If you are doing a larger batch then shaking will work but exhaust you. There are lots of fancy tricks to help with this but I haven't built one yet. The trick is not to get up to 40 parts per million. Doing so will kill your yeast. You can't reach that point by the shaking method so don't worry.

Now you are aerated. It is time add your yeast. This isn't bread yeast. This is beer yeast. The yeast you use can play more of a part than anything else you have done so far. A hefe yeast will add banana flavors, body and spice. A stout yeast will clarify the beer and add body. Your yeast can make all the difference in the world. Choose smartly. Make sure it is 70 degrees. Add it.

Put an air lock on the fermenter. This will stop oxygen from getting in and when the yeast runs out of oxygen it will start creating booze as it tries to matabolize without oxygen. In animals cells this causes lactic acid, aka the burn you feel when exercising, but when it happens to plant materials it creates booze. The other thing that yeast puts off is CO2. Lots of CO2. So much CO2 that if it doesn't escape the fermenter that the pressure in there will build up so much that the fermenter would explode if it couldn't escape via the air lock. Sometimes the fermenter gets clogged up as the beer ferments and some solids and foam come up. Keep your air lock clean. Check it every day. Take a straw and push it down the inside edge and put your thumb on the top. Pull it out release the load into the sink or a cup. Repeat. Clean the holes on the cap of the air lock because they will clog. Failure to do so has caused glass carboys to explode. Glass gets embedded into walls. Walls become brown. The house will smell like yeast for months.

Aerated and air-locked

Put this in a place that will maintain a constant temp that will make the yeast happy and a place that is free of light. Light will 'skunk' your beer which is bad. Let it sit for 1 to 8 weeks. A hefe will be ready to bottle after just one week. A stout can take the full 8 weeks. Check your air lock daily. The first day you are looking to make sure that the yeast is alive and kicking which can be determined by the blow off CO2 coming out of the air lock.

When you go to bottle you will want a siphon. An auto siphon is best but in a pinch you can just poor the beer into bottles. In some beers, like a hefe, you will want some visible amounts of yeast in your bottles but in a lot of ales you won't want any visible amount of yeast at all. But before doing that decide how you will carbonate the beer. You will want to carbonate because no one likes flat beer. Bubbles make beer magical. There are three ways to carbonate. You can take some corn syrup in some boiled water and add that to your fermented wort. You can put beer into bottles and add a carbonation tablet (sugar pill without all the nasty side effects of a placebo). Or you can go all out and force carbonate with a CO2 canister in a pressurized environment. The last one is expensive so we will skip that. I have been using the carbonation tablets, or carb turds as they are also known. I siphon into bottles and add the carb turd. Seal the bottles and put them in their safe place for another week.

Note that the water in the air lock has changed color.

You now have beer. Beer that you can drink, cook with or give away. One thing you shouldn't do with this beer is sell it. That is against the law.
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Beer Making

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