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The first time I brewed beer I was learning from my friend Roger (he lurks around this site) who had brewed several of his own by that time. He decided to experiment and showed up at my apartment with four pounds of honey. There's a joke here that I'll get to in a minute.
The basic idea of making any alcoholic beverage is this: Yeast consumes sugars and makes alcohol. Cool. One by-product of that consumption, or fermentation, is carbon dioxide, and this is what gives home-brewed beer it's carbonation after it's bottled.
In fact, you may see some commercially available beers labeled "Bottle Conditioned". This means they were carbonated in the bottle, and you'll find a thin layer of yeast on the bottom as proof. It will be less yeast than you will find at the bottom of your home brews, but that yeast presence will often cause some of these commercial brews to have a distinct home-brewed taste compared to beers carbonated with pressurized CO2.
So, my friend Roger stops by my apartment with two jars, two pounds apiece, of honey. I said, "What's that for?" He replied, "We're making a Honey Brown Ale!"
"Okay, cool," I replied.
Here comes the funny part. We brewed The Honey Brown ale using 6 pounds of malt extract AND four pounds of honey. The extra sugars available for the yeast to consume made for one active fermentation and the resulting pressure (combined with the clog of hops in my air-lock) blew the lid off my fermenter and sprayed hops onto the wall of my bedroom. Hey, it was the only place I had room to ferment the beer. Good thing I like the smell!
There's one mistake you'll want to avoid for your first brew. While the beer turned out nice, it was a messy process. May I suggest using muslin sacks or another form of steeping bags when adding your hops to the boil.
Without further ado, The brew:
The basic concept of making beer is fairly simple, but it's the drive for originality, variety, and perfection that makes brewing an art form, and evermore complex. Once you get the basics down and successfully produce your own beer, you'll begin to experiment with a variety of ingredients, each time expanding your knowledge of beer brewing and fine tuning your flare for this craft.
To brew your own beer you need nothing more than an 10 quart pot (I started with a nice stainless steel pot, the one my wife uses for cooking corn on the cob), a decent long handled spoon (preferably stainless), a funnel (one with a strainer inside would help), and a glass carboy with a rubber stopper (with a hole) and air-lock for fermentation. You can use a food grade bucket for fermentation (one with a spigot in the bottom will make your bottling easier). You'll also need some vinyl tubing, a bottle filler, and a bottle capping tool.
Actually, you don't need to buy these items individually. If you live near a home brewing supply store by all means drop in and gather what you need based on the complete list at the end of this article, that'll get you brewing quicker. But if you'd like you can order a starter kit right online from MoreBeer.com (recommended). The pricing is very fair, and often lower than prices you'll find in a local store, especially for extracts and grains. Plus they offer free shipping on orders over $49 (more details on their site).
The $65 beginner kit (BRKIT1) contains a plastic fermenting bucket and bottling bucket (with spigot), hydrometer with test tube (for specific gravity readings), bottle filler, hand operated bottle capper (and 50 bottle caps to get you started), sanitizer, reusable bag for steeping grains, a home brewing reference book and MoreBeer!'s MoreManual!(TM) "How to Brew Great Beer". With this complete starter kit you don't need to worry about siphoning to the bottles like I did for my first four batches of homebrew. Spigots are definitely a plus!
If you're ordering your kit from MoreBeer.com, you might as well order your malts, hops and yeast while you're at it.
Now, let's get to it!
To get you started I'll show you how to brew a nice, straight forward pale ale. If you're adventurous you'll likely make substitutes for some of these suggested ingredients, but if you're truly a beginner with no clue about malts, hops, and how they work I suggest you stick to this recipe so you can see, smell, and taste how the various ingredients affect the final beer.
The "recommended" ingredients for your first brew:
- 6.6 lbs. Light DME (Dry Malt Extract) (2 bags of 3.3 lbs., or equivalent)
- 1 oz. Challenger hops (bittering hops) 8-11% Alpha Acid
- 1 oz. Willamette hops (finishing/aroma hops) 4.5-6% Alpha Acid
- Coopers dry, pitchable ale yeast (it's in a gold foil package).
- 3/4 cup corn sugar (for priming)
This will be a condensed brew because of the small breewpot capacity. Start with 5 gallons of carbon filtered tap water (using a Brita filter), and pour 3 gallons into the sanitized fermenter before. Put the air-lock on to prevent impurities from settling onto the water.
Bring the remaining 2 gallons of water to a boil in your brewpot, then lower the heat. Stir in the DME slowly until it's thoroughly dissolved into the water. This is your "official" wort (pronounced wert) and is the sugar-water mix that forms the basis of your beer.
Turn up the heat to bring the wort to a boil and add 1 oz. Cascade hops for bittering. Crumble it into the wort and stir, or use a steeping bag to prevent any possible clogs like I mentioned earlier.
Note: Do not cover your brewpot at any time during boil, the wort will foam up and you'll have a big mess on your hands, and your stove! I found out the hard way.
Now enjoy the aroma and stir occasionally. Make sure you have a few tasty ales handy to enjoy while you work. At the 30 minute mark add a half ounce (.5 oz.) of the Willamette hops. Just toss it right into the brew, or add it to the steeping bag.
This will be a 60 minute boil. A smooth rolling boil must be maintained the entire time. At 45 minutes into the boil (15 minutes remaining), add the last half ounce of Willamette hops. The Willamette hops (I hear it's pronounced Will-AM-et) serves as both a flavoring hops (at 30 mins.) and a finishing hops (at 15 mins.). The finishing hops will add to the aroma of the beer.
I make it a point to take a good sniff of the hops before I add it to the wort, just because I like the smell. If you're meant to be a brewer you will too.
While you're waiting for the last 15 minutes of the boil (still stirring occasionally) you can fill your sink part way with cold water (and ice if you have it). When the boil is complete you will cover the pot and place it in the sink to bring down the temperature. If you can add more cold water to the sink go right ahead, the idea is to reduce the temperature of the wort as quick as possible.
Make sure you keep the brewpot covered until you're ready to transfer the wort to the carboy or bucket fermenter, this will reduce the risk of contamination.
Once your wort is cooled to below 130° it is susceptible to contamination. The quicker you cool the wort the quicker you can pitch the yeast and begin fermentation in a sealed environment.
This cooling method requires about three refills of the cold water in the sink. Once the water has warmed up due to the heat from the brewpot you need to drain it and refill with cold water (and more ice if you have it).
Another, quicker method of cooling requires a wort chiller which is available at Morebeer.com and any local brewing supply store. The sink method isn't bad, just a little slower than the chiller, but for now it does the trick.
Wort chillers are often used to chill full 5 gallon boils. Since you'll be adding your wort to 3 gallons of room temperature water this will help to further reduce the temperature. And that's what we're going to do next.
Let the Fermenting Begin!
Get your funnel ready (and sanitized). My friend and I have found this to be an effective way to filter out hops while pouring the wort into the fermenter (if steeping bags weren't used). A funnel with a screen in the bottom will hold back the hop leaves, and promote good aeration as the beer pours into the fermenter. This aeration will help to infuse the wort with oxygen, a necessary ingredient for a successful fermentation.
This step requires two people, one to hold the funnel steady, another to pour the wort through the funnel and into the carboy or bucket. MoreBeer.com offers alternatives, which make it easier for one person to perform this transfer. A siphontap, some tubing and a wort aerator make this step easy, and keep messiness to a minimum.
You will need to pause every so often to remove the collected hops which will restrict the flow of the wort, and generally just pile up and create a big mess if you don't get them out of there. You can always forget the funnel and just let the hops settle out on the bottom of the fermenter, but use caution, a large head could form during early fermentation and actually clog the air lock, like it did for me, and cause a mess if you aren't around to clear it occasionally.
Once you have the wort transferred to the fermenter you're ready to pitch the yeast. Take the Coopers Dry Ale yeast and pour it directly into the wort.
Stir the wort with your brew spoon to get the yeast all mixed around.
Return the lid to the fermenter and replace the air-lock.
Tip: Some homebrewers use vodka in their air-lock to ensure no bacteria will pass into the fermenter, but regular water will work just fine.
Keep your fermenter in a dark location, and someplace where the temperature will stay right around 70°. Leave it alone for one week. You will notice the initial fermentation begin 6 to 12 hours after you pitch the yeast, and the air-lock will be bubbling like mad for a while. Activity will slow down after a few days, but the beer should remain in the fermenter for a week (7 days) before you bottle.
Bottling your HomeBrew!
And that brings us to bottling day. This can certainly be used as an excuse for a party. I always invite a few friends over on bottling day so we can chat and enjoy some interesting commercial brews while we bottle the home-brewed stuff.
Clean and sanitized your bottles, tubing and bottle filler, and set them aside to dry thoroughly. It's best to get the bottle cleaning out of the way an hour or so before you bottle, so they have time to dry.
I actually use the rack from my dish washer and stand the rinsed bottles upside down on the vertical doohickeys. You know what I mean. MoreBeer.com sells a Bottle Tree which will hold up to 80 bottles at once. Those are some cool doohickeys!
Here's a trick, sanitize your drying rack too by putting some denatured alcohol in a spray bottle and misting the rack. It will evaporate fairly quickly.
To prepare for bottling, boil about 2 pints of water and stir the 3/4 cup of corn sugar into it until it's dissolved. This is sugar for priming before you bottle. Priming helps to "wake up" some yeast in order to carbonate the beer in the bottle once it is all sealed up. This is also known as bottle conditioning (see my comments at the beginning of this article).
Attach your vinyl tubing to the spigot on the bucket, or use a siphon method to start the flow from a carboy. Fill one bottle at a time with the bottle filler. To use this device you insert it into the neck of the bottle, all the way to the bottom and press down. The spring-loaded valve allows the beer to flow through.
Let each bottle fill until you see the foam reach the rim of the bottle. When you remove the filler tube you will see the beer settle back to about half way up the neck. That's as far as you want it to go. You need to leave that extra space to keep the pressure from blowing the cap off, or exploding the bottle. It can happen. Leave at least an inch and a half of empty space in the neck of the bottle and you'll be fine.
While I'm filling I usually have a friend do some capping, and then we switch stations so I can cap for a while. Each part of the process is fun. To cap just place a new (sanitized!) cap on top of the bottle, lower the capper in place and bring the handles down, you'll see how it works.
The basic cappers handle most bottle necks, except some that have smoother tops, or shorter tops. You'll learn. I find that regular bottles from Samuel Adams, and most micro-breweries work perfectly. Corona bottle are a bit tough, and short guys like Grolsch usually don't accommodate the capper too well.
I recommend collecting commercial beer bottles and reusing them to bottle your homebrew. This is more cost effective than buying empty bottles just for brewing, plus you get to enjoy some great beers before you claim the bottles!
Also, make sure to use the pop-top bottles, not twist offs. Caps may not seal properly on twist off bottles, and it's not worth wasting a precious homebrew.
Into the final Stretch. The Worst Part of Home Brewing... The Wait!
Like Tom Petty said, "the waiting is the hardest part!" But it's a necessary part of brewing your own beer, no matterhow tough it gets.
After bottling, store the bottled homebrews in a dark place for a week or two before sampling. Carbonation will usually end after about a week, but the beer will mellow in the bottle and develop it's fullest character the longer it sits. Don't wait too long though, beer with a lower alcohol content will usually not taste that great after about 6 months or so because bacteria present in the beer will start to grow and give it an off flavor. If your beer is any good it probably won't last 6 months so don't sweat it.
Well, that's it! Your first homebrew. Enjoy it, and definitely email me to let me know how it turns out. I'll be happy to answer any of your questions as well. As your beer brewing hobby grows you will be tempted to try new things, and weird combinations. If you stumble upon a true winner that you think is worthy of a place at Cryptobrewology.com please send in your recipe, maybe I'll post it on the site!
Happy Brewing!
About your beer brewing instructor:
Drew Vics is a musician, artist, writer and home-brewer from New Jersey. He's been an avid home-brewer for more than three years and has produced some interesting brews, including a holiday spiced ale, an interesting "Lime Wheat" and his "Sharkey's Midnight Porter". See the recipe section for more details on these brews.
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Cryptobrewology.com is an online publication dedicated to expanding interest in the art of home brewing and appreciation of unique, entertaining, even mysterious beers. It is maintained by an experienced home brewer and beer enthusiast. |