Skip to main content

The Home Brewing Process - Illustrated

In December, I made a small (2.5 gallon) batch of beer from a recipe intended to clone the famous Belgian ale, Gulden Draak.  I found the recipe in a book of clone beer recipes and decided to act on it.  Using Beer Tools Pro, I was able to scale the recipe down from the original 5 gallon size to 2.5 gallons.  To make the beer, I needed several ingredients:

From left to right, rice syrup solids, Irish moss, D-180 candi syrup, light dry malt extract, Northern Brewer and Styrian Goldings hops pellets, and a sack with some specialty grains in it 

These ingredients were purchased at a local homebrew supply shop and measured in my kitchen on a digital kitchen scale.

The brewing process began with my filling a 2-gallon kettle with water and heating it to the appropriate steeping temperature for my specialty grains, then dropping the mesh bag containing those grains into the kettle.

Specialty grains steeping in water

After the grains had steeped long enough, I had to sparge them with hot water to remove the remaining sugars from them.

Specialty grains in bag, sitting in colander during sparging
This left me with a relatively dark but weak wort.


I brought this to a boil and dropped a muslin bag filled with hops pellets into it.  These were the bittering hops that offset the sweetness of the malt.  They are boiled for 60 minutes.

Boiling the bittering hops in the wort

During the last 15 minutes of the boil, I added the second dose of hops.



At this time, I also added the malt extract, rice syrup solids, wheat extract, and Irish moss.

When the boil finished, I used two methods to cool it down to yeast-pitching temperature (as I did not own a wort chiller at the time).  I had previously boiled about 2 gallons of water and placed it in sanitized growlers outdoors in the winter air.  This got the temperature down to near-refrigerator levels.  I placed the kettle full of wort in an ice bath in the sink and cooled it to around 130 degrees Fahrenheit.  Then I placed a half gallon of the chilled water in my fermenter and added this wort to it.  I added more chilled, boiled water until I hit the 2.5 gallon mark in the fermenter.  By that point, the wort was at a pitchable temperature.

When the wort reached room temperature, I pitched a yeast slurry into it and sealed the fermenter.  About three weeks later, my refractometer showed that fermentation had pretty much stopped, so I bottled the beer.  I added a carbonation drop to each bottle to give the yeast the necessary sugar to carbonate the bottled beer.

This particular recipe also needs to sit in the bottle for 2-3 months after it's finished.  It's only been about 40 days since it was bottled.  It needs another 20-50 days to reach its optimum flavor.

Something I learned after doing this particular batch was that if you're going to dilute the wort as I did in this case, you need to increase the amount of hops you use during the boil in order to achieve your target bitterness level.  By introducing the cold water, you are essentially diluting the hops and making a sweeter beer than you intended.  This was borne out by the bottle I've had of the "still green" beer, which was sweeter than I wanted it to be.  This may mellow out some over the next 20-50 days in the bottle, as the yeast consumes more sugar, but probably not.  This explains why some of my smaller batches have been too sweet despite my adding what would have been an appropriate amount of hops for a full-size boil.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Yellow Label Angel Yeast vs. Typical Brewing Yeast

I currently have my second batch of rice wine fermenting with the "magical" yellow-label Angel Yeast from China, and wanted to share some of the more unusual aspects of using it.  If you've never seen or used this yeast, I suspect you're not alone.  It ships in a 500 gram package that looks like this: What makes it "yellow label" is that yellow box you see in the upper left corner of the package.  This implies that it's yeast for distilling (though you do not need to have a still or distill the output to use it).  As I understand it, inside the package is a mix of yeast and other materials which will convert starch into sugar and directly ferment it, without the need for a traditional mash step.  This can radically shorten your brewing time.  For my most-recent batch of rice wine, I heated 3 gallons of water to 155F, poured it over 13+ pounds of uncooked rice straight out of the bag, let that soak for an hour, rehydrated some of this yeast in warm water,

Making Alton Brown's Immersion Cooker Fennel Cardamon Cordial

Alton Brown's "Good Eats" series is my favorite cooking show.  I love the way he explains the "why" and "how" of a recipe in detail, which helps you understand (if things don't go right) where you may have gone wrong.  In his episode on immersion cooking (also known as sous vide), he shows you how to make a cordial in an hour using an immersion cooker. It took me a while to locate all the ingredients here in Columbus.  I ended up getting the fennel and vodka at Giant Eagle. The cardamom seeds, pods, and anise stars came from Amazon.  The Fennel fronds and bulb came from Trader Joe's at Easton. Ingredients 32 ounces of 80-proof vodka 2 cups of fennel fronds 10 green cardamom pods 3 ounces granulated sugar 1 tablespoon fennel seeds 1 teaspoon black cardamom seeds 1 whole star anise Begin by loading your sous vide vessel with hot water and set your immersion cooker to 140F. While the cooker is getting up to that temperature, meas

2021 Batch 1 - Rice Wine made with Yellow Label Angel Yeast

I've become a big fan of the Still It channel on YouTube.  About a month ago, Jesse posted a video about how he made rice wine using nothing more than water, rice, and a purported "magic" yeast from China called Yellow Label Angel Yeast. Perhaps even more amazing was the fact that he was able to make the rice wine without gelatinizing or mashing the rice.  He shows three batches in the video.  One was made by cooking the rice before adding the yeast mixture. Another was made by adding uncooked rice to boiling water.  The last was made by adding uncooked rice to room temperature water.  All three fermented out to roughly the same amount of alcohol in about two weeks. He was amazed by this, as was I. I resolved to buy some of this magical yeast from Aliexpress.com and try it out. In the Still It video, the rice is ground up in the grain mill into smaller chunks to make it easier for the enzymes in the yellow label yeast to convert and ferment.  I'm changing this up s