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How beer is made.
Water Grains Yeast Hops Hop Bags Sparging Sparge Arm Mashtuns and Mashing False Bottoms Brew Kettles Propane Burners Wort Chillers Fermentation Vessles Sterilizers and Cleaners How beer made. The answer to this question lies in the magic locked up in barley malt. Each barleycorn is a seed, designed to sprout and produce a new barley plant. Each kernel is made up of three basic parts, 1. The outer protective layer or husk. 2. The tiny baby plant. 3. A starch food supply to get the baby plant started. Malting, not to be confused with mashing, is moistening the seeds with warm water so they germinate and sprout, and then drying them. Breweries rarely do their own malting. They buy malted barley from malt houses, and begin each brew with milling (grinding) and mashing (starch conversion). The malted barley contains natural enzymes, chemical triggers, which perform an important task. Brewers crack the outer husk of the barleycorns via a roller mill, making "grist," and then they mix the grist with hot water at a specific temperature. Over a period of an hour or two, natural enzymes in the malt convert the starch to sugar (maltose). Then they rinse this sweet liquid away from the husks and transfer it into a brewkettle, where it is boiled and spiced with hops, then cooled and fermented with yeast. Mashing, then, is cracking the grain and cooking it or steeping it in hot water to convert the starch to sugar. The three basic varieties of mashing; 1. Infusion mash: grist is mixed with hot water, and held in the 155 degree F. range for a period that is commonly 90 minutes. Most American and British craft ales are made using an infusion mash. The temperature may be a little more or less than 155 F. depending on the brewer's intent. Different mash temperatures will result in changes to the finished beer. 2. Step mash: grist is mixed with hot water and held at one temperature, then is raised to a higher temperature by applied heat. There can be more than two steps; again this depends on the brewer's choice of grain and what he or she wants the beer to taste like. 3. Decoction mash: grist is mixed with hot water and held, and then a portion of the mash is removed and raised to a very high temperature. When this very hot portion is added back to the main mash and gently mixed in, it raises the temperature of the whole mash to the next step. As with a step mash, there can be several temperature steps in a decoction mash. This labor, and time-intensive process, which also requires special equipment, can lead to deep, complex, stunning malt flavors, commonly found in dopplebock. A couple of clarifying notes; 1. They specially treat some barley malt by roasting, smoking, or caramelizing. These "specialty grains" are for flavor, color and usually make up less than 15% of the total grain in the recipe. Because of the special ways they have been treated, they undergo little or no change from starch to sugar during the mash. 2. Traditionally beer is made with water, malt, hops and yeast. Brewers who add adjuncts like corn or rice to their mash are using a different variety of starch. Because corn and rice don't have the enzymes that will convert starch to sugar, adjunct brews always use barley as well. In the mash, the barley supplies the enzymes to convert all the starch to sugar. The following are useful tips I’ve picked up from books and hands-on experience. Having been the owner of a home beer and wine making supply store for over 7 years and the manager of our local homebrew club has given me the opportunity to see and test out many devices and techniques. Nothing here is set in stone, but I feel they have helped me craft an extremely good product. There is always much to learn and I would appreciate hearing any suggestions you may have. (to the top) Water We are blessed with some pretty decent water here in the northwest. If the water taste good to you chances are you will like your beer. Heavy iron in water is not good, it can inhibit yeast culturing. Do not use distilled drinking water because it lacks much of the elements yeast need to live healthy. If you use a filter, be sure the filter does not remove everything good from the water. There are different size (microns) filters used for different purposes choose the right one. Don’t “fine” filter finished beer or wine, you’ll loose much of what makes it good. Rough filter through nylon mess or bags to remove heavy debris is OK. Beers like pale ale like hard water while dark beers like porter or brown ale like soft water. If you have soft water that’s good because you can always harden it with gysum or brewing salts. You really can’t soften hard water, so stick with beers that do well with this water if the darker styles don’t taste quite right. You can tell if your water is hard or soft by hand washing some dishes. If the soap washes of sqeaky clean fast you have soft water, if it takes some real work to rinse them your water is hard. If you normally don’t do the dishes you better do this experiment when he/she who does is away or you’ll be screwed, trust me. (to the top) Grains Quality, quality, quality. Don’t get cheap here, this is afterall your beer. Use the appropriate grain from the origin of the style you are trying to produce, English beer/English grain, American Beer/American grain, etc. There are a few exceptions; if the American beer your trying to reproduce uses grains from another country or there is a specialty grain that is impossible to easily get, you will use what’s available. In America we don’t always have the right lovibond color of crystal malts in foreign grains as is the case with domestic grains. If you can use one close to it by all means do so. Most of the “main” ingredient pale, pilsner and lager malts from all the countries are available and should be used for the appropriate beer styles. We prefer Hugh Baird (a Marris Otter varity) for English styles and Great Western for American styles. The Belgain and German grains make some of the most outstanding beers we’ve had. We do like to experiment now and then, as any homebrewer should, but always use high quality ingredients. (to the top) Yeast By far a homebrewer has the ability to make a far greater range of beers then most commercial breweries by using liquid yeast cultures. A commercial brewery in most cases has to use only one type of yeast due to economics, cross-contamination between strains or mutation. We as homebrewers can add so many more flavor profiles to our beers by experimenting with different yeast strains. Try making a batch of beer and spliting it in half just before adding the yeast and add 2 different strains. You will be amazed at the differences. This can also help you find which yeast strains you prefer better then others faster. As far as starters and large batches of beer are concerned I have found they are not really needed if you buy fresh (1-2 months old) yeast. I have activated hundreds of Wyeast smack packs 1-2 days before brewing 10-15 gallons of beer and have never had a slow or stuck fermentation. I’ve even had a number of them start fermentating within a few hours. If you are adament on using dry yeast, I found Coopers to be one of my favorites. We like maintaining a 65F temperature when fermenting ales. The lower temperatures seem to give us cleaner tasting beers. (to the top) Hops Pellet or flower? It’s your call, I have used both extensively and have not found any significant difference when it comes to bitterness, flavor or aroma. The pellets are by far the easier to handle when measuring and putting into bags. Try blending similar “style” hops instead of just one type during the brewing process to achieve a more complex tasting beer. Example: If the recipe calls for 2 oz. of Kent Goldings for flavoring, instead try 1 oz. each of Goldings and Fuggles. Bittering Hops: LEARN how to calculate HBUs (homebrew bittering units) or AAUs (alpha acid units) these are the same thing and are different from the commercially used IBUs. I have noticed that most HBU/AAU amounts are about 1/3 of the commercially used IBUs. Example, if you see a amber ale in a pub listed as 40 IBUs then you can safely assume adding 13 HBUs to your own recipe will achieve the same bitterness. HBUs ONLY apply to the bittering hops which are boiled for 45 minutes or longer. Hops boiled 30 minutes or less use weight. Hops are a crop and the bittering oils can vary from year to year and variety to variety. For this reason if you use weight you may have your bittering levels flucuate with the same recipe each time you brew it. Learning how to use HBUs will also help yo determine consistently what levels of bitterness you do prefer. Here’s how it works. ALL hops have alpha acid oils which can only be calculated in a laboratory and are printed on the hops package. The alpha acid level applies to 1 ounce (that’s one, numero uno) of hops, no matter if it’s a 2 oz., 1 pound or 200 lb. package or bail. Most homebrew recipes will give you the HBUs or weight of bittering hops and their alpha acid level. If they give you HBUs then simply divide the recipe’s HBUs by the alpha acids on your package of hops and that’s how many ounces you will need of your hops to achieve the recipes bitterness. Example; the recipe calls for 12 HBUs of bittering hops for an amber ale. Your hops have an alpha acid level of 5.3%. Take 12 and divide it by 5.3 and you get 2.26 or roughly 2.25 ounces of hops. If the recipe has the weight of the hops and their alpha acid listed, simply multiply them together to find out the HBUs and proceed with the above formula to find out how much of your hops you will use. If only the weight of the bittering hops are used, you can guess according to your preferences or go to Charlie Papazian’s book Complete Guide to Homebrewing and you will find a chart in it which lists the range of HBUs for each style of beer. Dry hopping and aroma hops: I have had awesome results taking a recipe’s aroma hops (boiled usually 5 minutes or less) and steeping them in a bag like a tea in the boiled wort for about 2 minutes after the heat has been shut off. I then transfer these hops to the fermenters where they stay the whole time the beer is fermenting. Do not transfer them to a secondary fermenter if one is used. (to the top) Hop Bags I prefer to put my hops, pellet or flower, into the nylon type bags with the draw string. This prevents me from havng to deal with them clogging up the whole transfering process and keeps things tidy. They come in 5x7 and 9x15 sizes. They are more spendy then the throw away muslin (sock type) bags but have a finer mess, are easy to clean and reusable. When using large amount of single addition hops do not try to cram them into one bag. This does not allow the hot wort to flow around the hops freely. Instead break the hops up into more then one bag so the bag and hops feel somewhat loose and you will achieve the desired bitterness, flavor or aroma. Don’t hassle with trying to keep the draw strings in the tops of the bag, this becomes annoying as they are always getting lost inside the sleeve. Instead just pull them out and keep them all in one of your bags. Just securely tie the bag off at the top of the neck like you would a shoelace. I have never had a bag come open from doing this. We use very large stainless steel cookings tongs to remove and squeeze the hop juice from these bags back into the wort. Hold the bag with one tong and squeeze it with a second, works great. These bags are also handy for holding orange peels and other spices that may clog up the outlets or transfer hoses. (to the top) Sparging This is one area where most first-time all-grain brewers make their mistakes. Maintaining 170F on top of the grain is VERY important. With our systems this means keeping the sparge water almost boiling because we loose heat through the hose, sparge arm and sprinkling process. It is absolutely CRUCIAL you “slowly” rinse your converted sugars from the grains. It takes roughly 1 hour to do this with 24 lbs. of grain in a 10 gallon mashtun. The reason for the mistake is usually these individuals are use to “sparging” the grains in a partial mash recipe by simply pouring hot water over the specialty grains while they are in a strainer. This takes all of 30 seconds and does what it’s suppose to, wash the flavor and color from those grains. This is fine for partial mash because all the sugar is in the extract syrup. I knew one guy who did this process with a whole batch of all-grain brew and ended up with Bud Ultra Lite. No flavor, no alcohol, no good. With all-grain your sugars ARE coming from the grains. I like to use a 3/8” hose going from my sparge vessel into my mashtun and a 1/4” hose coming from my mashtun into the brew kettle. First circulate your wort from your mashtun from the outlet to a pot and slowly pour this back on top. Do not disturb to much or punch holes into the grain bed or you will have a “weak” area where all the water wants to flow out. I usually trickle this wort over my sparge arm which disperses the liquid evenly. Do this until your liquid is clear of debris and then the sparge can start. I like to turn the sparge water on until it just barely starts to trickle from all the sparge arm holes. Once I have about 1” of water on top of the grain I open the mashtun’s valve and maintain this 1” level. It may help to put a mark on the side of your mashtun where this water level must maintain. Things may be running great at this point, but don’t just walk away because as volumes change in the sparge vessel, the grain bed settles or other unforeseen events, things do change on you and you will need to tweak your vlaves to maintain the right flow. I’ve always wondered about using a couple of flow meters at both ends of this process. This is one area where you must baby your beer. I like to fill my sparge vessel full with water so to have plenty for the sparge or for adding back to the wort should I over boil the volume and for cleaning up , especially on cold days. Don’t let this scare you away, it’s more time consuming then difficult, just be patient and you will be rewarded, this is my guarantee, no fine print here. (to the top) Sparge Arm We have made sparge arms from soft copper, brass compression fittings and pvc pipe. They work exceptionally well for us. The ready made brass sparge arm that spins also works very well. Whatever you use the trick is to gently trickle the water onto the grain bed and not shower it. When drilling holes in copper use the smallest drill bit you can find. It’s amazing how big a drop of water can come from these tiny holes. The one we used almost looked like a thick piece of hair. Grab a couple they can easily break. (to the top) Mashtuns and Mashing I absolutely love my double walled stainless steel mashtun which was converted from a hot beverage server like those you see with coffee in them in the lobby of hotels. We cut the top off it and filled the gap with resin to protect the insulation from getting wet. We had to re-thread the the outlets male threads to take a standard brass 1/2” pipe coupler so we could use a standard stainless steel ball valve on it. I use a 1/4” brass barbed nipple and 1/4 thick-wall cornielius clear hose at the outlet. The exit hole is flush with the vessels flat bottom and works perfectly with my stainless steel ABT false bottom, poly elbow and 3/8 poly hose. The poly hose fits snugly into the exit hole and can quickly slip in and out for easy cleaning. I use one of my lids from my converted sankey kettles to cover the grains while mashing. I can mash 24 lbs. of grain in this mashtun for 2 hours without loosing a single degree. I have used mashtuns from converted kegs with burners, picnic coolers to plastic buckets and by far this is the best I’ve come across. My brew partner Will has been on the lookout for one of these but they are hard to find. I have thought about taking a sankey keg, 10 gallon soda keg and liquid foam rubber to build one. One could cut off both tops with a plasma cutter, run a stainless steel tube out the bottom of the soda keg through the sidwall of the sakey and fill the gap between them with the rubber. The 10 gallon soda kegs don’t have the black rubber on both ends like most of the 5 gallons ones do. If we do this we’ll post pictures. If you use a picnic cooler make sure it can handle hot liquid. The Rubbermaid Will is using is warping from the heat. I haven’t seen this happen with the Gott or Igloo coolers I and others have used. When mashing in it helps to have a friend pour the grains while you mash in (stir), this prevents clumps. Once all the grain has been mashed in and settled in to convert, do not disturb the grain bed. Most starch to sugar conversion will happen within 1-2 hours, we play it safe and go to 90 minutes. We have always hit our gravity mark with these procedures and have often hit higher gravities then some of the borrowed recipes we have used. We fill our system is very efficient and one needs to be aware that all systems may vary and can effect a recipe. After some time you’ll learn your system like the back of your hand, unless of course you keep changing it. (to the top) False Bottoms We prefer the plastic or stainless steel plate-like varity over the slot-cut copper or pvc tube varity. They are easy to clean and the holes are spread over the entire base of the mashtun. If you use the plastic version it tends to float so be sure to weight it down or hold it down with something like a metal rod or yard stick. I’ve heard the horror stories of mashing the grain only to find that the false bottom had floated up and grain slid under it, what a mess. (to the top) Brew Kettles We love our converted sankey kegs. When boiling wort and depending on the burner you can burn-off about 2 gallons fo water per hour. You’ll want to fill the kettle with the right amount of “extra” water so that when the boil has finished you end up with the right volume for what the recipe called for. We use a metal yard stick and have calibrated to where our gallon marks fall with the inches of the stick. You’ll see our calibrations written with a magic marker onto one of our brew tables in the pictures section. This has proved invaluable because we use the same amount of grain in all our recipes and only adjust the volumes of the wort to make the different styles. This way we utilize our system’s mashtun to the fullest. By not writing on the yard stick you can use this calibration method for different size vessels. Don’t put the yard stick in the boiling wort, the bubbling wort will not give the correct reading, lower the heat first, then take the reading. Do not leave the yard stick in boiling wort. (to the top) Propane Burners Be sure the burner you by has a ring larger then the diameter of the kettle or things can get unstable. With boiling water sitting 8 feet above our heads this would not be a good thing. If you come across a used burner that has a small ring, you can weld 3 pieces of rebar together into a triangle that sits on the burner and has the points sticking out past the walls of the brew kettle. Our burners are the King Kooker brand with the large rings and banjo style burner element. These suckers can bring 15 gallons of 50F water to a boil (212F) within 30 minutes. The banjo elements spread out the flames unlike the jet style which shoot out in one direction. (to the top) Wort Chillers I have seen them all, commercial heat exchangers, counterflow and copper coil. I have found the most econimical, easy to use and clean are the copper coil type. Many say the rapid clhilling of the counterflow type is what makes them the best for homebrewers. The secret to making a coil type chiller that can rapidly chill 10-15 gallons of boiling wort quickly is the amount of copper surface to liquid you have. Most stores carry a 25’ 1/2 copper coil type which from experience takes about 20-30 minutes to chill 10-15 gallons of 212F wort down to 60F. We’ve made a chiller using 50’ of 3/4 copper which was wraped around a soda keg to form the coil. Brass compression and garden hose fittings were used at both ends. This chiller can drop the temperature of 212F wort down to 60F in 8 minutes. You can actually watch the metal dial thermometer drop while you stir the wort through the center of the coil. (to the top) Fermentation Vessles Glass vs. plastic the age old battle. My rule of thumb is don’t AGE any alcoholic beverage in plastic. I like plastic buckets for primary fermentation with beer or red wine on the skins. With white wines I go right into the glass because of their suseptibilty to oxidation and having no skins to hassle with. I like using the opaque 7.5 gallon white buckets because I can see through them enough to know what’s going on. I also like to float bagged hops in these buckets for that dry hopped character in some style. They are easy to clean and I have never in hundreds of batches of beer had one go bad because of being in plastic. Don’t use abrasive scrubber pads on them and they’ll do fine. In most cases after initial fermentation (2 weeks) we can go right onto our kegs for aging. The kegs act a a bright tank like in a brewpub. In some instances where secondary fermention is taking longer then normal, like with high gravity barleywine, imperial stout or lagers, we will transfer the beer into glass carboys until finished. This most the garbage behind in the bucket and makes for cleaning the carboys much easier. Another advantage is no blow-off tubes is necessary. My friends and I have never noticed any headaches from not blowing off the fermentation debris. (to the top) Sterilizers and Cleaners I have used many chemicals since winemaking in 1982, hot water, bleach, sodium bisulphite, potassium bisulphite, PBW, iodophor, etc. For standard sterilizing iodophor sanitizer is by far the best and not having to rinse is wonderful. We use 1 tsp. per gallon of water. For tough cleaning 5-Star’s PBW is our favorite. If it’s not available in your area or shipping would make it cost prohibitive then you can use Arm & Hammer’s Washing Soda (not laundry detergent), the active ingredient in it is very effective. Most grocery stores carry it in a 3 lb. box, use it with hot water so it dissolves. Here is an excellent article in B-T-F Iodophor sanitizer. (to the top) |
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