Brewing from grain requires a fair amount of time, expertise, and specialized equipment. It is not really practical or possible for everybody to brew from grains. For beginners, it is not even advisable. Learning about brewing is facilitated by simplifying the process and mastering one step before progressing to another.
Brewing can be reduced to its simplest elements with malt extract syrup, which is simply condensed wort. The homebrewer reconstitutes it with water so that it can be boiled, cooled, pitched with yeast, and fermented. This allows the novice homebrewer to master the mechanics of fermentation and hopping, uncomplicated by crushing, mashing, and sparging grain.
For most hobby brewers, malt extracts present the best choice for producing their beer without giving up the better part of a day each time they brew. An extract brew can be started at noon and the cleanup finished by three. By using unhopped extract, hop pellets, and small amounts of specialty malts in the wort kettle, the homebrewer can create any one of a wide variety of excellent beers in under four hours.
In brewing good beer from extracts it is important to substitute Dry Malt Extract (DME) for any cane or corn sugar called for in the recipe. Sugar increases the alcohol content of a beer without a balancing increase in flavor and fullness. Moreover, sugar gives beer a peculiar flavor, often characterized as “cideriness,” that is unpleasant. For every pound of sugar called for in the recipe, substitute 1 ¼ pounds of dry malt extract or 1 ½ pounds of liquid malt extract.
The best beers are generally produced by boiling the full amount of wort for 1 ½ hours, but most households do not have a twenty-four- to forty-quart/liter stainless kettle and a wort chiller among the pots, pans, and kitchen widgets. Many homebrewers and virtually all novices boil a more concentrated wort in a twelve- to twenty-quart/liter stockpot for forty-five to sixty minutes and dilute that high-gravity wort down with sterile, chilled water.
For a five-gallon (nineteen liters) batch, the malt extract is boiled with two gallons (eight liters) of liquor, and that high-gravity wort is cooled down with three gallons (eleven liters) of sterilized, chilled liquor as the wort is transferred to the fermenter.
Brewing really needs to begin with planning and preparation. You must choose a recipe and purchase suitable ingredients. Unless you will be pitching granulated dry yeast, you will need to activate liquid or harvested yeast at least twenty-four hours before you pitch it. And you need to sterilize three gallons of water and give them enough time to chill down to 35 degrees F (2 degrees C) or so (the colder the better).
The beginning brewer also needs to accumulate three plastic one gallon spring-water jugs or six two-liter PET soda bottles to hold the chilled liquor. Rinse out soda bottles immediately after they are emptied, put a little detergent and hot water in each, screw the rinsed lids on, and shake them well. Uncap each bottle and pour out the detergent solution, then rinse them several times with very hot water.
Measure out three-quarters of a teaspoon of bleach into each two-liter bottle, or one teaspoon into each gallon jug. Fill the bottles with tap water to the top, cap them, and let them sit and sterilize until needed.
In addition to containers for the liquor, you will need to collect bottles to package the beer into. Heavy glass bottles, such as are used by most import beers, are preferable to light weight bottles. For five gallons, you will need fifty 12-ounce bottles, or forty 16-ounce, or twenty-eight 22-ounce bottles. Rinse each bottle several times just as it is emptied.
If you are pitching liquid yeast, prepare it the day before brewing, or as appropriate for the amount of yeast on hand. At least a quart of starter, or its equivalent volume of yeast, should be actively fermenting on brew day.
On the day before brewing, heat 3 ½ gallons of water in a clean pot(s) to a boil. Empty the sterilant solution out of your sterilized bottles/jugs. With a very clean, just-rinsed funnel and a Pyrex measuring cup for a ladle, pour a cup or so of boiling water into each jug, swirl it around to rinse out chlorine residues, and dump the rinse. Leave your jugs draining on a paper towel.
Put a clean lid on the kettle, stopper up your clean sink, and fill it with cold water. Immerse the kettle into the water bath. After five minutes or so, drain and refill the sink. Once the brewing liquor has chilled to near body temperature, use the measuring cup and funnel to fill the bottles. Cap and refrigerate them.
The beer will be fermented in either a six- or seven-gallon (twenty-four- to thirty-liter) lidded, food-grade plastic pail with no visible scratches, or a five- or six-gallon (nineteen- to twenty-five-liter) glass carboy. These containers are relatively inexpensive and easily sanitized. Overall, beginning brewers are best advised to begin with the cheaper, and more rugged, food-grade plastic bucket and move on to two-stage or inverted-carboy fermentations after they have gained some experience.
The fermenter, and any and all parts and utensils that contact the wort and beer after the kettle boil, need to be sanitized. Put 1 to 1 ½ ounces of bleach into the bottom of the fermenter and fill it with water. Fill the fermenter one quart at a time and calibrate its volume as you do so by marking the level after each addition on the outside of the bucket with an indelible marker.
It’s a good idea to calibrate your kettle, too, by immersing a long-handled spoon into the water and scratching calibration lines into its handle after each one-quart addition.
Fill the fermenter to the brim. Put every part and utensil that won’t rust right into the sterilant solution. Cover it and leave it overnight.
On brew day, fill a kettle with two gallons of water and heat it to boiling. Add any mineral salts called for in the recipe. If you are using malt-extract syrup, open the can and set it in a pot of hot water to warm the syrup so that it will run out of the can more readily.
If you are using specialty grains in the recipe, crush them coarsely and place them in a nylon or muslin bag. Suspend the bag in the brew kettle; the contents of the grains will be leached out into solution as the liquor heats up. Only add caramelized or fully roasted grains to the kettle; starchy malts and grains need to be mashed first. Lager, pale, Vienna, Munich, and amber malts should not be used as kettle adjuncts.
Remove the grains when the liquor reaches 165 to 175 degrees F (74 to 79 degrees C), so that harsh-tasting tannins aren’t leached from the husks by hotter temperatures. Squeeze all the free liquid from the bagged grains as they are removed.
As the water comes to a boil, use a rubber spatula to scrape the extract out of the can and into the brew pot. Stir and lift the extract up away from the bottom of the kettle. Scrape the can clean, and mix the wort again until the extract has evenly dispersed.
Add any DME called for in the recipe and part of the kettle hops to your extract, and boil the wort for at least forty-five minutes. The wort boil should be rolling and intense, but not so wild that it boils over.
While the wort boils, heat two quarts or so of water to boiling. Empty the sanitizing solution out of the fermenting bucket, rinse it with a quart or so of the boiling water, and invert the fermenter onto paper towels on a clean drainboard to drain. Keep an eye on the boiling wort and a clock, and make hop additions as the recipe calls for them.
If you are using granulated dry yeast to pitch the brew, wash and rinse out a pint (500-milliliter) glass container or Pyrex measuring cup with hot water, and then pour about four fluid ounces (120 milliliters) of boiling water into it. Cover it tightly with plastic wrap and force-cool it in the freezer. Cool it to 95 to 110 degrees F (35 to 43 degrees C, about body temperature, so that it feels warm, not hot), and uncover it just long enough to pour the granulated dry yeast into it. The yeast will rehydrate in the warm water and should show a frothy head within a half hour or so.
Shut off the heat to the kettle at the conclusion of the boil. Check the volume level of the wort. If needed, make up the volume to 5 ¼ gallons (twenty-one quarts, twenty liters) with cold water. Cover the kettle and remove it from the burner. Stopper up the sink again and fill it with cold water. Place the kettle into it for a few minutes to reduce the heat of the wort from boiling to near 160 degrees F (70 degrees C).
Remove the kettle to a clean counter and block it up on one side so that the bottom slopes. Wait for the trub to settle to the low side of the kettle bottom. Wash your arms and hands and sanitize the area around the kettle. Set the sanitized and drained fermenter below in the kettle, away from any drafts. Splash the three gallons of chilled liquor into it.
Siphon or ladle the clear wort into the fermenter, letting it splash into the chilled liquor to aerate it. Leave the last trub-laden wort behind in the kettle, collecting five gallons, or a little more, in the fermenter.
Fit the fermenter with its sanitized lid and an airlock. Cool the wort to below 80 degrees F (27 degrees C), preferably by force-cooling the fermenter, as in a sink full of cold water and ice cubes.
Pitch the yeast. Uncover the fermenter, splash the yeast into the wort and re-cover the fermenter. Give the fermenter a few circular twists to disperse the yeast, and set the fermenter out of harm’s way at an ambient temperature, or at slightly below, the fermentation temperature called for by the beer style and the yeast strain’s preferred operating range. For ales, the general range is 60 to 72 degrees F (16 to 22 degrees C), and 45 to 55 degrees F (7 to 13 degrees C) for lagers. Fermentation temperatures can be inexpensively monitored by applying an adhesive-backed liquid-crystal temperature indicator to the outside of the fermenter.
Fermentation temperatures can be controlled to some extent by evaporative cooling or by insulation. For evaporative cooling, set the fermenter in a pan of cold water, drape a dampened towel over it, and let the towel trail into the pan of water. Evaporative cooling will draw heat out of the fermenter, reducing its temperature by 5 to 10 degrees F (3 to 5 degrees C). Where a higher temperature is needed, wrapping the fermenter with a dry towel or blanket will let the fermentation temperature rise as much as 10 degrees F (5 degrees C) above room temperature.
Once fermentation has subsided, move the fermenter to a cooler location (ideally 50 to 60 degrees F [10 to 16 degrees C] for ales, 35 to 50 degrees F [2 to 10 degrees C] for lagers). The temperature is reduced for conditioning because it produces mellower flavors. One of the first equipment upgrades that most homebrewers make is either a two-stage or inverted-carboy fermentation (using the BrewCap, for instance). The purpose of racking to a secondary fermenter, after intense primary fermentation subsides, is to separate the beer from its trub. Inverted-carboy systems accomplish the same thing by draining trub and yeast as it settles.
Novice brewers are advised to begin using a single-stage fermentation solely because racking to secondary introduces significant risk of contamination; until the beginning brewer learns the importance of sanitation and how to ensure it, a beer with an astringent bite or phenolic character is at least preferable to a contaminated one. Most beer styles benefit by two to ten weeks of conditioning, but a beer that has not been separated from its trub should not remain on it for more than two weeks, even if it can be aged very cold. So for single-stage fermentations, the beer should be bottled a week to two weeks after the fermentation head has dropped and CO2 generation has ceased. This is not usually a major concern for beginning brewers, who are impatient to try their handcrafted beer anyway.
The first step of bottling is to sterilize all the bottles you have collected. If your dishwasher has a sanitizing cycle, you can load it up with your bottles and let it sanitize them. Or you can soak them overnight in a clean ten- to fifteen-gallon (forty- to sixty-liter) bucket of water treated with the standard sanitizing solution (approximately one fluid ounce/thirty milliliters per each four gallons/sixteen liters). Another method of sanitizing bottles is to put a half ounce/fifteen milliliters of water into each rinsed bottle and stack them in your oven, set at 200 degrees F (94 degrees C), for an hour to heat-sterilize them. Shut the heat off about an hour or so before you will begin bottling.
A couple of hours before you will begin bottling, carry your fermenter over and place it gently on a countertop with a solid chair below it, in an area that is free from drafts and that will be easy to clean up. Block the fermenter up at a slightly tilted angle with a book to let the yeast sediment settle to the low side. Fill your priming bucket with sterilizing solution, and cover it.
When you are ready to begin your bottling session, measure out your priming sugar and a pint or so of water into a pan or small pot. Set up your sanitized, drained, and lidded priming bucket on the chair below the fermenter. You will need to start a siphon through the racking cane/tubing to get clear beer from the fermenter into the priming bucket.
Homebrewers have devised dozens of methods for starting a sanitary siphon. One of them is to boil a quart or so of water in a pot, and then pour it hot into one of your chilled-water bottles. Cut a two- to three-inch (fifty- to seventy-five-millimeter) piece off one end of your tubing and put both pieces into sterilant solution in a pot or bucket on the counter with the fermenter. Wash your hands very thoroughly (you should do this again before you prime your beer, and again before you bottle), and assemble your racking cane to one end of the tubing. Pull the plastic cap off the working end of the racking cane and slide the short piece of tubing over the end of the cane.
Insert the tubing into the bottle of hot water and suck on the end of the short piece of tubing to fill the tubing. Use your thumb to cap the end of the short tubing, and lower the tubing into your sanitizing solution. Pull the plastic cap off the working end of the racking cane and replace it with the trub cap.
Hot water should be siphoning from the jug to the sanitizing solution. Slide the fermenter and priming bucket lids over slightly to one side, lift the racking cane out of the sanitizer and up into the fermenter, then quickly drop the free end of the tubing into the priming bucket. Water, and then beer should start flowing into the priming bucket. Keep the free end of the tubing submerged in the priming bucket, and keep a watchful eye on the end of the racking cane. Unless it is kept below the beer level, you will lose the siphon; on the other hand, you want to avoid sucking up trub from the bottom. Pull the beer from the uptilted side of the fermenter until the end of the transfer.
As you get near the bottom, watch the end of the racking cane. Leave the sediment, and enough beer to take a hydrometer reading, behind. The hydrometer reading gives you the final gravity (FG).
Cover the priming bucket. Rinse and then disassemble the racking cane from the tubing. Put both back into the sanitizing solution. If your bottling bucket is not fitted with a spigot, you will need to start a siphon again to fill the bottles. Attach the tubing to the bottle filler.
Heat the pint or so of water to boiling, adding the priming sugar to it. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then lift the bottling-bucket lid. With your sterilized spoon, gently stir the beer to mix the priming solution into the beer, without splashing it around. Cover the bucket and give it a series of sharp twists to complete the mixing.
Set up your bottles ready to fill. Drain any water or sanitizing solution out of them. Set up your bag of crown caps and the capper within easy reach.
You are ready to bottle. If you are siphoning, run the sterilant through the tubing and bottle filler to a bottle until beer emerges, then move to another bottle and begin filling. If you are bottling from a spigot, try to let the beer run down the inside wall of each bottle without a lot of splashing, or attach a bottle filler. Fill each bottle until the beer comes up nearly level with the rim of each bottle. Set a cap loosely on top of each bottle after it is filled. Set the first bottles that you fill an arm’s length away so that you won’t knock the caps off as you accumulate more and more full bottles.
Tilt your priming bucket as you get near the bottom so that you get all the beer you can. When the racking cane sucks air, you will lose the siphon.
Go back and crimp the caps onto the bottles with the capper. Rinse off the bottles, set them in cases, and put them out of the way at room temperature. Thoroughly rinse and clean your fermenter, priming bucket, and equipment, being careful not to scratch the plastic.
Let your beer carbonate in the bottles at room temperature for a week or two before storing them in a cooler place while the bottles condition. Be patient; most homebrew will not come into its prime state until at least three to four weeks after bottling.