4

SIMPLE ALL GRAIN

“It turns out that all-grain brewing can be just as straightforward and fun as extract brewing.”

Most homebrewers start out by brewing with extract, viewing it kind of like spring training prior to the big-league experience of all-grain brewing; they can learn the basics of brewing while getting ready to step up their game (see chapter 2 for why we think that’s a myopic view). But for a lot of homebrewers, all-grain brewing is as intimidating as a rookie batter facing an all-star pitcher with a 95-mile-per-hour fastball. You hope that you’re gonna hit the ball and not vice versa! But some days you’re the Louisville Slugger, some days you’re the ball. The only thing we can do to help is improve your odds.

It turns out that all-grain brewing can be just as straightforward and fun as extract brewing. There are two ways to approach it, understanding a method or understanding the “why.”

DENNY: That was me. I really longed for the brewing experience and variety of ingredients I’d get from all-grain brewing, but every time I started to read about it I was overwhelmed by the gear and process. Multiple vessels, pumps, complicated mash schedules, PIDs … I mean, I didn’t know what half the stuff was and I certainly didn’t know what it was for or why I needed it!

DREW: I was the opposite. I was the precocious kid brewer (twenty-five, oh, to be that young again!) and was into all-grain shortly after brewing. Like Denny, I read everything I could get my hands on, but, and here’s where the advantage of having my local club comes in, I was able to filter the myriad approaches through the things I was seeing from my fellow brewers. Today’s brewers have it even easier with free podcasts and internet videos providing more feedback. (Shameless plug: listen to Experimental Brewing via your favorite podcast source or download episodes at https://www.experimentalbrew.com. I’ve got no shame.)

Understanding a method is the quickest way to get started: “Get these parts, put them together this way, raise water to this, blah, blah, blah …” It’s a formula, a recipe, a to-do list—as long as everything goes to plan, you’re golden and in beer galore. Naturally, we’ll give you several methods because, let’s face it, making beer is tons more fun than someone hitting you over the head with elementary quantum mechanics to understand your mash chemistry! (Yup, we’ve seen this approach—it gives Denny a headache and reminds Drew too much of college.) But if things go pear-shaped, well what then, Sparky?

While understanding the “why” behind what you’re doing is arguably harder to achieve, once you get those ideas grokked, the methods behind all-grain brewing will make sense to you. When the pears come falling out of the tree, you’ll be ready to adjust and keep the brew day on track. Plus, your understanding of those basics will let you decide what matters and what doesn’t. In other words, you’ll be defining your take on simple.

We’re going to explain the science behind all-grain brewing, but we promise it will be painless! Then we’ll pass on some of the tips we’ve learned that can make your all-grain brew day fun and rewarding. We’ll even show you how to build inexpensive all-grain brewing equipment. Your inexpensive system may not be quite as shiny as some of those big, complicated ones, but it will make beer that tastes every bit as good as the beer you make on a fancy system. And we’ll pass on some techniques for both shortening and extending your brew day in order to make brewing all-grain beer easier.

So, step into the batter’s box, take a couple practice swings, and get ready for us to pitch you the big meatball that is simple all-grain brewing. Of course, if you’re already brewing all-grain, we encourage you to stick around because we’re offering up some world-class simplification techniques here!

THE STRICT WORLDS OF FERMENTATION

When it comes down to it, the difference between beer and wine is that wine is made from fruit and beer is made from grain. In other words, we are fermenting different sources of sugar into alcohol. With wine it’s easy, you just crush or press the fruit to free the sugar-laden juice, pitch some yeast, do a little dance, and you’re mostly done. (OK, not really, but this isn’t Simple Winemaking.) With grain, our initial work is a bit more complicated, but you wanted to earn that beer, right?

It Wasn’t Always So

Way back in the far reaches of prehistory, when humanity was first working out the idea of civilization, the rules weren’t so fixed about what made a beverage a beverage. The earliest discovered examples of fermentation currently come from China. Dr. Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia did a chemical analysis of jars from China dated to 7000 BCE and discovered trace residues of a beer-wine hybrid made with rice, grapes, hawthorn berries, and honey.1 It’s all the food groups in one beverage! Even the beer made by Babylonians and Sumerians included date wine and honey in the ingredient list for their barley beers.2 Somewhere, a tradition-obsessed brewmaster just shuddered.

Making Malt

Cereal grains, the grasses that have fueled humanity’s growth, contain long complex chains of sugar molecules called starches. Starches can be chopped, sliced, and chemically altered into simpler fermentable sugars by enzymes like alpha-amylase and beta-amylase. Miracle of miracles, those enzymes are built into barley and, to a certain extent, most other grains—but they’re really present in barley! This is a big reason why barley is the grain of choice for brewers.

The malting process activates enzymes in the grain that convert starch to sugar. Malting starts by soaking the barley kernels to allow them to germinate, which is where they sprout and begin to grow. The enzymes will allow the new sprout (acrospire) access to the starchy fuel in the endosperm. When the grain has softened, the maltster intervenes and stops nature dead in its tracks by drying the kernels and killing off the sprout. This locks the malt’s starches, enzymes, and other proteins in a useful state.

After the grain has been dried, it’s kilned to produce different colors of malt, from very pale (like the malt used to make Pilsner) to very dark (like the roast barley that gives stout its deep color and flavor). The catch in all of this is that the darker the malt is kilned, the more enzymes that are killed off, as we mentioned in chapter 2. That’s one reason that dark malts are always used in much smaller quantities alongside lighter malts (the other reason being their disgusting taste!).

DREW: The previous few paragraphs are a radical simplification of the complicated art of malting. Suffice it to say that your ability to make beer begins well before you get involved. One of the great advantages brewers have over vintners is the consistency of our starting ingredients thanks to highly skilled folks like maltsters. Malting used to be done as part of the brewing process, and brewers would malt the barley themselves. Now maltsters operate independently, giving all of us access to their best products. Seriously though, praise to the men and women behind converting barley into our foundational ingredient in all of its varieties!

On to Brewing

When brewers start to formulate a recipe, they begin with a base malt; think “domestic two-row” or “pale malt” or “Pilsner” at the top of the grain bill. Much like when you bake a cake, you begin with flour (fairly bland) and add other flavors to it in smaller portions (chocolate!). In general, most beer begins with a light-colored malt as the base, then brewers use darker malts to add flavor and aroma: crystal or caramel for color and sweetness; toasted malts, such as Munich, Vienna, aromatic, and biscuit, for bready, rich tones; and roasted malts, like chocolate and black “patent” malt, or even unmalted roasted barley, to provide coffee, chocolate, and burnt flavors. The roasted malts can be added in various combinations to it to get the color and unique flavor the brewer is looking for. There are some beers that are made using only one malt (see chapter 7), but the majority of beers use a mixture of malt types to achieve the desired impact.

DENNY: I brewed about half a dozen extract batches and one partial-mash batch before deciding to be brave enough to venture into all-grain brewing. The incentive was that I was dying to make an altbier … kind of a German amber ale. All the recipes I could find used Munich malt, and I knew that you had to mash it. It couldn’t be steeped like some of the specialty grains you use in extract brewing. Fortunately, by that time I had run across information from two gentleman named George Fix and Ken Schwartz. George had written about a brewing process known as “batch sparging” that simplified and sped up all-grain brewing. Ken had come up with an inexpensive, easy-to-build piece of equipment that was perfect for mashing the grain and using the batch sparge process. I built my first mash tun following Ken’s instructions and made a 2.5-gallon batch (I was still boiling on my kitchen stove and that was all it could handle) of altbier that was so good that I was hooked and on my way to bigger all-grain batches.

Figure 4.1. Denny’s original altbier recipe.

After the you determine which malts to use and in what proportion, the malt is crushed to expose the innards (endosperm). The grain is mashed by mixing it with hot water and letting it sit for a while. The heat in the water reactivates the enzymes and finishes the conversion of starch to fermentable sugars. After an hour or so, the liquid (which is now wort) is drained off from the grain. At this point, the grain has given its all for the beer, but the spent grain can be repurposed as feed for farm animals, or as an addition to pizza dough, bread, or even homemade dog cookies. Yep, your best friend can even benefit from homebrewing! At the very least, you can recycle the grain via composting it yourself or through your city’s composting scheme.

At this point, all of the work you’ve done in making the wort is the same as what extract manufacturers do for brewers and bakers, that is, concentrating the wort. From this point on, the brewing process is pretty much the same whether you’re brewing with extract or all grain. You boil the wort, add hops, cool it down, pitch the yeast, and ferment.

Nothin’ to it!

RECIPE

Denny’s Alt #1 Recipe

Note: The process in this recipe has been simplified from my original all-grain batch for two reasons. First, because I’ve learned a lot since then. Second … well, look at the book title!

Batch volume: 2.5 gal. (5.7 L)

Original Gravity: 1.062 (15.2°P)

Final gravity: 1.012 (3.1°P)

Color: 17 SRM

Bitterness: 41 IBU

ABV: 6.6%

Malt

• • 3 lb. (1.36 kg) pale malt
• • 3 lb. (1.36 kg) Munich malt 10°L
• • 2 oz. (56 g) chocolate malt
• • 2 oz. (56 g) crystal malt 80°L

Hops

• • 1 oz. (28 g) Spalter Select 5.8% AA @ 60 min.

Extras

• • 1/4 tsp Irish moss @ 15 min.

Yeast

Wyeast 1338 German ale yeast (no longer available, substitute WY1007)

Brewing Notes

• • Mash: 9.5 qt. (9 L) water to hit a 155°F (68°C) mash temp.
• • Sparge: 6 qt. (5.7 L) of water at 170°F (77°C).
• • Boil: 60 minutes with hops, add Irish moss with 15 minutes remaining.
• • Fermentation: 68°F (20°C) for 2 weeks, then cool to 35°F (2°C) for 2 weeks before bottling or kegging.

DREW: A long time ago in a galaxy far away I used to do catering as a way to add some money to my college’s coffers. When I graduated and got an “adult” job, I stopped cooking because I lacked the time. Part of the draw of brewing was getting back to creating. Since I’m the kind of guy who baked his own bread, I wanted to get as real as possible, so I got a pot and carefully built a copper strainer, etc. Looking back … man, I wish I had known about the batch sparging method. It would have saved so much time and money!

For some homebrewers, it’s all about the gear and trying to brew like a commercial brewery. Not us—we like to keep it simple! If you’re one of those brewers who likes to have a garage full of shiny stuff and another project always in the works, be our guest. We won’t be joining you in that quest. We admit that once you get all that stuff put together you might have a simple brew day. But we both prefer brewing to building gear, and we both like to brew pretty much the same way we cook, which is hands on. While having the right equipment is obviously necessary, it’s important to note that the brewer makes the beer, not the equipment … well, at least not on its own! We’ll also talk later about why, sometimes, the equipment actually gets in the way of you making the beer.

So, with that in mind, we’re going to show you how to build and use simple, inexpensive equipment to turn out delicious all-grain beer and have a great time while you do it.

MASHING FROM START TO FINISH

The Super High-Level Process of Mashing

In case you’ve never brewed an all-grain beer before by batch sparging, here’s a quick overview of the process:

1. 1. Crush the grain using a proper grain mill. Your homebrew shop can do it, or you can buy your own grain mill if the mood suits you.
2. 2. Heat up your strike water (~1.2–1.5 qt. water/lb. grain, or 2.5–3.1 L/kg) to about ~10–15°F (~6–8°C) above the target mash temperature.
3. 3. Soak the crushed grain in the hot water for 60–90 minutes. Drain the wort from the mash into the kettle.
4. 4. Stir 170°F (77°C) sparge water into the now-drained grain.
5. 5. Drain the new wort from the tun into the kettle.

And that’s pretty much it! From here on, you boil, add hops, and chill just like you would for an extract- or partial-mash brew. There are a few details that we’ll get into now, starting with making your own mash tun.

The Cheap ’n’ Easy Mash Tun

When building a mash tun, keep the general brewing process in mind. You heat some water, mix it with some grain, and keep it hot. After an hour, you drain the sugar water (wort) from the grain and bring it to a boil. You then chill the wort and ferment it with yeast. The primary difference for you, the all-grain brewer, is the addition of a mash tun, which holds your hot grain and allows you to separate the wort from it.

A mash tun needs to have a few specific properties in order for it to be useful. First, it needs to hold hot water without leaking. We suppose you could use a leaking mash tun, but we prefer our shoes to stay dry. Second, to avoid ending up with really chewy beer, your mash tun needs to have a way to separate the wort from the grain. So, unless you enjoy the tedious job of straining, you’ll want an easy way to drain the wort from the tun while leaving the grain behind.

DREW: I have to admit, if you’re big into the concept of multi-temperature, multi-step mashes (for various reasons), decoctions (please, why?), or worried about not hitting your temperatures precisely (stay calm and carry on), I can see the attraction of being able to directly heat your mash. You don’t need the direct heating capability for your whole mash. If you must adjust temperature, you can always add a little hot water or pull a small portion of the mash, heat it to a boil while stirring and add it back the main mash. The latter is known as a decoction mash and, yes, I know what I just said. I just don’t like decoctions as a necessary thing in your mash.

When we first started brewing, the solution everyone sought was a big stainless steel pot with a fancy false bottom or slotted copper pipes. Oh, the copper pipes that we used to diligently hacksaw slots into every quarter inch … the sheer numbing boredom leading to slipped attention, leading to a slipped blade, leading to sudden blood loss via hacksaw. Those were fun times and made all-grain an adventure!

While there are a lot of things that can satisfy the above requirements, the easy, inexpensive solution is a picnic cooler and some stainless steel hose braid. A 48 to 70-quart (45–66 L) cooler is a perfect vessel for a mash tun for 5 to 10-gallon batches (19–38 L). Coolers are made of food-grade HDPE (high-density polyethylene) that is safe up to 248°F (120°C) for short periods and good for extended use up to 230°F (110°C), which is a lot hotter than our mash will ever get!

Why did people futz with pots and slots and whatnot? We think it as a case of, “That’s what the big guys use—they have metal pots they can heat!” Lots of folks believed you had to be able to heat the mash through multiple steps in order to brew proper beer. Never mind that countless breweries in beer havens like Belgium have the big equivalent of our cooler: an unheatable, separate lauter tun with just a screen.

To build your Cheap ’n’ Easy mash tun, you’ll need the following parts:

Figure 4.2. The parts for a do-it-yourself mash tun are relatively cheap and simple. Pictured here is a stainless steel hose braid, some vinyl tubing, hose clamps, and a mini-keg bung. You’ll also need food-grade silicone sealer and, obviously, a picnic cooler.

• • 48–70 qt. (45–66 L) cooler. The Coleman Xtreme® is one brand of cooler that works really well, although there are others. You want to look for a drain spigot that can be removed (there will be a nut inside the cooler) and can be replaced with a ball valve. That will ensure you get complete draining.
• • Stainless steel hose braid. First, a word of warning: there are plastic braids that look like stainless steel. Don’t get one of those! Between the weight of the grain and the heat, plastic braid will collapse and not drain properly. Denny uses Lasco brand hoses, part # 10-0121. Drew uses some military-spec braid that’s about as big around as most people’s wrists. Yeah, he’s an overachiever!
• • 6–8 feet of ⅜-inch ID (inner diameter) vinyl tubing (1.8–2.4 m, 10 mm ID)
• • ⅜-inch (10 mm) plastic ball valve
• • 3 hose clamps
• • Mini-keg bung
• • Silicone sealer/adhesive (food grade)

DREW: Want to witness the silliest holy war ever? Look online for raging debates over which cooler is better—the blue or red Coleman!

Start by unscrewing the nut inside the cooler for the drain spigot on the cooler and remove it. Put a thin bead of the silicone around the hole inside the cooler. Insert the mini-keg bung into the hole from the inside, with the conical part going in first so that the flange on the bung lays flat against the inside of the cooler. Give it at least 15 minutes or overnight for the silicone to set up.

While the silicone dries, let’s take the hose out of the braid. The braid is all we’re interested in using. Start by cutting each end (with the threaded fittings) off of the hose. Denny uses the brute force approach and chops the ends off with a hatchet. Feel free to use a more refined method, like a Dremel® tool or hacksaw, if you have one. Once the ends have been removed, gently push each end of the braid towards the middle. That will expand the braid and allow you to pull the hose out of it. Discard the hose or use it for some other important household project. Fold about ½ inch of one end of the braid over on itself three times and either smack it with a hammer or pinch it with pliers to keep it closed.

Next, cut off about 6 inches of your vinyl tubing. Slip the open end of the braid over one end of the tubing and secure it with a hose clamp. You want the clamp tight enough to hold the braid on, but be careful not to crank it down too much or you’ll close off the tubing. Push the other end of the tubing through the mini-keg bung from inside the cooler (fig. 4.3). You want about equal amounts of the tubing inside and outside the cooler. On the outside, insert one side of the plastic ball valve into the tubing from the cooler and secure it with a hose clamp. Attach the remaining tubing to the other side of the valve using your last hose clamp (fig. 4.4). The tubing should be tight enough in the mini-keg bung that it doesn’t leak, but if yours isn’t tight enough just use some silicone sealer.

Figure 4.3. Inside view of the mash tun, showing the braid construction.

Figure 4.4. An assembled cooler mash tun showing the ball valve and connected vinyl tubing.

DREW: This is Denny’s classic rig. As alluded to earlier, I use a massive braid that came from a shielded military video communications cable that a fellow brewer dug out of a scrapyard for cheap. (Scrapyards are a handy brewer’s best friend. Handy brewers are a DIY-hapless [like me] brewer’s best friend.) My braid is hooked up to some copper plumbing fittings and then secured by silicone tubing to a 1/2-inch stainless ball valve. It’s hearty and will outlast the cooler. Actually, strike that—it will outlast me. Look upon my mash tun, ye mighty, and despair!

And that’s it! Admittedly, Denny has had practice making a few of these, but excluding the drying time it only takes him about 15 minutes for the entire process.

OK, the tun is dun … er, done! Let’s mash something!

Mashing

We need to start by converting the starches in the grain into sugars we can ferment. We activate the enzymes that carry out this conversion by soaking the grain in hot water. Most mashes take place at temperatures between about 148°F (64°C) and 158°F (70°C), but the exact temperature is recipe and style dependent.

Hitting your temperatures

In order to hit your mash temperature, you need to account for heat loss from your cooler and the grain. In most cases, heating the water in your hot liquor tank to about 15°F (~8°C) hotter than the desired mash temperature works well, but it will depend on ambient temperature, grain temperature, and the amount of grain and water you’re using. (How much water should you use for your mash? We look at how you can calculate this below.)

DREW: For me, the difference is usually about 12°F (~7°C), but I live in Southern California, where my garage is barely below mash temperatures some days.

Most people use some sort of software to calculate how hot to make their mash water. Beersmith™, Promash, and Brewer’s Friend are popular calculators, but if you look around the internet you can find a lot of different ones. Or you can use the old method of trial and error. Start by making your mash water 10–15°F (6–8°C) hotter than your desired mash temperature and see where that gets you. It may not be exactly where you wanted it to be, but you’ll still make beer! Take careful notes and adjust things the next time you brew.

Add grain to water

Add your heated mash water to your mash tun and then add your grain.

DREW: I measure my water volume before heating and then dump the whole thing into my cooler.

DENNY: I measure my water after heating and use a plastic half-gallon pitcher to scoop water out of the pot and add it to the tun.

Once all the water is in the tun, slowly pour in the grain as you stir. By stirring as you add grain, you minimize the chance of “dough balls.” Dough balls are lumps of grain that stick together, meaning that they stay dry inside. If the grain isn’t in contact with the water, you can’t convert those starches, so make sure to stir thoroughly as you pour in the grain. Some folks use a special “mash paddle” to do this, but in reality almost anything works as long as it’s sturdy! Lots of people swear by a massive wire balloon whisk to really work the grain out.

DENNY: Through the many years and batches I’ve brewed, I’ve developed a “stirring regimen” I’ll pass on to you. As I begin adding the grain, I keep my spoon almost parallel to the cooler and stir the top few inches in a circular motion. This helps to break up dough balls, which tend to float on the surface. Once all the grain has been added, I stir from the bottom to the top of the tun, lifting up grain as I do. I also stir lengthwise, parallel to the braid, which helps prevent the braid from being caught up by the spoon. As I stir, I stick a thermometer in the mash at different places and depths. I continue stirring until I get about the same temperature reading any place I check. This can take three to five minutes. Don’t worry, you won’t lose too much heat!

DREW: And in the continuing saga of “well, that’s not how I do it,” I usually add a small base of water (say a few inches in the bottom) to my cooler, add the grain in a stream and keep stirring until everything is the right consistency and temperature. I think I started doing it this way because I’m doing 10-gallon batches single-handedly.

Calculating Your Mash Water Volume

We’ve been pretty vague about specifics when it comes to water, because that would mean we have to do some math to determine how much to use. There are a lot of theories about how water volume will affect your mash, but in the end that variable has a minimal effect on beer flavor in terms of how it effects conversion. What it can affect is your efficiency—how much sugar you get out of the grain. Obviously, more is better!

A QUICK LOOK AT EFFICIENCY

Efficiency is a measure of how much sugar you get from the grain compared to a theoretical maximum. Each type of grain will vary a bit, but in general you can expect a theoretical maximum of 36 gravity points for each pound of grain in each gallon of water (i.e., 36 PPG). In other words, if your mash and lauter process were an inhumanely perfect 100% efficient, one pound of grain mashed in one gallon of water will yield a specific gravity of 1.036.

For example, if you mash 1 pound of grain in 1 gallon of water and get a specific gravity of 1.027, your efficiency is 75% (i.e., 27∕36 = 0.75). Make sense? Many homebrew systems will average between 70% and 80% efficiency without much problem.

Homebrewers usually mash with 1.25 qt. of water for every pound of grain (this equates to 2.6 L per kilogram). But if you mash with more water, you can get a higher efficiency. Now, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all for homebrewing, but more is better. By using 1.5–2 qt. per pound of grain (3.1–4.2 L/kg) you can gain a few extra points of efficiency.

The key to figuring out how much to use is to look at the final volume you want to boil. Ideally, half of that volume will come from the mash and the other half from the sparge. You don’t have to be exact. Actually, if they’re within a gallon of each other you’ll be fine.

DREW: Meanwhile, I’ve run a number of brew sessions sticking to the 1.25 qt./lb. ratio and having massively skewed second water additions. Beer still drinks good!

But there’s a catch … isn’t there always? You are starting with dry grain, which means it will absorb water. Generally, the rate of absorption is about 0.5 qt. for every pound of grain (roughly 1 L/kg), so you’ll have to take that into account for your mash.

Let’s walk through an example by assuming you want to boil 7 gal. of wort. That means we want to get about 3.5 gal. out of the mash. Let’s also assume your recipe calls for 12 lb. of grain. We know that 12 lb. will absorb 6 qt. of water (because 12 × 0.5 = 6), which is equal to 1.5 gal. Add that 1.5 gal. to the 3.5 gal. you want to end up with and you’ll find that comes out to 5 gal. of water to use in the mash. That didn’t hurt too much, did it?

(Exercise left to the reader: How much water do you need to heat up for the sparge? The answer is 3.5 gallons, naturally, because the grain is already wet and won’t absorb more.)

So, assuming you want a mash temperature of 153°F, you’d heat 5 gal. of water 15°F higher to 168°F and add to your tun before stirring in your grain. Software may get you a bit closer, but that’s a pretty accurate seat-of-your-pants method to get you started.

Batch Sparge

After the mash sits in the hot water in your tun for the recipe-recommended amount of time, it’s time to drain it into your boil kettle. But first, we want to clarify it a bit. For this step you’ll need an extra container, something like the half-gallon pitcher Denny mentioned earlier. Put the end of the tubing coming from the mash tun into the pitcher and crack the valve slightly open until wort starts to slowly flow. As you’re doing this, look through the tube and down into the pitcher. What you’re looking for is pieces of grain and husk … we don’t want those! These pieces should start to clear up after a quart or so (~1 L). We’re not looking for so clear that you can read a newspaper through it, we’re looking for free of chunks and grain pieces. Once it looks clear, transfer the end of the tubing to your boil kettle and slowly pour the wort in your pitcher back over the top of the grain in your mash tun. The grain bed along with your braid acts as a filter, keeping your final beer from being too chunky. If you want to impress people (well, nerds anyway) you can tell them that the term for this process of recirculating the wort until it clears is vorlauf, from the German word, vorläufig. They probably won’t throw things at you.

DREW: When I first started brewing, I learned to fly sparge, which we won’t cover because it’s well documented and annoying, although it has its adherents. When fly sparging, common practice is to not open the valve all the way, and even though I’ve batch sparged for more than a decade, I still leave the valve halfway open at most. It only really costs me time.

Once you have returned the wort in your pitcher to the mash tun, you can open up the valve all the way and let ‘er rip! You can turn on the heat for your kettle at this point in order to get a jump on boiling, but keep it fairly low. Once you have collected all the wort you can, crank it up and get boiling!

RECIPE

Bloody Head Stout

DREW: Sometimes brewing requires a blood offering to atone for whatever sins against beer we’ve committed. After my first book was released (The Everything Homebrewing Book3) I was flush with pride and decided to buy a new kettle (actually still my main kettle, 26 gallons). To christen the pot, I decided I had to tackle a stout. In the middle of the boil my garage door slammed into my skull, dosing the beer with a bit of me. Turns out the beer was great, but ouch.

Batch size: 5.5 gal. (21 L)

Original gravity: 1.067 (16.4°P)

Final gravity: 1.014 (3.6°P)

Color: 40 SRM

Bitterness: 37 IBU

ABV: 7.0%

Malt

• • 7.0 lb. (3.2 kg) Maris Otter malt
• • 3.0 lb. (1.36 kg) US-grown Pilsner malt
• • 1.0 lb. (450 g) British 55°L crystal malt
• • 1.0 lb. (450 g) flaked oats
• • 0.75 lb. (340 g) roasted barley
• • 0.25 lb. (115 g) Weyerman Carafa^® III Special malt, debittered

Hops

• • 0.6 oz. (17 g) Magnum 12.9% AA @ 60 min.
• • 0.75 oz. (21 g) Crystal 3.25% AA @ 20 min.
• • 1.0 oz. (28 g) Amarillo 8.5% AA @ knockout

Yeast

• • Wyeast 1056, WLP001, or Safale US-05

Brewing notes

• • Mash at 153°F (67°C) for 60 minutes.
• • Add hops according to schedule.
• • Chill and pitch yeast.
• • Ferment at 65–68°F (18–20°C) until done.

OTHER MASHING REGIMENS

Short Mash and Boil

Traditionally, a mash lasts for 60–90 minutes and a boil is about an hour. Why? Well, because that’s the way it’s always been! But in chapter 2 we talked about a recipe that requires only 20 minutes each for mashing and boiling. What’s up with that? Well, a couple of things.

First, malt these days is a lot more modified than it was 200 (or even 20) years ago. Modification refers to the degree to which the enzymes have released starches from the kernel during malting. The more highly modified the malt is, the more quickly and easily it releases the starches and breaks them down during the mash. There are ways to determine the degree of modification by looking at the soluble/total protein ratio (called the Kolbach index). However, you can safely assume that any grain not billing itself as “undermodified” can convert during a short mash. (Undermodified malts are used to recreate older styles like classic Pilsners, but the stuff is hard to find and a real complication to your brew day, which is what we’re explicitly avoiding!)

An hour boil is likely a holdover from the days when longer boils were needed to deal with inferior malts, efficiencies, and concentrations of wort. Also, boiling hops for an hour is an efficient way to get the most bittering from the least amount of hops, but you can make up for that by simply using more hops for less time. One of the greatest advantages of being a homebrewer is that our ingredient costs are incredibly low. Commercial breweries strive for better efficiency and utilization numbers because the extra costs cut into their very narrow profits. What’s another buck or two to us hobbyists? If you’re parsimonious, feel free to squeeze every drop of sugar from the malt. For us, we’ll take the extra time we save.

It’s true that mashing for a longer time will increase the fermentability of the wort, but that makes a minimal difference that really doesn’t matter for most homebrewers. If you’re mashing for a style that wants a very dry finish, like a Belgian tripel, where you want to have maximum fermentability, then mashing for 60–90 minutes might make a bit of a difference. Part of deciding how long to mash is based on how fermentable you want your wort to be. The longer you mash, the more time the enzymes have to break down less-fermentable sugars into more fermentable sugars. So, for something like a Pilsner or tripel, where you want a very light, crisp body, a longer mash can help you get there. But it’s a very subtle effect, and the fact is that most malts made these days are so fermentable that you may get very little of that added effect for your investment of time.

So, if you’ve got a tight schedule, a 30-minute mash and 20-minute boil will suffice for almost any style that we enjoy. A rule of thumb for hopping short boils is to use twice as much hops by weight than you would use for a 60-minute boil. That will get you darn close the same IBU level, or you can use software if you want to get closer.

You’ll also want to crush the grain as fine as your lautering system allows. If you’re using the same braid that Denny uses (see “The Cheap ’n’ Easy Mash Tun” above), you can crush very fine. The same goes if you use a bag in your mash tun as a lauter system. By crushing as fine as possible, you make sure that as much starch as possible is exposed to the mash water. That will help ensure complete conversion during your short mash.

RECIPE

30-Minute Man Tripel

Batch size: 5.5 gal. (21 L)

Original gravity: 1.084 (20.2°P)

Final gravity: 1.015 (3.8°P)

Color: 3.8 SRM

Bitterness: 20 IBU

ABV: 9.4%

Boil: 30 minutes

Malt/Sugar

• • 15.5 lb. (7 kg) Pilsner malt
• • 1.5 lb. (680 g) table sugar

Hops

• • 1 oz. (28 g) Magnum 12% AA @ 30 min.

Yeast

• • Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity

Brewing notes

• • Single infusion mash at 150°F (66°C) for 30 min.
• • Mash quick, run off, and boil for 30 min.
• • Chill to 63–65°F (17–18°C) and pitch with a healthy pitch of yeast.
• • Ferment until done—usually 2 weeks based on the fall of the krausen and activity of fermentation.

Overnight/Extended Mashing

Denny usually uses the downtime during his mash for household chores … cleaning, laundry, that kind of thing. Not only is it an efficient use of time, but it does wonders for marital harmony. But how about taking that downtime during mashing one step further? In keeping with the line in Denny’s chapter 1 mantra about “the least effort possible,” how about mashing while you sleep? It just doesn’t get easier than that!

Sitting at the other end of the mash spectrum, a long mash, even overnight, can really make your brew day shorter and easier. Imagine if you get a mash going during your lunchtime from work, or before you go to bed at night, and finish the brew after work or the next day. Two short brew days beats one long one!

Just as a short mash doesn’t make a huge difference to the fermentability of your wort or the quality of the finished beer, neither does a really long mash. The minimal increase in fermentability can either be ignored or compensated for by adding a bit of less fermentable malt (like crystal or Carapils®) to your grist.

There’s one worry about an overnight mash, and that’s having the temperature fall so low (i.e., below 140°F, or 60°C) that bacteria, like the intense souring agent Lactobacillus, begin to grow on your grain. There are several ways to avoid this:

• • Wrapping your mash tun in a blanket or sleeping bag overnight will help hold in the heat. Not to mention, think how much your mash will appreciate being put to bed for the night!
• • You might also want to try overshooting your targeted mash temperature by a bit. For example, if you’re targeting 153°F (67°C), shoot for 157°F (69.5°C) when you actually mash in. The extra few degrees won’t have a major effect on your beer and they’ll give you a bit of a cushion as the temperature falls overnight.
• • There’s another path you can take … go ahead and do your mash and sparge, and then bring the wort up to boiling for a minute, or at least 170°F (77°C) for 10 minutes. The heat will pasteurize the wort. Then you can use the lid of your kettle, aluminum foil, or some other clever method to seal your kettle overnight. The next day, you bring your wort to a boil and continue as normal.

Whichever of the above methods you choose, you’ll shorten your brew day. Or from another point of view, you get to extend the fun for two days!

Brew-In-A-Bag: One-Pot Brewing

The whole mash tun system we’ve described above, well, it shouldn’t surprise you that it’s not the only way to brew, just the most common. Walk into a professional brewery today and you’d be able to suss out the same elements: a vessel designed to hold a mass of hot grain and then separate the sugary liquid from the remaining solid mass. There have been other systems, like the historically common “shove a woven basket strainer into the mash and ladle out the liquid that flows into the basket.” (Can we admit that if that was still the way we brewed, few of us would?)

Our equally beer-mad and possibly more frugal brewing compatriots in Australia turned the whole lautering notion on its head. What if, instead of creating a vessel that you removed the liquid from, you created a way to remove the grain from the liquid?

That thought resulted in “Brew in a Bag” and no surprise, it’s like using a massive tea bag full of grain. The BIAB notion is the pinnacle of simplicity. Take a finely woven bag, something sturdy and heat resistant like nylon or polyester, and fill it with your crushed grain. Fill your boil kettle with all of the water that you’d use for a traditional sparge (remember, mash ratio isn’t a super impactful thing in the light of other variables). Heat the water, drop the bag into the water, and work it to fully wet the grain.

Allow the bag and water to rest for the mash, like you would in a cooler-built mash tun. When the mash timer is done, lift the bag and suspend it above the pot. For smaller batches, you can put it in a colander; for larger batches, you’ll see brewers rigging up winches to hold the bag above the kettle. Now just let the bag drain. To improve efficiency (a common early complaint lobbed against BIAB), most brewers will don thick gloves and squeeze the bag to work out the liquid. Old brewing practices cautioned against squeezing the bags of grain for fear of tannin extraction, but it’s pretty clear that tannin extraction is a chemical process that you don’t need to worry about (except in extreme cases). Squeeze away! Your muscles ain’t pulling harsh flavors into the beer.

The early homemade bags were made from cheap muslin fabric. The fine weave keeps the grain in while letting the liquid out. These days, if you’re so inclined, you can find custom-made bags from tougher materials.

The major advantage of BIAB is massive savings, both in money and space. Even Denny’s vaunted “Cheap ’n’ Easy” tun is more expensive than the cost of a mesh bag. You also have less gear to store and the path to upgrade from extract brewing to all-grain has never been simpler.

How do you really do BIAB? How about we turn to an expert with our next profile! In the first of two profiles that bring this chapter to a close, we take a look at how Chip Walton tackles BIAB. Our second profile introduces Jeremy Jalabert, who is living proof that you can turn out award-winning all-grain beers while spending less than four hours on your brew day.

DREW: Some additional tips from my attempts to split my brew over a few days. Lactobacillus is on every grain you use—it’s no big deal, but some brewers will attempt to do a “sour mash” and purposely leave the mash for long periods warm (24 hours or so). That can lead to some extraordinary off-flavors. We’ll cover a more surefire method of making quick sours later, but be really careful about leaving the mash for too long. This also applies if you’re just leaving the spent grain in your mash tun overnight. We’ve done that before and, oh boy, does it smell like death. (Seriously, don’t do this. You’ll wish your sense of smell had never been born.)

RECIPE

Overnight Scotch Ale

Batch size: 5.5 gal. (21 L)

Original gravity: 1.072 (17.5°P)

Final gravity: 1.018 (4.6°P)

Color: 22 SRM

Bitterness: 17 IBU

ABV: 7.4%

Boil: 60 minutes

Malt

• • 15 lb. (6.8 kg) Maris Otter malt
• • 6 oz. (170 g) roasted barley

Mash

• • Single infusion at 155°F (68°C) overnight (see Brewing notes).

Hops

• • 0.5 oz. (14 g) Target 11% AA @ 60 min.

Yeast

• • Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale

Brewing notes

• • Begin your mash at night, say, after work. Stir it up and close up your mash tun. If you’re not mashing in an insulated vessel, wrap your mash tun with blankets (make sure any flames are off!). In the morning, lauter as normal and make your beer. Ferment your Scotch ale on the lower side of ale fermentations, say 65°F (18°C).

PROFILES IN SIMPLICITY: CHIP WALTON TEACHES US ABOUT BREW-IN-A-BAG

Chip is a one-man video crew of homebrew madness. Back in the day, he joined Mike Dawson and Jake Keeler to launch and host a YouTube video show for the homebrew shop they worked for.

After leaving, Chip bounced around the beer industry, but never quite forgot his days of being a homebrew host. He now runs the YouTube channel, Chop & Brew, dedicated to brewing and chopping—I mean, cooking.* The Alabama native (now firmly ensconced in the snowy climes of Minneapolis), along with a stalwart crew of fellow homebrewers, brings you a series of misadventures and silliness, including some pretty rad home cooking.

We’ve both played with the BIAB method of mashing, but Chip is a master at it. So, do you want to learn from some scrubs or from someone who really walks the walk? Also, as a bonus, we include Chip’s King Cake Ale recipe that he made with some pointers from Drew. Look, it’s a homebrew twofer! Chip is originally from the Gulf Coast where King Cake is a pre-Lent tradition, so he wanted to make a beer in honor of his childhood.

Chip was a stalwart extract brewer, preferring to stay with syrups to keep his knowledge sharp for customers new to brewing. Plus, the level of seriousness he saw in his colleagues made all-grain seem more intimidating. Once Chip discovered BIAB in 2011 he went all-in, making both small and large batches of beer with his bag, kettle, and pristine, never-used-for-grilling grill grate. Over time, he’s settled into a happy medium of three gallons, feeling it’s the right balance of beer produced versus weight of all the wet grain.

Chip uses a thin mash ratio of 1.75 qt./lb. (3.65 L/kg). He clips his bag to the kettle and slowly streams in the grain, stirring gently to thoroughly wet all of the grain. When Chip wants to raise his mash temperature, he pulls the bag off the bottom before igniting the flame and “bouncing” the bag to keep everything moving. Once done with the main mash, he pulls the bag and sets it on a clean grill grate over the kettle to drain. He does do a fairly light sparge of a few quarts (~2 L) before letting the bag sit for a little longer. This is so he doesn’t have to squeeze the hot bag of grains.

But Chip’s main advice is to get yourself out there and brew. If he can brew outdoors in a Minnesota winter, what’s your excuse?

RECIPE

King Cake Ale

Batch size: 3 gal. (11.4 L), BIAB

Original gravity: 1.058 (14.3°P)

Final gravity: 1.018 (4.6°P)

Color: 34 SRM

Bitterness: 7 IBU

ABV: 5.2%

Boil: 60 minutes

Malt

• • 5.0 lb. (2.3 kg) Weyermann Barke^® Pilsner Malt
• • 1.0 lb. (450 g) flaked wheat
• • 0.5 lb. (225 g) Golden Naked Oats^®™
• • 0.33 lb. (150 g) aromatic malt

Hops

• • 0.75 oz. (21 g) Hallertau 4% AA @ 60 min.
• • 1.0 oz. (28 g) Lemondrop 6% AA @ 5 min.

Extras

• • 1 tbsp. (15 mL) cinnamon @ 5 min.
• • 1 oz. (28 g) dried lemon peel @ 5 min.

Yeast

• • Wyeast 1968 London ESB

Brewing notes

• • Mash at 153°F (67°C) for 60 minutes and remove the bag to a grill grate over your kettle to drain.
• • Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops and extra ingredients as per schedule.
• • Chill to the low 60s Fahrenheit (16–17.5°C) and pitch yeast.
• • Ferment at 65°F (18°C).

PROFILES IN SIMPLICITY: JEREMY JALABERT—AWARD-WINNING, BUSY DAD BREWER

Jeremy Jalabert is a busy guy. He works as a senior management analyst in the mental health field. I mean, just the title sounds daunting! He and his wife have two kids, ages four and eight, which keeps him even busier. But, somehow, Jeremy had enough time to crank out lots of award-winning batches to become the Oregon State Homebrewer of the Year for 2017. How does he do it?

Jeremy simplifies things. He uses his analyst skills to look at his process and decide what works and what doesn’t. He’s cut his equipment down to what’s essential, practical, and efficient. Consequently, Jeremy has cut his brew time without sacrificing quality. He’s living, breathing, award-winning proof that simplicity isn’t just for beginners!

Here’s Jeremy explaining some of his ideas:

The main things that speed up my brew day is a big kettle (22 gallons) and doing super-duper no-sparge. I abandon water-to-grist ratio and just fill that mash tun to maximum capacity, run off [without a pump] and get to boiling. I sold my fancy plate chiller, pump, bottle filler, etc., and use exclusively my JaDeD* chiller and I’ve shaved down my brew day from 8+ hours down to <one hour—not bad for ending up with 10–12 gallons of wort to ferment. I also typically only use Imperial Yeast^® straight up (note: Imperial yeast is sold with high cell counts, so for most beers it can be pitched directly without making a starter) or a slurry from a local brewery. I like starters, but it’s been way faster going my current route.

I’ve really focused on fast, but still really fun, brew days—and using only the freshest ingredients I can get my hands on (and can afford). I only bottle using the Gordon Strong PET bottle-style filling,† which saved hours of dealing with bottle fillers, etc. [We describe this method in chapter 3 here.] I also follow a lot of your recommendations: don’t drink much on brew day, clean all my gear as I go, have fun, experiment, etc. Lately, and this is going to sound soooo Eugene, Oregon, I’ve been brewing more with “vibes,” which is to say, I’m trying to brew a bit more intuitively on brew day. That is, when I see/smell/taste a variable, I call it good and don’t worry so much about the timer and exact temps, etc. This is partly due to my interest in brewing history and thinking that brewers way back in the day were probably using some “vibes” and less science to make their beer. My main thing these days is going back to basics, just with bigger-volume tools and more stainless steel.

We’re loving his “brewing with vibes” attitude! In 2017, Jeremy took Best of Show at the Sasquatch Homebrew Competition with his recipe for a “Glen Beer.” The competition honors the memory of brewer Glen Falconer, and includes a category for beers like he would have made. Denny wrote the style guidelines for it, and it’s been a mainstay of the competition for many years.

RECIPE

Glen Tribute Beer 2017

All-Grain Red IPA

Batch size: 12 gal. (45.4 L), BIAB

Original gravity: 1.072 (17.5°P)

Final gravity: 1.019 (4.8°P)

Color: 14 SRM

Bitterness: 125.5 IBU (Tinseth formula)

ABV: 7.0% (est.)

Malt

• • 16 lb. (7.26 kg) Vienna malt
• • 5.0 lb. (2.27 kg) pale malt (Jeremy used Maris Otter)
• • 4.0 lb. (1.8 kg) Munich malt
• • 3.0 lb. (1.36 kg) flaked rye
• • 2.0 lb. (910 g) Carared^®
• • 1.0 lb. (450 g) acid malt
• • 1.0 lb. (450 g) 40°L caramel/crystal malt
• • 0.5 lb. (225 g) roasted barley

Hops

• • 2.5 oz. (71 g) Magnum 12% AA first wort hop @ 60 min.
• • 2.0 oz. (56 g) Simcoe 13% AA @ 60 min.
• • 2.0 oz. (56 g) Centennial 10% AA @ 50 min.
• • 2.0 oz. (56 g) Centennial 10% AA @ steep/whirlpool
• • 2.0 oz. (56 g) Simcoe 13% AA @ steep/whirlpool

Yeast

Wyeast 1056

Brewing notes

• • Mash in with 11.5 gal. (1.4 qt./lb.) strike water at 166°F (74°C). Mash at 156°F (69°C) for 45 min.
• • Recycle first runnings and verify grain temperatures are 162°F (72°C).
• • Batch sparge with, 7.66 gal. of 168°F (76°C) water.
• • Boil 60 min.
• • 2 Whirlfloc^® tablets @ 15 min.
• • Pitch yeast at 65°F (18°C). After 3 days, let the temperature start rising to 68°F (20°C) for 3 days, then to 72°F (22°C) for 3–4 days. Fine with gelatin if desired, then bottle or keg.

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1 Patrick E. McGovern, Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 37–39.

2 Ibid., 97.

3 Beechum,The Everything Homebrewing Book (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2009).

* ChopAndBrew (YouTube user), Chop & Brew (webshow), https://www.youtube.com/user/ChopAndBrew/.

* The JaDeD Hydra chiller uses three concentric cooling coils connected to a single inlet and outlet, which, in effect, triples the chilling power.

† Strong, Brewing Better Beer: Master Lessons for Advanced Home Brewers (Boulder: Brewers Publications, 2011), 294–95; this method involves filling a clean one- or two-liter soda bottle, attaching a carbonator cap, then squeezing the air out and blanketing with CO₂.