Home Brewing Beer

I've been homebrewing for about ten years. I don't do it terribly often - once or twice a year, really - but it's an interesting hobby.

Bortnyk talks about using Clorox to sanitize everything before you start, which I do, too, but it's a bit overkill to use straight bleach. It's enough to fill one of those 5gal containers with water and put maybe a half-cup of bleach. It's more than enough to kill any bacteria on the relevant surfaces.

The Clorox wipes are a good tip, though. I hadn't really thought about those.

The process he's describing uses malt extracts. They're created by a process called "mashing", which takes the raw grains, allows them to germinate, then roasts them a bit. This causes some of the starches to be turned into sugars, which are extracted by soaking the grains in hot water. They then reduce it by boiling off some of the water, which takes it down to a syrupy extract. It's very convenient.

It's also possible to do "full mash" brewing, in which you do the mash yourself. Purists tend to push full mash brewing. Personally, I like "partial mash" brewing, which steeps some actual grains in the wort (between steps 3 and 4 in Bortnyk's description). I think it gives a little better taste without all the hassle of full mash brewing.

Also, if you can, I'd recommend finding a brewer's supply shop that sells the malt extract in bulk, rather than the cans. Sometimes the cans spend too much time on the shelf. If they sell in bulk, they're turning over their inventory fast enough that you're getting better stuff.

Personally, I'd skip step 4 entirely. The gypsum and salt is more about softening hard water than anything else - if your water tastes fine coming out of the tap, then just use it. The malto-dextrin is a relatively unfermentable sugar that adds "body" and "mouth feel" to the beer. Purists would say you don't need it.

Actually, the old German Reinheitsgebot (the "Beer Purity Law") says beer may only contain water, barley, hops, and yeast. (The malt extract is the barley product in this process.)

If you brew fairly often, it's worth investing in a wort chiller. It's about 20' of coiled copper tubing that you can attach to the faucet of your sink. You sanitize it with everything else, then, when the boil's done, you put the copper tubing in the hot wort and run cold water through it and down the sink. It brings the temperature down much more quickly than the ice bath. They run about $50-$60, and can easily be the biggest expense in your whole kit, but it's worth the investment. Less time cooling off means less risk of contamination.

After the beer's done fermenting and you're ready to bottle it, what you've basically got is flat beer. The point of adding the sugar to the bottling bucket is to give the yeast a little more food so it'll produce some CO2 in the bottle. Purists prefer not to do this. Instead, they use a trick known as "krausening" - for a five-gallon batch like this, you siphon off about a liter of the wort before or during the chilling step. That goes in the fridge through the primary fermentation, and then you use that instead of the sugar mixture to prime the yeast for bottling.

The bottling process can go a lot more quickly if you get a bottle filler. It's a plastic tube with a valve in the tip. You attach one end to the spigot on the bucket, push the other end into the bottle and press the valve-tip against the bottle's bottom. When the bottle fills up to the very top, you pull it out - the valve closes stopping the beer flow, and the volume of the tube in the bottle leaves just the right amount of head space in the bottle. They're pretty cheap - around $3.

It's also possible to keg your beer instead of bottling it. It's more expensive - basically, you're buying those commercial cannisters that they use for soda. Very convenient, but expensive. I've personally never gone that route, so I can't offer any real advice.

It's a fun hobby - you get good beer, it's not terribly expensive (per batch), and the process is fairly educational.

If you don't want to invest in the wort chiller I mentioned before, here's another trick for cooling the wort a bit more quickly than an ice bath.

If you follow the steps, you'll notice that you start with 2.5 gallons of water (step 1), into which you put some malt extract - typically a quart or two (step 3) - and then somehow manage to pour 5 gallons of cooled mixture into the fermentation bucket.

What actually happens is that you pour about three gallons of cooled wort into the fermentation bucket, and then fill it the rest of the way to the 5 gallon line with water.

The trick I wanted to mention is that you can actually use ice instead of some or even all of the water. One pound of ice is equal to one pint of water. So once the wort comes off the boil, pour it into the fermentation bucket and pour two five pound bags of ice in there. The ice will melt, becoming five quarts (1.25 gallons) of water. Top it off to the 5 gallon mark and you're ready to go.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.