Today is brew day

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

I'm mashing the grain

Here's my recipe
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Cliff’s all grain Pale Ale
Produces 5 gallons beer

Grains should be slightly cracked leaving hulls in place
Water Ph start at 5.2Ph Adjust as necessary

The Mash:
1.) Mash the grain in 3.28 gallons of well boiled water (Strike Water) boiled and lowered to 165Deg-F
.............(i) Goal: to get the volume in the Mash Tun to 151Deg-F.
.............(ii) Start the strike water around 165 Deg-F
2.) Hold at 151-F for 75 minutes.
3.) A gallon (or more) of the strike water is added at the end of the mash
.............(i) Strike Water is well boiled.
.............(ii) This addition of Strike water is meant to raise the mash temp to 170-F
.............(iii) Hold at 170 F for 15 minutes This kills the enzymes
4.) GRAIN amounts.
.............(i) Pale Malt Maris Otter 8 pounds
.............(ii) Aromatic Malt 0.5 pound
.............(iii) Munich Malt 0.5 pound
.............(iv) Carafoam 0.4 pound
.............(v) Carared 0.4 pound
.............(vi) Caramel/Crystal Malt 0.4 pounds
.............(vii) Wheat Malt, Belgian 0.4 pounds
.............(viii) Barley, Flaked 2.08 ounces

Now you have wort.

Lautering:
1.) Rinse the wart back through the grain husks and other material till the wart runs clear.
.............(i) Method ONE: use any vessel, draw wort off the mash tun and pour it back through the settled grain till it runs clear of crap.
.............(ii) Method Two: Run the whole volume into a carboy then siphon back down through the grains till it’s clear of crap



Conventional Sparge: (I'm not using this method today. I'm batch sparging instead)
1.) Sparge water is well boiled 168-Deg –F
2.) Time 75 – 90 minutes
3.) Sparge water 3 gallons
4.) Flow 1.5 Gallons @ 15 minutes
5.) When Wort runs clear Sparge with the remainder of hot water necessary to complete the volume in your Secondary Fermenter.
6.) The Sparge water is run through the mashed grains to capture any residual sugars in the mashed grain.
7.) Combine all the wart and sparge products in one container and Chill the Wart.

✔✔Batch Sparge:
1.) Draw off all the wort First.
2.) Sparge water is well boiled 168-Deg –F
3.) Time 30 minutes
4.) Sparge water 3 gallons
Add a few extra pounds of base grains to compensate for efficiency losses


The boil:
1.) Use a tube to drain the wort from the Tun to the kettle Don’t spash it in ( it may pick up things in the air) .
2.) Bring wort to a boil TIME 75 Minutes
3.) Make a Stick with Carved Gallon Markers on it that fits your Boil pot.
4.) TIME THE BOIL

Hopping:
1.) Once a boil is achieved mark the time.
2.) put hops in nylon sacks (7 nylon sacks needed)
(i) 2 packs: Liberty 1 oz
(ii) 1 pack: Pearle 0.5oz
(iii) 0 packs: Styrian Golding
(iv) 0 packs Amarillo
(v) 0 packs Cascade
(vi) 3 packs BLEND HOPS: .5oz BLEND @: Amarillo 7.8%, Cascade 4.0% Styrian Golding 5.9% (3/4, less than 1/2, little more than 1/2)
(vii) 1 pack 1oz BLEND: Amarillo 7.8%, Cascade 4.0% Styrian Golding 5.9% (3/4, less than 1/2, little more than 1/2)

3.) 10 minute mark Add Pearle at the leave in 60 minutes
4.) 10 Minute Mark Add BURTON SALTS
5.) 45 minute Mark Add Liberty 0.5oz
6.) 30 minute mark: Add Liberty
7.) 60 minute mark Add BLEND 0.5oz
8.) 65 minute mark Add BLEND 0.5oz
9.) 70 minute mark Add BLEND 0.5oz
10.) Half-Whirlfloc-tab Added at the last 15 minutes of boil.
.............(i) on flame out stir into a large spinning whirl
.............(ii) let settle before siphoning off
.............(iii) only use half a tablet
11.) Muck the Glim: & add BLEND Hops 1oz for 10-15 minutes


Wart Chilling
1.) Chilling water is well boiled water frozen in clean containers
2.) Add the sterile ice to the wart to lower the temperature to a little less than 80Deg-F

Yeast casting:
1.) With wort in the primary fermenter at 80 Deg F or less add yeast to the wort and place tight lid on with CO2 trap. Wyeast 1968 London ESB Activator.
.............(i) this yeast can tolerate 10% alcohol.
(ii) Can add sugar if desired.

Primary ferment:
1.) Ferment till foaming stops ( a week or less)
2.) Use a Fermentation Trap
3.) Then transfer to glass secondary fermenter.

Second Ferment:
1.) Put Wort in Glass fermenter add a touch corn sugar (less than an ounce) and install Fermentation Trap
2.) Ferment till bubbles stop and yeast settles.

Bottling:
1.) Siphon Beer off to a holding Carboy making sure not to transfer any yeast from the bottom of glass fermenter.
2.) Add carbonizing sugar 4oz stir and bottle.
3.) Hold in bottles for 1 – 2 weeks before consuming.

[Ted Calver]

Cliff,
You need your mad scientist hat on when you do all that mixing and boiling. I was thinking of trying to make some , but you scared me away. I'l just buy the microbrew stuff :)

[Wayne Sparkman]

Cliff:

May I share your recipe on another list (non-woodworking)?

[Eric Larsen]

What's your fermentation temp?

1968 has a tendency to heat 5-8f as it ferments. I don't like the taste (ester production) if it's allowed to ferment anywhere above 70f.

I'd keep the carboy at 68 until fermentation takes off, then lower it to 62 just to be safe.


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Also, considering the technical complexity of your brew schedule, you may as well do a step mash -- dough in, acid rest, amalase A, amalase B, strike out.

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Are you using pellet hops? Plugs? Whole leaf?

If the answer is "pellet," what's the deal with the nylon bags? If the answer is "plugs or leaf," why not just make a hop jack and drop your aroma infusion into it?

A hop jack will work well with the wort chiller described below.

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Why the burton salts at the boil? It's better to add them to your mash water. You'll get better extraction that way -- you may actually be able to reduce your grain bill. (Assuming your water is not hard enough for mashing an English Pale Ale.)

EDIT -- Also, I don't think 75 minutes is long enough. Are you doing starch tests? Seems to me there would still be some unconverted starch at 75. I never mash for less than 90. And I do a starch test every time. Bacteria loves starch, yeast does not.

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Finally, you'll never get repeatable results if you're using ice to chill your wort. (Unless you are using the exact same volume of ice every time).

A cheap wort chiller can be fashioned out of copper tubing, and a five gallon plastic bucket. Make a coil that you can connect to your boil kettle -- either a "J" over the rim, or attached to a spigot on the kettle. The coil goes into the bucket. Heavily iced salt water goes into the bucket. Then use gravity (and suction, if you did the J-hook thing) to send the wort through the copper pipe into your carboy. Two coils and two buckets is ideal. To sanitize the coils, just drop them into the kettle for a few minutes as the wort boils.

[Eric Larsen]

Cliff,
You need your mad scientist hat on when you do all that mixing and boiling. I was thinking of trying to make some , but you scared me away. I'l just buy the microbrew stuff :)

Homebrewers brew because they love to do it. There's also the pride of making it yourself. (And it's really not hard. You can get as complex as you want. But a basic recipe is no harder than making barley "oatmeal," straining it, then boiling the liquid with hops, allow to cool, and dump in some yeast.) Keeping the yeast happy is basically the hardest part.

But brewers won't save any money brewing five gallons at a time (when you factor in the equipment outlay to brew a high-quality beer). And it takes MORE time to brew five gallons than it does to brew 500 gallons. I can kick out a batch of basic pale in four hours -- including cleanup time. Most homebrewers are hampered by the fact they don't have 1/2 million BTU boilers, and 10 cubic foot counter-flow chillers. Fermentation takes the same amount of time whether it's 5 gallons or 5,000. So there is a huge economy of scale in brewing.

Most homebrewers bottle condition their beer -- which is a great thing. But it also means they have to cellar their bottles to properly age and carbonate. That adds to the time and cost. One of my friends has 1,000 swing-top bottles to handle the volume -- and his house always smells like a brewery because bottles will burst.

Filtering and kegging is a better way to go, but leads to even more equipment. By the time brewers get to that level, they really should just open a brewpub and be done with it.

I know more than one nutcase who has high-end equipment in the back yard, though. Morebeer.com caters to those who want to brew by the barrel.

I'll occasionally make a 5-gallon batch just to test a recipe small scale (and keep my equipment in working order). But I don't really enjoy making small batches anymore. Once you start using clover clamps and two-inch hoses, there's really no looking back.

[Josh Reet]

Man I really hope that I can get going on some homebrewing this winter. I've had the gear for a while now, just no time.

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Cliff:

May I share your recipe on another list (non-woodworking)?

You betchya

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

What's your fermentation temp?

1968 has a tendency to heat 5-8f as it ferments. I don't like the taste (ester production) if it's allowed to ferment anywhere above 70f.

mid 60s F

Single infusion works pretty well for this


Are you using pellet hops? Plugs? Whole leaf?[quote]
I had to take the Golding as a pellet


[quote]- Also, I don't think 75 minutes is long enough.
I’ve not complained about it yet. However, too long will extract tannins.



A cheap wort chiller can be fashioned out of copper tubing,
I had a stainless steel one. Stolen by a psychopath.

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Cliff,
You need your mad scientist hat on when you do all that mixing and boiling. I was thinking of trying to make some , but you scared me away. I'l just buy the microbrew stuff :)

You don't have to make a project of it.

I started brewing years ago back before there was an internet (1982) and the yeast selection like three types and the hop choices was tragically shallow. Yet using Extracts and a small stove top enamel pot from K mart I made damn good bear: As good and often better than the best commercial beers of the day. Hell I didn't even know you shouldn't use city water. So I did. I had no problems.

If you go all extracts the process becomes very streamlined and straightforward. I got into brewing because I wanted good beer but didn't have the coin for it.
Go for it~!!
Make a batch of beer from extract. Fet a "kit" but be sure to get a glass secondary fermenter ($40.00). See if you don't fall in love with brewing. In ten years you'll be ogling conical SST fermenters.

[Eric Larsen]

I’ve not complained about it yet. However, too long will extract tannins.

Too long a mash (well, up to six hours or so) will not extract tannins (OK, if you want to get technical, yes, it will extract SOME tannins, but not really enough for humans to detect)

Too long or too hot a sparge will extract a lot tannins. (Ten times the taste threshold.)

One brewer to another, do a starch test. Even if it's the low-tech iodine test. You probably have some iodine in your medicine cabinet anyway, so where's the harm?.

Converting more starch makes for better beers and easier fermentation. (You can't convert all the starch unless you want to go Japanese and add Koji to the mash and Bean-O (almost pure amalase) to the fermenter)

With less residual starch in your wort, you'll have a higher initial gravity, a lower terminal gravity, vastly improved mouthfeel and less danger of bacterial infection.

There's simply no downside.

[Ted Calver]

OK...now Eric scared me away too!! :) :)

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

I haven't used iodine because the diastatic factor in modern malts is pretty good given a conversion in about 40 minutes (75- 80 minute mash should do) and the probability that I'll get sufficient malt fines in the test sample to give me a false reading. I suppose I could run it through a coffee filter paper. That might exclude enough maybe.

I didn't know about mold kome koji rice, koji kin (moldy rice) or Bean-o.

Google and the internet really do take the learning curve to another level
http://www.leeners.com/sake.html

What does Bean-o do in the fermenter in terms of taste?
How much do you use?
What if there's insufficient starch?
Here:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/stuck-1-021-esb-bean-o-139394/
They are talking about Bean-O and the general trend is to not use it. But they don't say why.

[Eric Larsen]

I haven't used iodine because the diastatic factor in modern malts is pretty good given a conversion in about 40 minutes (75- 80 minute mash should do) and the probability that I'll get sufficient malt fines in the test sample to give me a false reading. I suppose I could run it through a coffee filter paper. That might exclude enough maybe.

The chalk-iodine test has always been cheap and accurate. Here's a link.

http://www.braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Starch_Test

If you haven't done tests before, I'd recommend doing them for the next three or four sessions. If you tend to brew using the exact same technique every time (a good practice to get into), you'll know how long your setup and technique takes to convert almost all of the starch. You'll only need to retest when you do something wildly different (like a brew with large amounts of adjuncts).

If you're converting most/all of the starch already, no harm and it didn't take much time to find out. If not, this can really take your beer to the next level.




I didn't know about mold kome koji rice, koji kin (moldy rice) or Bean-o.

Google and the internet really do take the learning curve to another level
http://www.leeners.com/sake.html

What does Bean-o do in the fermenter in terms of taste?
How much do you use?
What if there's insufficient starch?
Here:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/stuck-1-021-esb-bean-o-139394/
They are talking about Bean-O and the general trend is to not use it. But they don't say why.

Koji is used in sake because rice will not self convert (and the medieval Japanese didn't mess with barley (for whatever reason)). It's not really necessary in beer unless you want zero unfermentable sugar in your brew. Japanese beers like Kirin and Asahi use this technique. (And quite frankly, I'm not good enough to replicate these beers reliably. American pilsner is tough enough. Japanese pilsner is rocket science.)

Beano in the fermenter converts most (all if the batch is small) of the unfermentable sugars and starches into fermentable sugars.

Unless you're looking to emulate Asahi Extra-Dry beer, there's no reason to use Beano. Beano isn't worth much in the mash because it takes a long time (days) to completely convert everything. Beano will RUIN most ales, which rely on unfermentables for body and mouthfeel. Proteins are good, starches are not.

Hope this is helping.

[Paul Atkins]

Whew! I have 5 gallons of red ale I was supposed to bottle today, and now it's 11:15 at night an I have to get to bed. Priorities. I think it longer to digest the information here than it took me to brew the batch I made. A lot simpler, but I haven't tasted it yet. I'm so spoiled by having Sierra Nevada brewery here that it seems silly sometimes to make my own. The prices in town are lower than anywhere and they have experimental and local only brews on tap. Oh darn, they are closed tonight ------

[Eric Larsen]

Whew! I have 5 gallons of red ale I was supposed to bottle today, and now it's 11:15 at night an I have to get to bed. Priorities. I think it longer to digest the information here than it took me to brew the batch I made. A lot simpler, but I haven't tasted it yet. I'm so spoiled by having Sierra Nevada brewery here that it seems silly sometimes to make my own. The prices in town are lower than anywhere and they have experimental and local only brews on tap. Oh darn, they are closed tonight ------

You lucky "live in Chico" so-and-so.

That's the rub of homebrewing. Back in the day (Cliff's and my day at least) we brewed because it was nigh impossible to get a decent ale. Imports didn't sell well and were already old and skunky at the time of purchase. Domestics were usually of the Bud/Miller/Coors varieties. People in Pennsylvania always had Yuengling, and SF always had Anchor. Shiner has been bring a smile to Texas faces since the turn of the century. I even have a soft spot for New York's Genesee Cream Ale -- Genesee, just down the Genesee river from a coffin factory! Boo yeah!

(Note, there is nothing wrong with Bud, Miller or Coors. I have nothing but respect for the brewers.)

These days, any beer drinker can head to the local mega-mart and buy Fat Tire, Three Philosophers, Brooklyn Lager, Sierra, Rogue, and a host of other world-class beers. (I'm so sick of listening to the world pooh-pooh our beer. The US makes great beer. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They can't name six US breweries. Ask the naysayers if it ever comes up. They know Bud and not much else.)

Brew for the joy of it, but don't brew expecting a magical cost reduction. (My wife also says the sheer variety makes it worth it. She's pontificating over my shoulder as I write this.)

Her exact words, "Pumpkin ale in October. Spruce ale in December. Raspberry Wheat for Valentine's Day. And Peach Wheat for the entire month of June."

OK, is it any surprise why I married this woman???

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

The Colonists didn't have barley ready to hand so they defaulted to rice. I know the colonists didn't have koji or bean-o. But then their beer was very low alcohol. They drank it all the time.

I've wanted to make a rice beer.
Maybe now I will.

[Jon Grider]

After reading all that, I think I'll just enjoy the fruits of other peoples' labor. I can't afford any new hobbies, but it sounds like a very interesting one.

[Ben Martin]

You guys just really need to go to another person's house to see how beer is actually brewed! The Egyptians used to do it, it can't be that hard! Before brewing by yourself, find a friend. All it takes is two 5 gallon buckets and a turkey fryer kit!

But yes, I have never made beer better than I could buy, it is more just the "cool" factor of saying you made it...

[Eric Larsen]

You guys just really need to go to another person's house to see how beer is actually brewed! The Egyptians used to do it, it can't be that hard! Before brewing by yourself, find a friend. All it takes is two 5 gallon buckets and a turkey fryer kit!

But yes, I have never made beer better than I could buy, it is more just the "cool" factor of saying you made it...

It is possible to make "craft brew quality" beer with two five gallon buckets, a turkey fryer kit, and a 6.5 gallon glass carboy. But there is quite a learning curve. Knowing a lot about yeast is the main thing -- keep it at exactly the right temperature, and give it what it needs (and keep starch, wild yeast and microbes away from your wort*.)

There are homebrewers who make beer that is every bit as good as I make. Most of them have stellar equipment. Some are using stuff that is cobbled together. Just like a Unisaw won't make me David Marks, a tower brewing system won't turn a newbie into Garrett Oliver.

*Wort is a German word, pronounced "wert" that means "unfermented, unfinished beer."

[Dennis McGarry]

Ummm Can I just come by for a six pack? I'll bring a few bf of wood? :)

My hat tips to you, that hurt to just read it, let alone do it!

[Dan Mages]

Brewing is a fun and adicting hobby. I have been at it for three years now. It is cheaper than buying beer. It is also very impressive when you go to someone's house for dinner and you bring a six pack with you. Why bring wine when you have homemade beer? This past sunday I won second place in the herb/spice/vegetable category for an American wheat with dried chiles at the regional home brew competition.

Dan