SockMonkeysAndBeer
Home Monkeys Beer


How I Make Beer

There are many ways to make beer, this is how I do it. I brew all-grain beer using a pretty simple setup. All-grain means no extracts or kits, just malted grains, hops, yeast and water. The first step is preparing the yeast. I use liquid yeast that comes in a "smack-pack". The yeast package contains a small bubble of yeast nutrient. A day or more before brewing, you smack the package to break the nutrient bubble. The yeast start to feed on the nutrient, and build up a larger yeast population. The photo shows the package one day after smacking. The package is ready to use when it bloats. This one only took a day to bloat, but I've had some take as long as 5 days.
For a really good fermentation, you need lots of yeast. The amount of yeast in the smack-pack is likely enough, but I usually continue to build up the yeast population by using a yeast starter. The starter is just a small amount of wort. I boil a small amount of malt extract (I know, I said I don't use extracts, and here I am using extracts), and seal it into canning jars. When I'm ready for the starter I just dump a jar into a small glass jug. The yeast from the smack-pack is then added to the jug. I leave this for a day or two. You can usually notice some foam on top of the starter indicating that the yeast are fermenting the wort and building up their numbers. I found an old glass jug with the same size opening as my larger carboys so I can use my carboy airlock on the starter jug.
When the starter has started to foam, it's time to brew. The basic idea with all-grain brewing is to extract sugars from grains by soaking the crushed malted grain in hot water. This is called mashing. I buy malted grains from a supplier in town. They also crush the grains for me. The photo shows the package of grain sitting on the counter, two large pots of water heating on the stove and my mash cooler. The hot water must be a certain temperature to encourage the right grain enzymes to go to work. Different recipes will call for one or more temperature steps. Since I'm using a cooler to hold the soaking grains, the only way to raise the temperature from one step to the next is to add hoter water. This is called infusion mashing. There are some standard calculations based on amount of grain, grain to water ratio, temperature steps etc that help you figure out how much water at what temperature to add to bring your grain up to the next temperature step (I wrote a computer program called "BrewEaze" to figure these amounts out for me). The recipe I was working on in the photos involved three temperature steps. I usually heat the cooler by putting some hot tap water into it and let it sit while I heat water to the correct temperature for the first infusion.
While the water is heating for the first infusion, I assemble my lauter manifold. You need to be able to extract the wort from the mash cooler when the mashing is finished. This extraction is called lautering. I use a bunch of copper pipes with slots cut in them, connected to a short length of vinyl hose. The copper pipes are placed at the bottom of the mash cooler before the grain and hot water is added. My lauter manifold can be taken apart for cleaning. The photo show it assembled. When the water is heated to the correct temperature for the first step, I dump the tap water out of the cooler, put the lauter manifold into the bottom of the cooler, dump the bag of grains into the cooler and add the proper amount of water.
Once you get the mash cooler and grains heated to the first step temperature, you just need to wait. The recipe will tell you how long to wait at each step. Now may be a good time to talk about extraction efficiency. You can only extract a certain percentage of the available sugar from your grain. If you do a good job of mashing, you will extract lots of sugar from the grain. This will lead to a higher alcohol content in the finished beer. Many things can effect your efficiency. How the grains are crushed is very important. Under crushed grains will drop your efficiency (over crushed will lead to other problems). Not mashing long enough or at incorrect tempuratures can also drop your efficiency. The photo shows the mash cooler holding the grains at the first step temperature. A digitial thermometer is reading the temperature inside the cooler. If the temperature drops during the step, hot water can be added to bring it back up.
You need to be percise with the step temperatures, but it doesn't really matter if you miss. What does that mean? A couple of degrees difference can cause a big change in the beer you make, but the beer you make will always turn out good. So if you want to match a specific commercial brand of beer, or consistently duplicate a previous batch of homebrew, you need to hit the temperatures right on. If you just want to make great beer, you can be a few degrees off without causing trouble. It's better for the temperature to be too low then too high. If it is too low, you can just add more hot water to bring it up. If it is too high you can add cool water to bring it down, but the high temperature may have cooked the enzymes you are trying to encourage. I've had pretty good luck following the infusion calculations and keeping an eye on the temperature using a digital thermometer. I used to use an aquarium thermometer, but it was very slow to read, and I had to keep opening the mash cooler to read it. I now use a digital thermometer which can be read from outside the mash cooler. It's just a cheap kitchen thermometer with some shrink wrap around the probe to keep it water tight.
While waiting for the first temperature step to end, I heat water for the next step. This hot water is dumped into the cooler to raise the temperature to the next step. The process is repeated for each step. The photo was taken near the end of the last step. The cooler is very full at this point. I find that three steps is about the maximum for my system, any more and I would need a larger cooler. If you look closely you can also see the hose from the lauter manifold sticking up out of the grain. I leave the manifold in the cooler the entire time I'm mashing. You could add it just before lautering, but it may be difficult to sink to the bottom of a cooler full of hot water and grain.
I usually mash for 60 to 90 minutes. The recipe I was working on here called for two 15 minute steps and one 60 minute step. When the last temperature step is over, the lautering begins. Lauter speed can effect extraction efficiency. A long slow lauter can increase your efficiency. My stove takes a long time to heat a large pot of wort to boiling, so to save some time, I raise the cooler up a little bit on the counter and siphon from the lauter manifold hose right into a pot on the stove. This way I can start heating the wort while lautering. When the first pot is full, I move the lauter hose to the second pot and continue. When the wort level in the cooler falls almost to the depth of the grain bed, it is time to start sparging. Sparging is a method of rinsing the sugars off of the grains. I sparge by slowly adding hot water to the cooler as it continues to siphon off into the pot on the stove. I float a tupperware lid on top of the wort in the cooler and poor the sparge water onto the lid so that the grain bed is not disturbed too much. When the second pot is full the mash and lauter is done.
The next step is to heat the wort to a boil. This is done to kill anything nasty in the wort and to cook the hops. The photo shows the wort just starting to boiling. I keep an eye on the temperature closely to prevent boil overs, which are VERY messy. Recipes will specify how long to boil the wort.
Your recipe will also tell you when to add the hops. Hops are usually added at various stages of the boil. The longer the hop is in the boil, the more bitterness will be extracted. Hops added at the start of the boil contribute most of the bitterness. Hops added later contribute some bitterness, but more flavor and aroma (BrewEaze also handles bitterness calculations). Be very carefull with the first hop addition, as it will often cause a boil over. You should wait about ten minutes after the pot initially boils before adding the first hop. This will help prevent boil overs.
I add all of my hops to the first pot. It has usually been boiling for some time before the lautering into the second pot is finished. As the hops boil away in the first pot, I start heating the second pot. The second burner on my stove is slower, so it takes a long time to reach a boil. Since all of the hops are in the first pot, I only boil the second pot for about 10 minutes to kill off any undesirables in the wort.
After the boil, I want to cool the wort as quickly as possible. A slow cool can cause off flavors and allows extra time for bacteria to find your beer. I use a homemade wort chiller made out of 3/8" copper pipe with some connectors on each end. I use garden hose quick connectors on the ends to make it easy to attach to my kitchen faucet (more on that later).
I heat the wort chiller and a metal strainer in the boiling wort for ten minutes to sterilize them.
I cool the second pot while the first continues to boil with the hops. The wort chiller is attached to a short piece of garden hose which is attached to a faucet. The garden hose quick connectors make it easy to attach. Cold water runs throught the copper pipe and cools the hot wort. The water drains from the chiller into a sink (in the summer I think I'll attach another garden hose to the chiller and run it out to our garden. I can water the hops growing out there while cooling wort inside). By now the first pot is done boiling on the stove and it is cooled the same way. The wort must be cool enough to add yeast without killing it. (That's my first batch of mead conditioning in the background. I'll let you know how it turns out a year from now)
Once the wort is cool, I siphon it into the carboy. I like to remove the spent hops and some of the gunk (technical term) that falls out of the cooled wort, so I siphon into a funnel with the metal strainer. The hops clog up the strainer a few times, but it's not much of a problem. This method also helps airate the wort. You want lots of air in the wort to help the yeast get started quickly. This is the only time you want air in your beer. After this, air is the enemy. That's my able bodied assistant's hand (okay, I don't have an assistant, that's me holding the siphon and taking the picture). I siphon from both pots to fill the carboy, I then siphon a small amount out of the carboy to get a hydrometer reading. The hydrometer will tell you how much sugar is in solution, giving you some idea of what the resulting alcohol content will be after fermentation. I use BrewEaze to track the hydrometer readings taken at this point. BrewEaze uses these readings to calculate the extraction efficiency. It then uses the extraction efficiencies to help with subsequent recipe formulations. If your extraction efficiency is low, BrewEaze will show you how to add more grain to compensate in your next recipe. (Did I mention you can download and use BrewEaze for free!).
I like to use a glass carboy so that I can watch the fermentation progress over the next week or two. It helps to be able to see what's going on to judge when it is time to rack into a secondary (I also just like to see the yeast churn around inside the carboy). I use a large hose stuck right into the carboy to handle the blow off. I used to just stick a bubbler on the carboy right away until I woke up one morning with beer dripping off the ceiling.
After the beer ferments for about a week, it is time to rack it into a fresh carboy. I usually wait until the yeast has slowed and the foamy gunk on top of the batch has crested and is starting to fall. Then it is just a matter of siphoning it into the next carboy.
Once the fermentation is complete, it is time to bottle or keg. I keg most of my beer. However, since the keg only holds 19 liters, I usually have three of four liters left over for bottling. I always take another hydrometer reading. I feed this reading and the original reading into BrewEaze and it calculates the alcohol level.
Here's a tip for cleanup. I've put a garden hose quick connect on my carboy cleaner and another on the faucet in my brewing room. This makes it very easy to attach the carboy cleaner to the faucet and to remove it. And another tip... Don't drop the carboy on the tile floor.

Here's the recipe I was using. This file is readable by BrewEaze. If you have BrewEaze just click on the link and BrewEaze will open the file.

Cheers