Home Brewing pt.1

Apparently, the 5th of November is Learn To Home Brew Day, and do you know what that means? #content

I thought I should chime in with how I started and offer some basic tips as it's a pretty rewarding hobby - I wouldn't be here without it. 

It *is* like all other hobbies whereby you can start for cheap and will quickly see how more money, time, and equipment can make your life easier, or the outcome better. I've called this blog "Home Brewing pt. 1" as I thought it would be good to start from some first principles, I might do a more advanced version at some point.

My first, and most important piece of advice is: "just calm down, it's probably fine". As long as you stick to basic steps: mash 60-70C, boil it for a bit, cool it, keep the fermentation temperature reasonably controlled (temperature spiking either way for a little while is probably not a big issue) you should be able to enjoy what you produce. It's like any hobby in that it takes a bit of practise. Artists are shit at painting on their first attempt. On my first few tries I was content with: "hey, that tastes like beer!". Each time you undertake the steps, just try to get a little better. I think some people think that if they can't brew enough brilliant beer on their first attempt for the party at their child's wedding, then home brewing isn't for them, and that's just not the case.

You can buy kits from Local Home Brew Shops (LHBSs on forums...). The owners are always very friendly and keen to help someone new to the hobby. A kit usually consists of:

- Malted barley or malt extract, maybe some other grain like oats or wheat

- sachet of yeast

- sachet(s) of hops

- Sometimes a bucket and airlock, but you can get that separately and can obviously be reused.

- Muslin bag

Kits are fine. They contain a recipe and method. They probably don't go into much detail of the why (like I do a bit below) but you'll probably end up with something you are happy drinking.

My tips for starting to home brew are nothing more than the basics of the process of brewing. It's pretty simple, and goes a little something like this:

- Soak malted barley (and sometimes some other grains or syrups) at a temperature of 60-70C.

- Remove the grain (maybe rinse it to get more of the sweet, sugary residue)

- Boil it for about an hour

- Add hop pellets early in that hour to extract bitterness, late in the boil to get more aromas and flavours.

- Cool this boiled liquid down as quickly as you can and stick the (now 20C liquid) in a sterilised bucket.

- Add yeast. Wait about 2 weeks for it to finish fermenting. Try to keep it at about 18-21C (for standard, British ale)

- Add a sugar syrup to your (now) beer and syphon it into sterilised bottles. Stick a cap on them. Wait 1-4 weeks. Drink.

And here's a bit more detail about these basic steps:

"Soak malted barley (and sometimes some other grains or syrups) at a temperature of 60-70C."

Big pot on the hob, get it to about 70C. If you have a muslin bag, and you're using real grain, pop the bag of grain in for an hour. The bag of grain will reduce the heat to about 65 for most of the hour, just keep an eye to keep it around 65C. This is the "mash" stage of brewing. The hot water and enzymes are helping to get all the sugar out of the grain and into solution so that the yeast can eventually eat it and excrete alcohol. Yum. If you're using malt extract then I think you just heat it up (so it is more fluid) and pour it out.

"Remove the grain (maybe rinse it to get more of the sweet residue)"

After an hour, pull out the bag and then rinse the grain bag with water, ideally around 75C-ish. It washes out any sugar that may be left on the grain and the slightly hotter temperature stops any further enzymatic activity which the mash started. This process is called "sparging". You'll need a big-ish pan. Most home brew recipes are designed to produce about 20-25L of beer 

"Boil it for about an hour"

This is done to kill off any nasties in the liquid and grain and sterilise your beer (we call beer at this point "wort", pronounced "wurt"). It also does things like definitely stop anymore enzymatic activity. This produces a lot of steam (obviously?). On my first home brewing days I had condensation running down the kitchen walls. I should have opened a window.

"Add hop pellets early in that hour to extract bitterness, late in the boil to get more aromas and flavours."

Hops come on a bine and look like small, green pinecones. When home brewing, you'll probably be using pellets which are hops that have been shredded and compressed. There are hundreds (thousands?) of different varieties that all have different flavour and aroma components. Different areas of the world have hop varieties with different attributes. Most beers have some hops added at the start of the hour long boil. This extracts bitterness from the hops, but not much else. The bittering hop therefore tends to be one of the cheaper, varieties. If you add hops at the end of the boil, then the aroma and flavour components (oils etc) which are very volatile, are not boiled away and remain in the beer. You literally just chuck the hops in at specified times usually something like "60 minutes to go in the boil, 15 minutes to go, 5 minutes to go" in a traditional home brew kit. Each time will have a specific weight and type of hop in the recipe. 

"Cool this boiled liquid down as quickly as you can and stick the (now 20C liquid) in a sterilised bucket."

The quicker you cool the beer to your "pitching" temperature (the temp that you will add your yeast), the less likely you will be to introduce bacteria from the air into your liquid. You can do this by putting ice water in the sink and putting your pan in that and run water on the outside of the pan. If you don't have a very big pan for the boil, you could boil and cool some water in advance and add your boiled liquid to that to get you to about 25L.

Add yeast. Wait about 2 weeks for it to finish fermenting. Try to keep it at about 18-21C (for standard, British ale)

At 20C add your ale yeast. You're probably making an ale, rather than a lager if you're home brewing for the first time. The fermentation specs are a bit more unusual for a lager (namely a longer and colder fermentation). A lot of the character of the beer comes from the yeast, you can make the same beer up to this point and add a different yeast and come up with a very different beer at the end of it. The (British ale) yeast will want a steady 18-21C if you can manage that in a cupboard. Controlling the temperature of fermentation is important - too low and the yeast gets sleepy and slow, too high and it gets stressed(!) and start producing 'off' flavours. Generally, for your first forays into home brewing, stick it in a bucket, with an airtight lid and air lock (the bubbler things), pop it in a cupboard, and you should be OK.

Add a sugar syrup to your (now) beer and syphon it into sterilised bottles. Stick a cap on them. Wait 1-4 weeks. Drink.

Bottling some beer/ Blue Yellow thing is a bottle tree. Orange thing is a steriliser.

Wait 12-16 days and the yeast should have finished eating all the sugar its going to eat (it will almost always leave some behind) and producing all the alcohol it can. Add a certain amount of sugar in some sterilised (boiled and cooled) water and gently stir it into the bucket of beer. You don't want to slosh it about as this may oxidise the beer (turns it dull and makes it taste cardboard-y) and will stir up any unwanted sediment from the bottom of the bucket. This is called the "priming" sugar. Gently pour or syphon your - now primed - beer into bottles and then cap them. If you can't be bothered buying a capper (about £30), then you could use some swing top bottles. The (still present) yeast will eat this extra bit of sugar and create a very small amount of alcohol, but also, crucially, some carbon dioxide. Leave the bottles for a couple of weeks for the CO2 to absorb into the liquid, carbonating your beer. Too little priming sugar, or not enough time resting at this point will produce under carbonated beer. Too much priming sugar will result in over carbonated beer or, worse, a bottle bomb that pops its lid or explodes.

There we go! That's more than I knew when I started, but hopefully it's laid out in an understandable manner. It sounds like a long process, but I found that I tried to brew every week and therefore had different brews at different points of the process.

Obviously there are loads of really good books on the subject, as well as forums and Facebook groups. I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have too! I would say that if you're going to buy a book, try to buy it from a shop so you can see it and just check that it's the right level you need. The first book I bought was pretty in-depth, and that wasn't ideal.

It's fun! If you end up giving it a go yourself, let us know!

Jon

(you can buy our beer here, if you fancy)