My younger brother Kyle has decided to become a home brewer (something I’ve done on & off for the better part of the past decade). He first approached me for a little advice back at the end of Apr’07 and since then we’ve been corresponding as he’s been getting his hobby off the ground. After our most recent e-mailed Q&A exchange, I realized it might be good material for this blog.
The format will be similar to those you see for interviews… question, then response… since most of the material is already written and I just need to pull it out of our e-mails. Occasionally, I’ll toss in an editorial side bar. So, without further ado…
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Reference Materials
- Equipment
- Technique
- Conclusion
Introduction
Kyle: Me and my neighbor have decided to start doing a little home brewing. I thought I should be talking to you since you’re the family expert. I’m sure I’ll be contacting you shortly with all sorts of ridiculous questions.
Me: Ah, the joy of home brewing. Reminds me I need to gather some ingredients and make a batch. It’s been a LONG time.
Reference Materials
Kyle: What I really need right now is a good book for beginners. I’m assuming you know of one that would work well for a complete novice like myself. Could you recommend one? If I can’t find it in town, I’ll just order it online.
Me: Here’s what I have on my bed stand at the moment:
- “The Brewmaster’s Bible” by Stephen Snyder. If you only buy one book, this is it. Covers the basics of technique and chemistry plus a lot of more advanced stuff. A lot of good recipes and reference tables. Truly a top notch manual.
- “Brewing Beers Like Those You Buy” by Dave Line. A rather ancient tome. You could probably take a pass on this one unless you really, really want to know how to recreate mass production beers like Schlitz or Budweiser. Then again, it has recipes for Pilsner Urquell and Tiger. Whatever.
- “Secrets from the Master Brewers” by Higgins, Kilgore and Hertlein. Recipes from brewmasters around the US. You’ll find that different books present recipes in different ways because there are various brewing methods. This book has some interesting recipes, but uses some of the more complex production methods.
- “North American Clonebrews” by Scott Russell. A good recipe book to help you make knock-offs of popular microbrews. A good second book to have.
Equipment
Kyle: I borrowed a bunch of supplies from dad already so I don’t really need a starter kit. I’m not sure about all the equipment I have, but I do have a 7 gallon bucket (primary fermentor?), 5 gallon glass carboy, siphoning tubes, 20-quart stainless steel pot, hydrometer and a few other odds and ends. As we don’t have a home brew shop in town, I’ll need to mail order the rest of the equipment.
SIDEBAR: My father Dennis was an amateur wine maker back in the 1970s when we lived in Iowa. Strawberry, chokecherry, etc. He’s held on to all his wine making gear over the years, although I don’t recall him making a single batch once we moved to Bismarck, ND in 1978.
Me: Here’s my current inventory of gadgets:
- 3 x 5gal food grade buckets plus an assortment of airlocks for fermenting. I like buckets better than carboys since they are easier to clean. One of the buckets has a little valve near the bottom on the side of the bucket to make bottling easier. I HIGHLY recommend a bucket like this since bottling with a tube under vacuum is a pain in the ass. I like to perch my bucket up on the edge of my kitchen sink with the valve over the sink and just slip bottles out of the dishwasher, into the sink and open the valve. Presto!
- 5 cases of empty, brown bottles. NO TWIST-OFFS! They will not keep a seal with the cap. Unless, of course, you and your buddy are going to burn a couple million on a brewery grade twist-off bottle capping machine. Would be kool, no? I also have a case of bomber size bottles. Kind of nice for holiday brews.
- A high temp plastic spoon for stirring the pot while brewing. Find one with a really long handle unless you want to burn your fingers. My spoon is probably about 18″ long.
- A long flexible tube connected to a rigid tube for siphoning. The rigid piece is about as long as a 5gal bucket is deep and has a little clip to secure it to the bucket. Slick.
- A couple reusable FINE mesh bags for hops (small bag) and grains (large bag). You can also use these funny cheese cloth (?) bags for this and just pitch it out (with the contents inside) after brewing for a no muss, no fuss approach. But I’m always forgetting to buy the disposable bags, so having reusable bags works better for me.
- I actually don’t have a hydrometer. After I broke my first one, then it’s replacement, I sort of gave up. They’re really useful if you’re experimenting and making up your own recipes. If you’re a cookbook hacker like me, then you really can get away without one. Most of the good recipe books you’ll copy from have specific quantities for grains and malts as well as wort boil durations. Much like making a cake, it’s hard to mess up if you follow all the instructions.
- A good thermometer. If you can find one that you can clip to the side of the kettle with the probe in the wort while boiling, that’s ideal. Be sure to calibrate the thermometer if it’s a mechanical one (vs electronic or mercury).
- I also have a big (20qt) stainless steel stock pot. Got it cheap at Big Lots. The bigger the kettle, the easier it is to boil the wort. You can have more fluids in the mix from the start and it’s easier to manage the boil and avoid boiling over. I used to use a much smaller kettle than I have now and it was just harder to work with.
- A bottle capper. Gotta have it.
Kyle: I’m definitely looking forward to the new primary fermenter and doing away with the carboy altogether. Is there any other benefit to using a carboy other than the fact that it’s the most air-tight option (assuming it’s glass)?
Me: The only things I’ve ever liked about carboys are that they are clear and, in theory, easier to keep sterile. But the downsides far outweigh that slight cool factor of seeing what’s going on since they are hard to clean. It’s different than with wine where the sediments aren’t so goopy and hard to get off the bottom at the end (unless you have one of those special carboy sprayer / cleaner things for your hose). I think a bucket can be as airtight as a carboy if you get a good one with a rubber O-ring built into the lid. As for cleaning, it’s a snap. DO NOT use a scratch pad or anything on the inside to clean after you’re done bottling. Just rinse out, then soap and water, using your hands or a soft sponge / cloth to rub off the gunk. If you scratch up the inside of the bucket, over time those little swirly scratches will start to retain material, make it harder to sterilize and may impact the flavor of your beer.
Technique
Me: Here’s a couple other tips:
- I like to brew outside. We have a side burner on our BBQ. If the wort boils over, who cares. Hose ‘er down. Plus your house won’t smell like malt for a couple days afterwards and Shannon isn’t likely to file for divorce between your 3rd and 5th batch.
- We have an extra deep kitchen sink. (Not that I replaced what was in the house originally just for this or anything
). To speed up the cooling of the wort after boiling, I bring the kettle inside and sit it in the kitchen sink. I then fill the sink around the kettle with water and ice. Makes things go much faster since you cannot put the wort in the bucket with yeast until it’s about 75-80degF. Also, I use cold water when topping off the fermenting bucket after pouring the wort in. Try to avoid putting ice into the wort or the fermentation bucket to cool things off. If you’re fridge is like most, ice picks up “flavors” from stuff in the fridge. Yack.
- This is key: keep everything that won’t be under boil during production super clean (like your fermentation buckets, their lids and airlocks). If you don’t, you’ll be sorry. We made a batch one time in college under less than sterile conditions and ended up with a case of brew infected with wild yeast. Not necessarily dangerous to drink, but it can impact flavor (or in our case, over-carbonate in the bottle and explode… not fun to clean-up and of course the money you spent on ingredients is poured, literally, down the drain).
SIDEBAR: Shannon is obviously Kyle’s wife. Thought I’d point that out for the slow learners.
Me: After you pour the wort into the carboy and top off with water, you should let it cool to room temperature. Remember the importance of temperature when adding the yeast. If it’s too hot, it’ll kill the yeast and you’re hosed. If you added really cold water and now the diluted wort is too cold, it’ll take a long while for the yeast to get rolling while the wort warms to room temperature. After adding in the yeast, you should stir the wort fairly vigorously to oxygenate the wort and distribute the yeast. BTW… I use the term “room temperature” very loosely. Different yeasts like different temperatures. Not sure what kind of yeast you have (or if it was wet in tube or dehydrated), but ALWAYS read the label on the yeast closely as not all yeasts are created equally. Yet another reason I tend towards pale ales as the yeasts for that type of brew are fast acting and work well at the temperature my basement tends to be in the summer (68-72°F). Your basement temps might vary as well, so wander around and try to find a place that fits. If it’s not exact, oh well, it’ll most likely turn out okay anyway. WARNING: Some yeasts go crazy. That’s cool and exciting, but can make a mess if it goes so fast and makes so much foam it blows out your airlock and gets all over the place. Be sure to put your carboys on concrete or in a box / plastic bin or something just in case this happens. Don’t want to ruin your rugs.
Kyle: We cooled the wort down to about 70 degrees before pouring it into the carboy. The 3 gallons of water that we added were also room temperature. I believe that we stirred the yeast in properly. It was a little difficult because of the narrow mouth on the glass carboy. We ended up using a metal hot dog roasting stick as we couldn’t find anything else narrow and long enough to reach the bottom of the carboy. It was kind of a thin wire contraption, but I could see the sediment swirling around pretty good.
Kyle: After we added the wort to the glass carboy and added water, the brew appeared very muddy (not dark, more like river sludge). There is also an insane amount of sediment on the bottom. Is this normal for an amber? Do we want to somehow filter the beer when we pour it into the bottling bucket? I did just order a new bucket with a spigot (should be here by Friday (15.Jun.07)). I assumed that by using the spigot, I would just leave the bottom portion behind while bottling which would include most of the sediment.
Me: All the stirring and the grain sediments in suspension should leave the wort pretty cloudy. Not too worry as all that stuff will settle to the bottom over the next couple weeks while you let it ferment. I have never filtered the wort as I poured it into my fermentation bucket. After a few days and depending on the yeast you’re using, top or bottom fermenting, you’ll also notice either: a) some nasty looking, caramel colored foam on the top of the wort or b) some creamy gunk on the bottom of the carboy. That’s a normal by product of the yeast doing it’s thing on the sugars in the wort. All that stuff, the grain sediments and yeast output (I believe it’s actually dead yeast), will be left behind when you bottle. No need to filter. If you got the right bottling bucket, the tap will be mounted on the side with the intake hole about an inch or so off the bottom of the bucket. This’ll keep you from sucking all the muck at the bottom of the bucket into bottles. If you’re using a top fermenting yeast, just be careful as you get to the bottom of the bucket during bottling and you don’t let some of the foamy crap suck into the tap intake and into a bottle. If you do, just dump out that bottle.
Me: The final clarifying of the beer will happen in the bottle. As you let it condition for a couple weeks and the last bit of yeast does its thing to carbonate the brew in the bottle, some more sediment will come to the bottom. That’s natural and if you take a close look at the bottom of a lot of microbrews like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, you’ll see a little bit of yeast hanging at the bottom of the bottle. You can try a bit of the beer as you are bottling it, but it won’t taste that great because it’s not carbonated, it’s at room temperature and it’ll likely be a little malty since the yeast probably ran out of oxygen during the main fermenting cycle. When you bottle, more oxygen will come into the beer and the bit of yeast that survived will work on that oxygen and malt to finish off the flavor.
Me: We should also talk about fining ingredients sometime. Irish moss, for instance, will also help with beer clarity.
Kyle: From one of your previous mails, it sounds like you sanitize your bottles by running them through the dishwasher? Do you need to remove the old labels first? Shannon thinks that if we wash them with the labels on, they’ll come off in the dishwasher and make a huge mess.
Me: I’d recommend stripping the labels as Shannon has suggested. The glue they use on the paper sort of melts in water and you will have a total mess on your hands if you go straight into the dishwasher. Just put a few inches of water in your bathtub and toss in the bottles. After a few minutes, the labels will loosen up and slide right off. Easy.
Conclusion
Me: I recommend that your first batch be a pale ale of some sorts. These are typically pretty simple recipes and are hard to screw up (ego building beers). Hefeweizen’s are also pretty straight forward as are many German styles. I think this is due to the now repealed Reinheitsgebot law that forced simple, straightforward recipes. Avoid the high octane stuff for now (like imperial stout) since these are expensive and much more complicated. Lagers are also a more complicated production. Besides, pale ales are a lot of fun. You can play with the bitterness a lot by experimenting with hops quantities and hops boil durations.
Kyle: My neighbor and I brewed up our first batch last Saturday (09.Jun.07). I hadn’t read enough of my Brewmaster’s Bible to feel comfortable starting yet, but he was pretty impatient and bought a pre-packaged kit of ingredients. Also, he’s got a copy of your very informative email with tips and suggestions. I was assuming we’d start with a pale ale to keep it simple, but he ended up going with an amber. I have a feeling I may end up brewing the next batch on my own or possibly sit him in a corner and make him watch.
Me: I’ve tried ambers before and found them a bit tricky. If you don’t have the EXACT stuff for the recipe, it can come out wrong. Like the batch I made the last time you guys came to Steamboat that ended up kinda malty / fruity tasting. Gack. That was supposed to be a knock-off of Alaskan Amber, but didn’t turn out right. I think it was the yeast I substituted that ruined it. If you guys used a pre-packaged kit with the right grains and yeast, it ought to be okay.
Kyle: I’m not really that confident that it will turn out well as my neighbor couldn’t quite grasp the concept of keeping everything sterile even after several reminders. He actually dried off the spoon and thermometer with a garage rag after sanitizing them….kind of defeating the purpose. Anyway, we should be bottling this weekend so I’m hoping we catch a lucky break.
Me: Sterilization is the key. Hopefully, you’ll get lucky. Home brewing requires a bit of patience. If your neighbor is a high energy type that requires instant gratification, this is NOT the hobby for him. But it might be better the next batch as you can goof around and drink what you made this time while working on the next one. Re: sterilizing buckets, spoons and such. Get yourself some liquid sterilizer if you haven’t already figured that one out. Super handy stuff and really easy to work with. I use a product called Star San Acid Sanitizer.
Kyle: I’ll try and find that sanitizer. I was planning to get away from the bleach solution… just worked in a pinch as the neighbor was hell bent on starting before we had everything we needed. The only place I’ve ordered from so far is beer-wine.com. That’s the site posted on Samuel Adams web site in the home brew contest section. They seem to have a decent variety of inventory and as far as I can tell, the prices look ok.
Me: That’s some website. Way more advanced than your typical home brew / home wine making type outfit. Looks like a pretty complete selection of stuff. The prices seem a little higher than what I’m used to walking into a store, but that’s life I guess if you don’t have access to a store. You might consider laying out a few recipes in advance, then buying all the stuff at once to save on shipping. Grains will keep for a long while as long as you don’t crack them. The liquid (“pitchable”) yeast should do okay in your fridge for quite a while as well. Ask about the hops, though, as I think it may lose potency over time… I don’t remember. I think if you get pellets rather than leaf the hops will last longer.
Kyle: How do you print your custom labels? I was thinking about Photoshop‘ing the labels, but do you buy sticker labels somewhere that are cut to the right dimensions?
Me: For new labels, you can buy them pre-cut at brew supply stores or go to an office supply store and find something with the right dimensions. Word of warning: most of the do-it-yerself labels DO NOT use the same adhesive the big breweries use to affix their labels. Unless you find something specifically for this application with water soluble adhesive, the labels will not be easy to remove down the road. Not that I’ve ever done this or anything . If you’re going to just do a few bottles as give-aways to friends and don’t expect the bottles to come back for re-use, that’s cool. Otherwise, you might want to skip this part. Instead, just use plain silver bottle caps. You can go after them with a Sharpie marker and put initials on the top to identify the goodies inside the bottle (e.g. PA = Pale Ale, AM = Amber, HW = Hefeweizen, etc).
Me: Hmm… all this typing is making me think I need to run to Boulder this weekend, get some supplies and make a batch. I might put up all this stuff on my blog as well (sensibly edited, of course).
Kyle: Yeah, you should blog this. You’ve sent some really good info. A lot of these steps are covered in the beginner books, but what has really helped is hearing your preferences and opinions and what has worked for you. The books might explain that your primary fermenter can be a carboy or bucket, but doesn’t really explain why one may work better than the other. I really wish we had a brew shop in town… hopefully we’ll have one before long. For our next run I’ll either order the exact ingredients I need for one particular batch or order another kit with all ingredients pre-measured. I’m not really stoked about storing ingredients long term.
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