Whats Going On During Fermentation
Whats this period called fermentation all about then. Well like in any brewing whether it is wine or beer the main concern in fermentation is to create alcohol in the final beverage.
To do this you need a few things, one is yeast and the other is something for the yeast to feed on. This is your sugary wort created earlier in the brewing process.
Proceed With The Rest Of Your Brewing
The brew process is the same with both all-grain and extract after the malting and mashing steps. Youll be boiling your wort, then finally, fermenting for your beer.
Just so youre sure that you dont lose sleep over your all-grain experiments, we suggest dedicating a few extra hours to your brew day.
Brewing Books Every Homebrewer Should Own
The Brewers Library: 15 Books You Should Own If You Want To Brew Better Beer
Whether youre just taking your first steps along the homebrewing road or youve been at it a long time, a little guidance is always welcomed. No matter where youre at in your homebrewing journey you want to brew the best beer you possibly can, get better at what you do, and learn more along the way.
The list below spans fifteen books that will hopefully guide your journey and help you become a better brewer. It starts with books for beginners, broadly covering the basic topics of making beer. Then it moves into books covering more intermediate and advanced brewing techniques and topics. As you near the bottom of the list the books will get more technical and the subject matter narrows.
I purposely avoided any books on specific beer styles because I wanted to keep the subject matter pertinent to all brewing, no matter the style. But, its worth noting, there are more and more books out there that cover the nitty gritty of brewing a single style.
Some of the more technical books may hold little interest for some homebrewers and thats ok. Some of the books, I feel, are required reading for any homebrewer worth their beer, others play to specific interests. Much as your curiosity and skill expands so, as you will see, must your brewing library.
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Lovibond And Maltiness A Spectrum Of Difficulty
What is a lovibond? Well it essentially refers to the color of the malted barley that you will be using in the beer. The more roasted a barley is the darker the color and the higher the lovibond.
The lovibond is the number next to the L in the name of the malt that you are looking to purchase. Its generally included with specialty malts, and the higher the number the darker the roast.
Darker Ale
Creating an all grain beer that has a higher lovibond can be a good way to go with your first all grain, since its very forgiving when it comes to hiding any issues you had during the lautering process.
This is why a porter or a brown ale can be a great first choice. Also if you mess up on either of these beers you can always use them to cook beer brauts or something.
Lighter Ale
Some lighter ales like a pale ale or a Belgian tripel can come with a few problems. While their grain bills can be simple, their lighter flavor can make it difficult to hide some potential issues.
- Water Profile: If you dont have access to quality water this could be a problem. Tap water is not so great when it comes to making light beers since the off flavors from flourine and chlorine could pose a problem.
- Sparging Mistake: While the exact cause is highly debated, there is potential for tannins to leach into your wort and cause off flavors in your beer. Having a lighter beer makes it difficult to mask these tannins.
Heres What I Usually Do
First of all, I almost never use a secondary vessel at all, unless its a fruit beer or something. I only do it when I want or need to get the beer off the yeast cake for some reason or another, usually involving physical space. I dont worry about leaving the beer on the yeast for extended periods otherwise. On homebrew scales I actually think its a benefit.
Anyway, back to dry hopping.
I typically leave the beer in the primary fermenter , then add my dry hops in a LOOSELY tied hop bag. It needs to be loose for two reasons.
- Hop pellets REALLY swell up when they get soaked with beer.
- You want beer to be able to penetrate the soaked hops. A tightly packed hop ball will not be very effective.
With this configuration, the hop pellets will be floating on top of the beer. Thats OK in my book. Or article, I guess this isnt a book
I actually prefer it, because it keeps the hops up off the yeast cake. This in turn makes it less likely Im going to suck up a bunch of yeast when I package the beer.
I actually prefer nice, crystal clear beers, but with heavily dry hopped styles some haze is to be expected. That doesnt mean I want a ton of yeast suspended in a West Coast inspired IPA or pale ale.
Anyway, after three days or so I can easily grab that hop sack and actually put it into the keg Im about to rack into.
Thats right, I put the same hops right into the keg before racking the beer into it. Ive never had any problems with grassiness.
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What Is Involved In Sanitising
Cleaning involves removing all traces of visible dirt and grime, just like washing your dishes for instance.
Sanitising involves killing any bacteria or wild yeast to levels where they wont be able to interfere with you beer.
There are a variety of chemicals available from your home brew shop that you can buy but one of the most effective ways to sanitise your equipment is ordinary thin household bleach, thats all you need.
Heres what you need to do:
Mix 1 tablespoon of thin unscented bleach per gallon of water and leave your equipment in this solution to sanitise for around 10 minutes.
When you are ready to use the equipment rinse very thoroughly and allow to drain
I usually fill a bucket or fermenter with the diluted bleach and then throw all the equipment in to sanitise.
More on Cleaning and Sanitising can be found here.
Foreword By Michael Jackson
Out of all the brewing books Ive listed, this one is probably the most fun to pickup and just leaf through. Randy Mosher is a graphic designer and so all of his books show his love of playing with design.
Here, a fun two-color layout weaves old prints and drawings into an ingenious romp through history, technique, and radical recipe. The book briefly visits the basics of brewing before spinning off through the common brewing ingredients and into a world of lesser known ingredients each put to work in what could only be called a recipe bent around a classic style.
Radical Brewing is a gem, not so much for how it covers the usual suspects when it comes to brewing, but for the less mainstream tidbits, such as brewing for Christmas, 12 ways to make your stout better, organic brewing, brewing ancient ales, cooking with beer, beer tastings, and eccentric ingredients.
There is no other book about brewing beer that will so fully and enthusiastically push you to try new things and guide your hand while doing it.
- Recommended For: Intermediate and Advanced brewers looking for new expressions of the art.
- Covers: Basics are briefly covered, deeper understanding of styles and brewing practices.
- Recipes: 120+ Most are all-grain, but most include conversion to a partial mash or steeping recipe.
- Formats Available: Paperback and Kindle
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Lautering Step : Recirculation
The aim of recirculation is to draw some wort off from the bottom of the grain bed and return it to the top. Once enough wort has been recirculated in this way, the wort clears up substantially. To recirculate manually, open the spigot to the mash/lauter tun slightly and slowly collect wort in a beer pitcher or similar vessel. Keep a timer running and collect wort at a rate that would fill the pitcher in about 5 minutes. Once full, gently pour the pitcher back on top of the grain bed. Repeat this until the wort looks clearer or 20 minutes have passed. Some homebrew rigs allow you to recirculate using a pump.
Beginners Guide To All
Mash, and sparge and grist, oh my! Mash, and sparge and grist, oh my! Just as Dorothy was overwhelmed when she entered Oz, moving into all-grain homebrewing can seem just as daunting. With a little determination, the right tools, and some helpful friends you will soon be on the yellow brick road to making great beer.
I got into all-grain brewing about 5 batches ago, and I love how it opens up more of the world of brewing to me. I feel I have more options in recipes and ingredients, I feel I have more creativity in creating my beers, and I feel I have more control of my final product. Yes, there is a learning curve, a whole new vocabulary and possibly some more gear to get or re-purpose, but once you make the leap, you and your beer wont be in Kansas anymore!
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Sparge Method And Equipment
Both Sparging and brew in a bag both require mashing. This means the grains will need to soak at a temperature range of 148-156. This will need to be done for an hour, but once complete the methods diverge.
Sparging requires extra water to rinse through the grains in order to get the rest of the sugars out. The strike temperature of the water should sit around 170F since when added to the mash it will cool considerably.
Insulated Mash Tun
The process of sparging requires you buy a mash tun which is insulate to retain the heat while the grains are in mash. This is completely separate from what you will be boiling in so again you will need to transfer to the pot that you will be brewing in.
You will need this seperate vessel with a spout and a false bottom inside. The reason for this is you will need to transfer to either a keggle or a large 10 gallon kettle to boil in.
Bigger Brew Pot
You will likely need a larger brew pot in order to hold the larger amount of wort that you will have. This is different from extract, since extract is more condensed. Typically a 10 gallon kettle is recommended although you may be able to get away with something smaller.
Sparge Water and Pot
The Redneck Sparge Arm
Because we believe in saving money, by not purchasing expensive unnecessary items, we devised a way to disperse the water when sparging.
Calculate Water Needs
I forgot to tell you about water, obviously with all this sparging and boiling you will need more than 5 gallons of water.
When To Stop Sparging
There are a few ways to determine when to stop collecting your wort. For average-strength beers, the easiest way is just to quit collecting when you’ve got the full pre-boil wort volume in your kettle. With a propane burner, on homebrew-sized batches you can expect to boil off about a gallon an hour with a full rolling boil. So, for a 5-gallon batch, you could collect 6 gallons for a one-hour boil or 6.5 gallons for a 90-minute boil.
A better way to know when to stop collecting wort is to monitor when you’ve gotten everything you reasonably can from the grain bed. The easiest way to do this is to take the specific gravity of your late runnings and wait until they fall to about 1.008-1.010. If you do this, you may end up with more or less wort than your planned pre-boil wort volume. If you are low, as happens on many low-gravity brews, just add water. If you have collected more wort than you planned, you can extend the length of your boil. When you are done collecting wort, write down the volume of wort in your kettle, the time you quit collecting and the original gravity of the wort. Also record if you needed to add any water to reach your target pre-boil volume.
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Easy Beer Recipes For Beginners
So youve just started homebrewing. Congrats! Now, what should you brew? With a seemingly endless list of possible beers to brew, where do you start? What homebrewing ingredients should you get?Here are some easy beer recipes for beginners. These are some of the best, basic homebrewing recipes:
The Benefits Of Sourcing Of Your Ingredients
Being environmentally conscious, one of the benefits of brewing all grain is to SOURCE ORGANIC MALTED GRAIN easier. The organic beer market itself is still very marginal, less than 5% therefore finding organic beer ingredients can be challenging. However it is getting easier to source organic producers.
- BRIESS Malt & Ingredients Co. based in Chilton, WI produces 11 different kinds of Certified Organic Malts and is committed to reduce its energy and consumption, to conserve water, uses only recyclable packaging, and works with local farmers and animal nutritionists to reuse wastes. This company works with many distributors in the USA and online vendors.
- A new company, ORGANICBREWSUPPLIES is an online supplier based in Canada shipping to the Canada and the USA, offering all organic brewing ingredient kits, as well as organic malts, hops and yeasts.
- BREWORGANIC.COM apparently is going to open soon. The people behind this internet venture come from SEVEN BRIDGES ORGANIC BREWING SUPPLY, Santa Cruz, California that had to close recently. That company had been well-known in the brewers community. Stay tuned.
Another benefit of sourcing your own ingredients is DIVERSITY. Beyond the characteristics and classification of the different types of malts base malt, specialty grains, non-barley malts ultimately you want to know variety of grain you want to brew with to achieve the CHARACTER you like.
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Transforming Raw Materials Into Delicious Beer Is A Skill Test Of Patience And An Admirable Hobby
The recipes below are an excellent start for any beginner and great practice for any adept extract brewer. Ruse phantom shore citra extra pale. Always use good and proper cleaned all grain home brewing equipment. Well, then you’re ready to brew beer. Sure there are a few simple rules to follow, but if you keep within the guidelines, you can’t go wrong. All grain beer is considered better over the extract quality because here, one can have control over the malt profile of the beer, as while brewing however, making an all grain beer is a bit of a complex process, which requires careful handling. Australia’s best brews over 200 beer recipes. In this column i’m going to step outside the norm for beginner’s block and talk more to. That sugar is consumed by yeast to create alcohol There are a wide variety of malts that brewers can use, all of which fall into two broad. The pdf contains all of my recipes and is updated every time i add new recipes to beercraftr. Brad will teach you the basics of the recipe formulation process that he uses to design each and every. A note on the beer recipes.
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Ultimate Guide To Beginner All
If you are a home brewer already Im sure you most likely started out with an extract kit. Its easy and less expensive in starting equipment costs. But if you find you enjoy homebrewing, making the switch to all grain will save you lots of money quickly.
Switching from extract to all-grain is easy for beginners. It requires some additional equipment and time to switch to all-grain. All-grain is easy to learn but difficult to master, dont worry about being a perfectionist on your first try. Follow simple recipes and learn the basics.
In order for beginners to start brewing all grain, you will need to set expectations since many of the first beers you brew will be experiments. Its also best to stick to the easiest beers since mashing can get extremely difficult with advanced ingredients.