GrapeHops Blog

So visiting breweries and talking to brew masters made me realize to get a real understanding for the brewing process, I needed to step in and actually make some beer. Many of you have seen those home brew kits (e.g., Mr. Beer) but that felt to me, like learning to bake bread via a bread machine. Yeah you get a feeling for the ingredients involved but not much else.

Now before I continue, let me give you my cop out. While I did use a huge vat on the stove to brew the beer, and I did cool this quickly (but not in a cooler) and I did move it to a fermenting bucket with an airlock for two weeks and I did move the beer from the fermenting bucket to a bottling bucket and I did use a tube (via vacuum effect) to move the beer from the bottling bucket into the bottles, and I did cap them, I also “cheated.” (Oh, and feel free to comment on my cheating here). I used a “kit” that came with all the necessary ingredients to brew our beer, a Scots Brown Ale. Yes, I know there are recipes, and I can buy and grind my own grains and flavoring ingredients and even make up my own recipes, but isn’t that like trying to make a beef wellington from scratch for the first time, without a recipe and/or pre-made puff pastry – you might be able to do it but would you really want to eat the results?

So I got my kit from The Home Brewery and it worked well.

And yes, my trusty assistant (aw, hell, who we kidding here – I made him do most of the work), Chris was by my side through the process.

First step, we had to heat five gallons of water in a large pot (and let me stop here to give a shout out to my brother, Andy, who got us a big ‘ol turkey deep fryer which is now doubling as our brew pot). Trust me when I tell you it takes a while to heat five gallons of water (to 170 degrees). While the water heats, you’re letting a cheesecloth filled with the “specialty grain” steep in there.

Next up, we took the pot off the heat and added the dry malt extract and hop pellets (the hop gives it that bitterness) and we stirred and stirred until it dissolved.

Then you boil it and continue to boil it for an hour. During that time, you gotta shove the green gunk from the bitterhops back down into the liquid (otherwise your beer won’t have as much of that bitter flavor in it).

Before it finishes boiling (45 minutes into the boil basically), we added Irish Moss. This stuff keeps the beer from getting cloudy.

Fifty minutes into the boil, we added the flavoring hops (okay – not really clear on what flavor the “flavoring hops” and this is the point where if I had selected my own recipe or made one up, I might have some more control over the end product). Oh, let me also note, after talking to a local beer geek last weekend, I learned more about dry malt (even tasted some) and got a better feel for how they affect the end product too.

Two minutes before the end, you add Aromatic Hops – and again, I’m assuming for smell but again because this was a pre-made kit, I have to trust them as to the type of aroma we were adding and whether or not it would be appropriate to a Scots Brown Ale. You wait to add them until the end so the aromas don’t boil away (kind of like adding fresh herbs at the end of cooking).

Now the fun comes – you’ve got to get this hot mass down to 75 degrees as quick as you can (you don’t want bacteria getting into it). By the way, you call this hot mass the Wort and you can buy a “Wort Chiller” to cool the beer down quickly. But lucky for us, the day we brewed it was about 20 degrees outside so we loaded it into a bucket filled with ice (today, we’re brewing a wheat beer and there’s snow outside, so we’ll stick it in that to chill).

Once the wort cools, you dump all of it into a fermenting bucket. If you ended up with less than 5 gallons of Wort, you can add cooled, pre-boiled clear water to bring the volume back to that 5 gallon mark.

Last step for the “brewing process” is to add the yeast. Sprinkle it on top of the Wort, it will get damp and sink eventually. Close up the fermenting bucket and hook up the airlock (which you fill with water or vodka – though vodka works better as an anti-bacteria fighter) and set it someplace cool and dark to do its work (we put it in our basement).

Now those little yeast monsters will eat all the natural sugar in the wort (from the hops and malts and stuff, creating alcohol and gas (aka CO2). After a couple of days, you’ll actually see bubbles in the airlock.

We left ours for two weeks, fermenting away before we bottled but that will be another entry.