EQUIPMENT
1- 4 gallon pot (your “brew pot”)
1- big spoon
1- 6 gallon plastic carboy, complete with bung and filter lock (your “fermenter”)
1- 6 gallon plastic bucket, w/ spigot (your “bottling bucket”)
1- 6 foot length of 3/8” inside diameter plastic hose (your “siphon hose”)
1- 3 foot length of 3/8” outside diameter plastic hose (your “blow off hose”)
1- kitchen strainer
1- bottle capper
50- 12 oz glass beer bottles
50- new bottle caps
1- thermometer
INGREDIENTS
Malt – 5.5 lbs Wheat Dried Malt Extract (DME)
Specialty Grains
8 oz roasted barley
4 oz 15L crystal malt
2 oz carapils malt
Bittering Hops – 1 oz Saaz Hops - pellets
Special – fruit, spices, teas – various amounts
Yeast - 1 pkg Safale Dry Yeast
Priming Sugar – ¾ cups corn sugar
PROCEDURE
1. Put 2 gallons of water into the brew pot and heat. Once the water is in the brew pot, brewers no longer call it “water.” It is now “liquor.” The bigger the brew pot the better. You want to boil as much of the liquor as possible. The biggest danger here is a boil over. As a general rule of thumb for stovetop brewing only fill your brew pot halfway. Later on you will top off your fermenter to 5 gallons.
2. Seep the specialty grains. Lightly grind the bags of specialty grains from your kit. A rolling pin works best for this, or you might try an empty wine bottle or something of that nature. You only want to crack the grains, making “grist.” You do not want to make flour. Once most of the grain husks are cracked tie the grist up in the muslin bag and seep them in the liquor. Start the heat (turn on the burner). Once the liquor starts to boil remove the grain bag. Boiling will extract unwanted flavors (tannins) from the grain.
3. Add malt and bittering hops. This is where must of us have our boil-overs. Remove the liquor from the heat. Slowly stir in the malt. Bring back to a boil. Then slowly add in your bittering hops. Once these are all stirred in then return the liquor to the heat and slowly bring back to a boil. Start your timer. This will be a 60 minute boil.
4. Boil. You will be boiling for an hour. You MUST watch the brew pot constantly during the boil, stirring occasionally to prevent scorching. The mess left by a home brew boil-over is amazing. Trust me, you'd rather drink your homebrew than scrub it off of your stovetop. If it starts to boil over you can do one of four things: remove from heat, stir, add about a pint of cold water, or just give up and get a new wife, girlfriend, or stove.
5. Remove from boil at 1 hour. The actual brewing part is now finished. Your liquor is now called “wort”. You are ready to ferment.
6. Sanitize your fermenter. You should sanitize everything that comes in contact with the wort after the boil. The better you sanitize your equipment the better your beer will taste. Sanitation cannot be stressed enough! We spend more time in our brewing sessions cleaning and sanitizing than everything else put together. Soaking everything in a weak solution of household bleach - a capful of bleach for every 5 gallons of water for 10-15 minutes should do the trick. Don't go any heavier on the bleach – it's potent. Don't forget to rinse well – bleach will kill yeast as well as it kills bacteria. Rinse until you no longer smell the chlorine, and then rinse a couple more times. If you're not sure that it's clean enough then clean it again.
7. Add 3 gallons of clean, cold water to your fermenter. You can do this.
8. Add your wort to your fermenter. Ladle the hot wort through the strainer. This will filter out most of the hops. The cold water will absorb the heat in the wort. You want a final wort temperature of 70-80 degrees F. You may have less than 5 gallons once you've transferred all of your wort, so top off your carboy with more clean, cold water until you 5 to 5 ½ gallons of wort. If you are really ambitious, pre-boil the water beforehand.
9. Add yeast. Once the wort's temperature is blow 78 degrees Farenheit add the yeast (we call it “pitching the yeast”). Don't forget to sanitize the thermometer before you test the wort temperature. Heat (do not boil) about 1/4 cup of water and stir in the dry yeast, sanitizing everything first of course. Then pour this into your fermenter.
10. Attach blow off hose. During the first few days of fermentation your beer will probably foam right out of your fermenter. Put the end of the sanitized 3/8” outside diameter hose into the hole in the sanitized bung. Put the other end of the hose into something that can collect the blow off. An old milk jug works well, as does a large drinking glass. Whatever you use should be clean. Fill partially with mild bleach water.
11. Attach filter lock. After a few days the activity in your fermenter will drop off. Once the foam level drops down enough that nothing is blowing off, replace your blow off hose with the sanitized filter lock.
12. Ferment. Fermentation can last anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks. Usually 2 weeks is plenty of time. You will see your beer become less and less active. Eventually, you will see the filter lock level off, or no longer bubbling. Once you have 3 consecutive days of no visible activity you are finished fermenting.
13. Bottle your beer. You're almost there. Bottling is somewhat tedious, but it is well worth it. Try to talk someone into helping out.
1. Sanitize you bottling bucket, your bottles,
and your siphon hose.
2. Boil your bottle caps for 10 minutes
3. Boil your priming malt with 1 pint of water for 10 minutes (this can
boil over).
4. Put your fermenter on a counter top or table and remove filter lock.
5. Put your bottling bucket on the floor beneath your fermenter.
6. Add your boiled priming malt to the bottling bucket.
7. Fill your siphon hose with water, put your thumbs over either end, put
one end into your fermenter and the other end into the bottling bucket.
8. Siphon all but the last ½ inch of sediment into the bottling bucket,
being careful not to splash.
9. Place bottling bucket on counter top or table.
10. Siphon beer into bottles, leaving about an inch of headspace in each
bottle.
11. Cap the bottles.
12. Store upright in a cool, dark place for 2 weeks.
13. Chill and drink. You should pour beer gently into a glass and off of
the sediment that naturally forms in the bottom of each bottle.
14. Make more. There will never be enough.
We hope you enjoy your beer. There are an infinite variety of beer styles to try, and just as many ways to brew them. There are many websites, brew clubs, magazines and books available to help you in your new quest for better, fresher, tastier beers. We will recommend only one to start with: The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing , by Charlie Papazian. Every home brewer that we've ever met started with this book and still swears by it to this day. We've actually met Charlie and hope to bronze him someday. Good luck and happy brewing!
Barley makes good beer and poor bread. Wheat makes great beer and good bread. Most people, left to themselves, would make great beer and go hungry. Laws had to be enacted to make people make bread with wheat and beer with barley just to keep the populace from starving. However, the nobles who enacted these laws still allowed beer to be made from wheat, but only for consumption by the nobles!
“RELAX… DON'T WORRY… HAVE A HOMEBREW!”
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