brewed some stout
My housemates and i brewed our first home-made beer today. The product will be an Irish Stout, a dark black beer with lower alcohol content and a sort of chocolatey/coffee taste to it (due to some roasted barley that we used). I’ll try and outline the steps we took in making it, but this is our first homebrew so it’s certainly not the best advice you can get. Consult an expert before following anything you read here, this is just a record of what happened. you’ve been warned. For a great guide on how to brew beer, i strongly recommend How to Brew, by John Palmer. The full book is available on the website, and it has tons of great advice.
So, we started out by buying some brewing equipment, available at homebrewing stores in your local town. We got a large white bucket with an air-tight lid, and a little hole in the lid where an airlock fits on. We want the yeast to convert sugars to alcohol, which is an anaerobic process, so we have an airlock on there to release CO2 without letting O2 in. We also have a 23L glass carboy, which we will use as a secondary fermenter to transfer the beer to when the yeast is mostly done. it’ll age there for a week or two. Also, as part of the beginner kit i bought, we got a large stirring spoon, some sanitizing detergent for eliminating bacteria before we brew, a strainer, a syphon and hose, and a hydrometer to measure alcohol content.
The recipe we used was from the homebrew place, Dan’s Homebrewing Supplies here in Vancouver, Canada (on Hastings street, sorta near chinatown). It’s listed here on his site, under “dry irish stout”:
Dry Irish Stout - O.G. 1.046 ……………….. $24.00
7lb 4oz Pale Malt Extract
8 oz Wheat Malt
8 oz Carapils Malt
1 lb Roast Barley
15 AAU bittering hop (Centennial, Columbus)
ale yeast
For those who aren’t familiar with beer brewing, Malt is where they take a grain (usually barley) and get it to start the process of sprouting. This releases enzymes that are able to convert the starches into sugars. then the grains are cooked, which continues that conversion process, so the end result has a high amount of “maltose”, which is a type of sugar. This is later eaten by the yeast which produces alcohol as a byproduct. Hops are flowers from a hop plant, which sort of resemble a pine cone in shape. they’re added for bitterness and for flavour and aroma. they also have an antibacterial effect. Different types of hops have different flavour effects, and have varying amounts of bitterness when cooked. Finally, the “O.G.” refers to “Original Gravity”, which is where we measure the specific gravity of our brew. This tells us how dense it is, compared with water, which indirectly tells us about the sugar and nutrient content of it. Later after fermentation is done, we’ll take another measurement (”final gravity” or “F.G.”), and we can calculate the percent alcohol by volume using the formula (OG-FG)*131. The difference in specific gravity is mostly because of the sugars that got converted to alcohol.
To make this beer, we heated a few gallons of water up to about 75C and steeped the grains (the wheat malt, carapils malt, and roasted barley) in the hot water using some cheesecloth. this is like making tea, getting the sugars and flavours from the different grains into the water. Then we removed the grains after about 30 minutes and brought the water to a boil, adding the malt extract (the major source of maltose in this recipe) and then the hops (for bitterness). since we added the hops at the beginning of the boil and then continued boiling for 60 minutes, most of the hops contribution is bitterness to balance the sweetness of the malted grains. if we had added some hops later at 15 minutes before the end of the boil, it would add hoppy flavour, and at 5 minutes before the end for hop aroma, but for this type of beer we don’t want too much of a hoppy flavour, just a bit of bitterness.
After the boil, we cooled the “wort” (unfermented beer) as quickly as we could. If we let it cool slowly, it’s a prime target for bacteria when it’s warm….it’s basically a warm bath of sugars and nutrients, which is paradise for bacteria. If a bacteria colony gets started, it’ll taste more like vinegar than beer, so we put the pot in a sink full of cold water to bring it down to 20C in about 15 minutes. we then strained it into the large fermenting bucket, removing the boiled hops, and pitched in some rehydrated brewer’s yeast.
We also aerated the mixture at this point, to provide some oxygen for the yeast to multiply quickly. Later, after the oxygen is used up by the yeast, it’ll start feeding anaerobically which will be the fermentation process. We don’t want to introduce any further oxygen because it could oxidize the beer ingredients to produce off flavours, so the whole fermentation process is done with an airlock on top of the container that only lets CO2 out. The end result right now is that i have a large bucket of black liquid in my kitchen, with an airlock on top that should soon start bubbling little CO2 bubbles out of it. After 5 days, most of the major fermentation should be done, at which point we transfer to a 23L glass carboy so that we can remove the spent yeast that will be gathered on the bottom of the fermenter. for about 2 weeks it’ll slowly develop the more subtle flavours as the remaining yeast processes the more complex compounds that are leftover from the primary fermentation.
after the secondary fermentation stage, we’ll mix up a bit of sugar-water to add to it, and then bottle it. the remaining yeast will eat that bit of sugar to produce some extra CO2 that’ll stay in the bottles to carbonate the beer as it ages for 2 more weeks. after a total of a month or so, 60 bottles of irish stout will be ready to drink :)
Of course, the next stage in all of this is to try to get local barley and local hops. some friends of mine have planted some hops, but it’ll take a few years before they produce enough flowers to use for beer. i’d like to find a place to plant some barley. A little while ago, i calculated how much space i’d need to grow enough barley for a year’s worth of beer, and i think it might be around 800 sq.ft. I can’t remember how i came up with that now though, so i’ll have to try to calculate it out again.
The beer process was interesting though, and i’m still learning lots about it. The “how to brew” site is great reading. Here are some links to a bunch more recipes, for all sorts of beers:
- grain+extract recipes from Dan’s Homebrewing in Vancouver. (there are more recipes on the site too)
- there are several different pages of recipes available on the BYO “brew your own” website. lots of good reading on there too.
- 10 more recipes from “fermentation frenzy”, including the “lawnmower ale” which was recommended to me as a good light ale to try brewing.
Ride hard, ride free
April 22nd, 2008 at 15:45 pm
don’t forget the Beer Tools step-by-step tutorial: http://www.beertools.com/html/tutorial/index.shtml
And if you can find a copy, look for the Good Eats episode called Amber Waves. I found it on a torrent site. It too is a good step by step overview of the process.
April 23rd, 2008 at 09:29 am
Have you heard of ‘Free Beer’, the Creative Commons beer recipe?
http://www.freebeer.org/
April 23rd, 2008 at 17:10 pm
In some ways I think free beer is actually harmful in terms of freedom because they create the false impression that brewers hoard their recipes. The brewing community is, in fact, quite friendly and open about recipes and brewing procedures. Perhaps some of the really big breweries are more stuffy, but 9 times out of 10 no one who brews wants to know those recipes :).
So by putting up all the bureaucratic copyleft red tape they actually are encumbered by it more than the already free and sharing community. That said, Free Beer is a brand that people can be loyal to and champion, which is how we express what we believe in and who we are in a consumer world driven by desire instead of necessity.