First Batch - a Nut Brown Ale

I don't drink beer - I don't like the taste of alcohol. It's always too bitter and the delicate flavors in beer I'm supposed to savor are like cigarette butts soaked in ethanol.

Still I'm intrigued by the process of making it - it's alchemy. You sprout grains under controlled conditions for a set amount of time then boil them to stop the germination. Then you boil the sugars out of these grains and evaporate the water to make malt. This is mixed with water, roasted grains, and the flowers of a resinous plant called hops for taste and preservation. Activated yeast is introduced to this solution and it's poured into a sterile container for several weeks, then the solution sans precipitate is transferred to another container for several more weeks. Afterwards this solution is combined with a carefully measured amount of corn sugar solution and put into individual bottles. If you mess up this last stage the bottles could explode.

Actually, even if you do everything right, the bottles could still explode.

The germinated grain is heated to a specific temperature to kill the buds. When you steep the grains you should introduce them to the water when the temperature reaches 155F and remove it before it reached 170. There are times when you're encouraged to aerate the mixture to introduce oxygen and other times when you should emphatically avoid this. Exposing the elixer to sunlight will create "wet cardboard" or "skunky" flavors. And god forbid you stirred your cooled wort with a wooden spoon.

I spent some time reading everything I could find on the subject and the instructions list what seems like hundreds of ways of making a bad concoction. I borrowed a brewing book from Akira and the text consists of 100 pages of warnings about things you shouldn't do interspersed with messages to "relax" every few paragraphs.

Brewers use their own language to describe the different stages of the process:

• Malt is a sugar (malted milk ball candy is the same stuff) produced by sprouting barley. The seedlings use enzymes to break down the starches in the barley seeds into sugar for growing. The growing process is stopped when sugar is maxed out and this is washed out in water. You can buy dried malt or jugs of malt as a thick syrup.
• Wort (pronounced wert) is the water and malt solution. You boil this before adding the yeast. Boiling kills any bad stuff in your pot or mixture and helps steep the resins out of the roasted barley and hops.
• Hops are the green flowers of a climbing plant (in the cannibis family) that has a resinous quality that adds flavor to the brew and helps preserve the fermented drink.
• Sparging - If you're using unprocessed and unfiltered hops and barley then you have to filter out all this mess from the wort before you put it into the fermenter. The process of filtering out all this stuff is called sparging.
• The Carboy is a 5 gallon glass bottle like a filtered water container. I'm doing my first fermentation in a carboy though I also could have used a plastic bucket with a lid.
• You don't add the yeast to the wort, you 'pitch' it.

If I chose to do some more of the production steps myself instead of purchasing the ingredients in a ready-made kit, I could have explained 'trub', 'kraeusen', and 'gyle'.

When I went home last year for Thanksgiving, I found my brother had left his buckets, thermometers and some bottle caps behind the last time he visited. I also realized Akira had an unused glass carboy for making wine. I decided to borrow everything for some experiments.

I went to this site to get the rest of the equipment.

You can buy the ingredients for an ale or lager for $20-30. The buckets, air locks, hydrometers, thermometers, sanitizing solution, hoses, bottle capper, and other equipment can be purchased as a separate kit for around $120.

There are many different recipes for ales and lagers. When I started my research I was told that lagers were "bottom yeasts" meaning the precipitate falls to the bottom of the jar as it ferments and ales were "top yeasts" and the precipitate floats to the top. The kit I got is called an ale but the precipitate falls to the bottom. The online site discriminates between ales and lagers by the fermentation temperature. Ales are brewed at a cool room temperature and Lagers have to be actively chilled to 40-54 degrees.

Last Saturday my dad drove out and we set up the kit.

Despite how specific and erratic the instructions were, the process is very simple. The malt was pre-distilled and came in a milk jug as a thick syrup. The hops were crushed into pellets and stored in a air-tight bag. There was a bag of grains and a small packet of yeast.

You boil a mixture of roasted grains like tea in water and then add malt and hops. After an hour you cool it down in a ice bath. Then you pour it all into your fermenter with more water and add the yeast. Wait two weeks then siphon the brew to a different clean container leaving any precipitate behind. Wait two more weeks and then add some more sugar and put it into bottles.

The process went relatively smoothly. The pot in which I boiled my wort was slightly too small and after you've added the grains, hops, and wort, it gets really foamy. I had to watch things carefully to keep it from boiling over. The instructions wanted me to sanitize the carboy while the wort was cooling. The sanitizing powder is advertised as something that will sterilize your equipment and won't require rinsing afterwards. The instructions on the package called for 1 Tbsp for every gallon of liquid. I mixed the solution in my bathtub as best I could with the small neck of the glass bottle and when I was ready to use it, I dumped the water out only to find a lot of the undissolved cleaning solution still in the container.

I rinsed the bottle again so it looked clean but running tap water into my supposedly sterilized container kind of defeats the purpose of having a no-rinse sanitizer.

During the first 24 hours after adding the yeast it's recommended you use a blow-off hose in your fermenter. The brew will foam up enough to spill over and make a mess - a hose redirects this foam into another container. My wort had some foam after pouring it into the container but this went completely flat after a couple hours.

This wasn't good and I didn't know if it was because I hadn't rinsed the bottle properly. My dad figured my yeast was bad and wanted to put more into the solution but I didn't really want to change the recipe and decided to let it go overnight. The next morning it hadn't created a foam explosion but there was a thin layer of foam on the surface. I replaced the blow-off hose with an air-lock. The air lock has a small amount of water inside that allows air to escape but nothing from the outside to come in. At the current rate my yeasties are farting, the bottle blows a bubble every 3-4 seconds.

It's been blowing bubbles continuously for the past several days. When it first started the air coming out of the airlock didn't have much of a smell but today you can smell the alcohol.

When the bubbling slows down I'm supposed to take hydrometer readings (measuring the specific gravity of the liquid) looking for two consecutive days with no change. This is the signal to move to the second part of the fermentation.

Bottling the Nut Brown Ale

I read a ton about beermaking. There were several books, numerous online instructions and pamphlets - I watched a plethora of videos. The problem with doing a recipe that requires a sterile environment is you're constantly messing it up, contaminating things, dropping the sterile hose, splashing or touching the critically prepared wort, forgetting that crucial piece that should have been prepared before you got started but now you have to scramble to get it cleaned while your recipe is waiting, open to the air and attracting every microbe floating on every speck of dust. It's hard to avoid OCD when you're trying to keep things sterile.

The hose I have for siphoning the beer from container to container is a few feet too short. It flops around and twists in your hand. The end always bends up to sip air when you're trying to start a siphon. During the transfer of beer from the first to the second fermenter I tried and failed to start a siphon 5-10 times. I got my fingers into the beer - it was impossible. Then, because the hose was so short and the two buckets weren't quite the right height, I had to try to change their elevation one-handed holding a bucket and the short hose with the other hand.

In the process of juggling the beer I shoved my wireless keyboard aside to make room on the table. It pushed up under the lid to the bucket with the 'Enter' key held down. It took about 20 seconds before my computer started up several thousand instances of MST3K simultaneously. The audio was blasting as if in an echo chamber and I pounded on the 'escape key' to stop the process but after several minutes I had to put aside the beer, lose the siphon, and restart the computer.

I bottled the beer on Sunday evening. It was a similar clusterfuck - though not as comic. I had gathered enough bottles for the 5 gallon batch and even got rid of a few of the extras - because they were clear and I wanted to have all brown bottles.

It wasn't until part way into the capping process when I realized you can't put a cap onto a bottle if it's a screw top. The diameter of the opening is the same but there's nothing for the press-on cap to grasp and it felt like it would break the capper if I forced things. It took me a few failed caps before I realized it wasn't a problem with the capper. How many did I fail to cap before I realized it was the thread that made the difference? This many.

It's a material demonstration of my thickness - though two of those don't technically count. One brown bottle chipped as I used the capper and the green bottle was overlooked as threaded after I had already known to avoid those bottles.

So in the end, I was left with 4-5 bottles worth of beer than I had bottles for. I put the remainder in a 2-L bottle - the only container I had on hand. During this last farce I tried to setup a siphon into the container. I failed at the siphon but did get a mouthful of the flat beer. It wasn't sour or especially bad tasting so I suppose I hadn't screwed up too badly.

I'm ready to try again. I will buy proper hose for the next time and stick with the buckets rather than the carboy though I'm not sure if I want to invest in proper resealable bottles instead of trying to clean and reuse standard beer bottles.

Second Batch - German Kolsch

I pitched the yeast on Saturday. We'll see how this one goes. The last one was a bit sour and I wonder if the wort was contaminated from one of my several blunders. This time it went as smoothly as possible.

This beer is a German Kolsch and required twice as many hops as I used in the last batch. My apartment smells resinous and malty - it's not unpleasant. The kit was put together piecemeal from the bits I picked up when I borrowed the equipment. Again, I hoped it would require the blowoff tube but the liquid sat flat for ~12 hours before gently starting to foam at the surface. The airlock is merrily bubbling away now and this is a relief; I had had some concern about the health of the yeast.

I started gathering material and boiling water at 10am on Saturday and got the wort cooled and in the bucket by 12:30. Unlike bread, the process requires a lot of attention. The recipe calls for ingredients to be added or changed every 15 minutes and you have to monitor the temperature continuously to keep the pot from boiling over.

Here is the rough recipe:

Ingredients:

• An unknown amount (1 bag) of dry malt extract added at -60min
• 3 pounds of liquid malt (this could be a problem the recipe online calls for 6 pounds) at -15min
• 1oz Tradition Hops at -60min
• 1oz Hallertau at -30min
• 1 Wyeast dry yeast packet
• a bag of unknown grains - (labeled specialty grains)

Procedure:

• I boiled about an inch of water in the pot for several minutes to sterilize things.
• crush the 'specialty grains' in a heavy duty ziploc bag and transfer them to a mesh bag
• tie off the mesh bag with some room for expansion and save the leftover piece for the hops
• put the tradition hops in a mesh bag with room left for expansion
• I added a total of about 1.5 gallons of filtered water to the boiling pot
• install the thermometer and steep the grains for 15min or until the water reached 170 degrees - whichever comes first (in my case it was at 160 at the 15minute mark)
• remove the grains and feed them to the chickens

The ingredients have times in negative minutes. You boil the wort for 60 minutes and the negative times indicate when to add the ingredients in this window. I stirred the boiling wort with a wooden spoon.

• I added dry malt and tradition hops - and because it looked like I had room, I emptied the last half gallon of water into the pot
• after 30min I added the hallertau hops (the bags of hops floated for the first 50min of boiling and then sank)
• at the 45min mark I hadded the liquid malt
• at 60min I put the pot into a cold water bath with all the ice in my freezer

Cooling the wort as fast as possible apparently give it less time to be contaminated and clarifys the resulting beer. As soon as the pot is off the burner you need to be extremely careful not to contaminate the wort with any rogue yeasts or bacteria.

• While the wort was chilling I filled the buckets in my bathtub with hot water and the no-rinse cleansing solution - stirring constantly to make sure it was dissolved.
• return to the kitchen to find all my ice melted and the water warm - I transferred the pot to the other side of the sink with more cold water being extremely careful not to drip water onto the lid.
• go back to wash and stir the sterilizing buckets
• return to the sink and transfer the wort back to the other side with more cold water. After 15min in this third bath, the pot was no longer warm to the touch.
• Bring the buckets in and prepare them for the wort
• dump the rest of the water (3 gallons) into the bucket and then add the wort. I made sure to splash things around to aerate the solution.

When I added the wort I made sure to leave behind as much of the sediment as possible.

I made the decision to not re-hydrate the dry yeast. I may have contaminated my last batch with non-sterilized glassware.

• I sprinkled the yeast on the surface and put the lid on the bucket. I then shook the bucket to aerate it further and mix the yeast in.

I probably should have taken a specific gravity reading before adding the yeast but I didn't think about it. The reading was 1.032 (the final product should be around 4% alcohol by volume when it's done fermentating).

There was no activity all that evening and I put an airlock on the bucket mid-morning the next day. I made sure to push the airlock in dry and then add water afterwards. It was blowing bubbles every few 5-10 seconds. The next day it was blowing bubbles every 1-2 seconds (and the gas smells more like proper beer)

Transferring the beer

Thurs 090416

During the primary fermentation, the yeast in the beer produces a lot precipitate. This is the hop and grain silt and the dead civilization of yeast. You want to separate the beer from this scum as soon as the fermentation settles down because it can cause bad flavors. I read you shouldn't leave the beer in the primary fermenter for more than two weeks.

I procrastinated and only got around to transferring the beer late last week - 12 days after starting the fermentation.

The spigot on the primary fermenter is set a bit off the bottom so when you drain the bucket it leaves the layer of scum on the bottom. The stuff left behind looked pretty nasty. It had the consistency of thick pea soup and smelled strongly of hops.

I licked some.

The taste wasn't that bad but it had a nasty bitter aftertaste.

I took a specific gravity reading in the process of transferring the beer, my original reading was 1.039 and this new reading was 1.009. This works out to nearly 5% alcohol!

I should be bottling sometime around next weekend.

Bottling the Kolsch

Bottling went smoothly.

I found the best way to siphon the beer out was to use the wine thief to start a siphon and a bottle filler to control it at the other end. It's then possible to just leave the thief in the bucket and the motion of the siphoned beer will keep the one way valve open. The filler would drip some beer but I had plenty of towels handy.

I did the first 12 bottles by filling then near the floor, and then standing up and capping then on the counter. Eventually I decided to just sit on the floor and do both the filling and capping there.

Because it's a two stage process, it would have gone much smoother with a second person. I think the entire process, boiling the final sugar add-in, cooling it, prepping the bottles and the sanitizer, siphoning and capping took about an hour and a half.

In order to keep things as clean as possible, I washed the bottles at the sink to remove the labels, washed them again in the dishwasher, and then washed them a third time in my no-rinse solution just before filling and capping them.

Filling the bottles with the sanitizing solution is messy and slow and I'm not sure it's necessary. A few of the bottles in this batch were filled directly from the dishwasher. If these turn out the same as the others I will probably forgo the extra sanitizing step.

Round Three, Irish Red!

Monday 090706

My first batch was sour, the second was good - it's time to find out which was the exception. If this goes well, I'll go ahead and order another kit - otherwise I might consider this experiment concluded.

I made one gaffe when I accidentally touched the shower curtain in my bathroom with the tip of the wine thief after sanitizing the equipment in the bathtub. It would have taken a while to resterilise everything so I let it pass.

I took notes during the process because I find it really helps to have a record of the process from the last time.

• 5:10 - I started collecting equipment and cleaning the kitchen. It's important to have both sides of the sink empty.
• 5:20 - I started boiling a small amount of water in the pot to sterilize things. While the pot boiled I put the grains into a gallon sized ziploc bag and cracked them with a rolling pin. The grains were put into a cheesecloth bag.
• 5:30 - I put the cracked grains into 2.8 (should have been 3) gallons of water along with a thermometer. The water was at 115F
• 5:47 - I removed the grains. The water was at 144F. I waited for the water to boil
• 6:10 - The water was at 190F
• 6:21 - The proto-wort was boiling and I added the williamette hops (-60min)
• 6:24 - The pot boiled over making a mess of my stovetop. I positioned the temperature knob at 2/5.
• 6:51 - I added the Kent Golding hops (-30min)
• 7:21 - I removed the pot and carefully set it into the sink with cold water. I made the mistake of adding ice to the first bath. In the future it would be better to do the first of the three baths with plain cold water. The second bath should be cold water with 1/3 of the ice and the third bath should be cold water with the rest of the ice.

I was careful not to drip or splash water near the lid. In fact I was careful not to touch the lid at all after it was removed from the heat. The only thing keeping my sterile and sexually innocent wort from the infectious filth and disease ridden atmosphere in my kitchen was the weight of the lid around the edge of the pot.

After putting the pot in the sink I went to the other room to run bathwater into the bucket and add the no-rinse sterilizer.

• 7:37 - The pot was going into it's third bath at this point
• 8:23 - The surface of the pot was cool to the touch so I brought the bucket into the kitchen and put it on a towel.

I added the rest of the water (for a total of 5 gallons) to the bucket and then poured the cooled wort into this. I was as splashy as possible during this process to introduce oxygen into the solution. I took a specific gravity reading; it was 1.040.

Then with a careless laugh I cut the top off my package of yeast with unsterilized scissors and dumped it, without rehydration, directly into the wort solution. I stirred the solution with the contaminated wine thief.

• 8:32 - done.

The temperature in Monterey has been warm and with rat and dormouse working as little space heaters, my room thermometer indicated the temperature as 76F. This ale does best at 58-70F. All I can do is open a window...

The hopped wort sampled from the hydrometer tube tasted bitter.

While boiling the wort, the thin steel pot popped, hissed, and groaned over the burner. As I cleaned up afterwards, I noticed two burned spots on the bottom. My old pot is smaller but it has a nice thick bottom. I don't know how the burned bits will affect the taste.

Will it start fermenting? Will it be irish? Will it be red? Tune in next week when I transfer the mixture to the secondary fermenter.

Transferring the beer

I moved the beer to the secondary fermenter on the following Sunday. Fermentation seemed like it had mostly stopped and there was no foam on the surface but I noticed after moving the beer that it was still blowing bubbles through the air lock.

I tasted a bit when taking the hygrometer reading and it tasted bitter. It's still early so I expect the taste will mellow somewhat over the next few weeks. The specific gravity was 1.010 - it's still not done fermenting.

Round ten or eleven, Santa Cruz IPA

I stopped writing about each batch for a while but I continued to refer to the procedure I followed when I brewed the irish red. Here's the log of another batch.

On Saturday we went to the fungus festival in Santa Cruz. We also went to several book and record stores, the penny ice creamery, and the seven bridges co-op brewing supply store where I bought an EZ IPA kit.

I brewed on Sunday and took notes on the equipment, materials, and process. It's pretty EZ and relatively cheap to get started. I've written about the process before but here's another overview of materials and process.

I have:

• two six gallon buckets (one with a valve on the bottom) and a lid with a grommeted air valve

• a wine thief

• a bottle filler

• bottle caps

• a bottle capping tool

• tubing

• 52+ mostly clean beer bottles

• two mesh bags - one for the grains and one for the hops

• a big pot with a lid that can hold three gallons and a little foam.

• a thermometer

• 5 gallons/19L of water

• specific gravity measurement tool (which I didn't use)

I bought:

The EZ IPA kit ($42) containing:

• 50g new zealand cascade hops
• 50g new zealand cascade hops
• 28g new zealand cascade hops (for finishing?)
• 28g american magnum hops (for bittering?)
• small bag of irish moss
• 3.86kg of breiss pale malt extract.
• A bag of priming sugar (for just before bottling)

I also bought:

• A can of brewers yeast ($10) (not pictured).

• A jar of sterilizing solution ($9).

The process:

The whole process took 3.5 hours and with a few exceptions I spent most of the time reading/waiting for a timer to go off so I could do the next step.

The whole process should take around an hour and a five gallon batch of beer will make around 52 bottles.