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Homemade Beer Part I

Florian the Saint of the brewers

My neighbor is a master brewer. Because he is a good friend he invented me to brew beer. Our plan is to do this next time in our garden, but the first time we went to his brewery and used a sort of educational equipment.

The steps are like at home, but the enviroment was a little bit more professional. So for learning this was quite perfect.

I will only show you the steps with some annotaions, because there is good material in the net, about what is happening. (try a google search brewing beer or try this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewing which is ok and has a lot of links that show the details.

We will produce an white ale with 2.nd bottle/barrel fermentation.

Ingredients:

Hopfen und Malz, Gott erhalt’s! (german slogan, that says nearly every thing. Something like god save hops and malt)

water (yes, very important)
malt
hops
yeast
love, devotion and surrender (how with every thing)

Equipment:

a piece of paper to log the process (if you want to reproduce your result this is the essence)
burner
one pot for mashing and boiling (and may be fementation, We took a separate pot for open fermentation and a barrel for closed)
one pot for lautering and cooling
thermometer
bottles or a barrel

Mashing

Let the enzymes crack the starch in the grain into sugars. There are many and every temprature level in the mashing process yields other sugars. Important: log the times, tempratures and of course water/grain ratio! And for the further process every thing you do!

And taste the water grain mixture at the beginning (hard but necessary) and after every temprature level. It will become sweeter and complexer in taste every step. (that is the first level of devotion ;-)

When the soup tastes well (ok when it has enough (ground) wort (german: Stammwürze a nice Wort = word in German), we were in a brewery so we had a possibility to measure it) heat it up to the boilig point to stop the enzymatic process.

Lautering

Now we have to sepearte the solute sugers with the soup from the mash. Put every thing in the lautering pot, which is nothing more than a fine sieve. Here the devotional act is to regulate the flewing process until it produces first a clear soup and second a flew that will not stop until the last essence has gone through the mash.

Put the result back to the boiling pot.

In the lautering pot there will be a sort of mash cake of which you can make bread, if you want.

Boiling and hopsing (sounds like the cook in Bonanza)

Now we cook the soup for ca. one hour. We give hops to it 3 times. First at the beginning, second after 1/2 an hour and third 3/4 hour or a little bit later. This process step is for taste, wort and sterilisation.

From now on sterile processing is very important, if you don’t want sour beer. (this is near by the surrender level)

Cooling

When the wort is al right (you can regulate it with heat, up means up or water, which means wort goes down, but don’t forget that with water you have to pay attention on sterilisation, which means cook until it is sterile), you have to cool down the soup as fast as possibel. (this is realy a technical hard problem at home, so we will see how we master this in home brewing part II)

Here we had a pump, which pumped the soup through a copper pipe that was placed in cold water.

When 14-20 degrees celsius are reached you can fill the soup in the fermentation pot or barrel and put the yeast in.

Fermentation

Wait 5-7 Days and fill the beer in bottles or a barrel.

2008-07-04:

We met again to fill the beer into bottles and a barrel. And we had the plan to experement with a part of the beer. So we decided to produce 20 bottles of chili beer (differnt sorts of chili to find out which one tastes good in beer) We used fresh and dried thai chili, dried indian chili and sechuan pepper. We heated every sort of spice to kill the bacteria.