Blessed are the Beermakers pt. 3 - Fermentation and Bottling

So 5 days in the bucket and I measure the Gravity (very simply put, the amount of sugar in a solution) of the beer. By measuring the wort when I pitch yeast and measuring again after a few days I can tell how much sugar is gone therefore how much alcohol is in my beer, and there fore when the Primary Fermentation is finished. I should have taken a picture of my Hydrometer, the tool that measure such things, but I didn't think of it. Any way we measured 1.058 degrees Plato at the start and 1.017 degrees at the end, I was shooting for 1.015 so this was pretty close and gave me about 5.3% ABV. Time to start the secondary fermentation.
See during Primary (read: when most of the alcohol is made) the yeast flocculate and fall out of suspension and make a 1.5 inch thick cake at the bottom of your ferment-er. This is called the "trub," and it can produce some off flavors if you let the beer set atop it too long. So, most brewers run the Secondary Fermentation in a secondary container. In my case a 6 gallon Carboy (one of those bottles you turn upside down on top of a water dispenser.) So I racked it over and it looks like this:

So this is secondary fermentation. During the week or so that the beer is in this container it will be conditioning. That is to say developing flavor while the yeasts clean op some of the waste products that they left behind when they were swimming in sugar water. This part of the process is a tasters game that I don't fully understand yet. The length of time that it takes is not only as varied as the types of beer that you can make, but as numerous as the amount of brewers making those beers. At any rate I left it be for a week and moved on to the bottling phase.
To sanitize I wash my bottles in the dishwasher on hot wash/hot dry, and am ready to bottle the second they come out. So after I get them started I have a few things to do. After the secondary fermentation there isn't much left for the yeast to eat, but I need them to keep working because I want another one of the products they produce. CO2. To get CO2 I have to give them more to eat. I, and most homebrewers, give them Corn Sugar. Why not Table Sugar? Brewers use corn sugar for its non-effect on taste. Table Sugar can leave cider-y tastes in the beer because it is not 100% ferment-able, corn sugar is. So I dump about a cup of corn sugar in the original plastic bucket, which I have cleaned and sanitized, and rack the beer over to it in preparation for bottling. I dump the sugar in first so that the beer mixes while it racks over rather than mixing with a utensil and adding a bunch of oxygen to the mix. Oxygen is bad.

After it's in the bucket it goes into the bottles with a bottling wand. Which is a plastic tube with a spring-loaded stopper at the end, as you push it down on the bottom of the bottle it opens and allows the bottle to fill without adding oxygen. Oxygen is bad. Then after all my bottles are full I start capping. Which looks like this:

Then we get everything cleaned up and put it all back in the tub so we can wait for that wonderful carbonation. Now that the solution is under pressure, as the CO2 produced increases the pressure even more it squeezes itself into the solution. After a about 10 days I'll open one to see how well carbonated it is. If it's good they go into the fridge where the cold temp stops the yeasts from working. I bottled em up a couple of days ago, I should be popping the top on the First Cold Irish Red on St. Patty's day. Poetic, don't you think?

Blessed are the Beermakers pt. 2 - Brew Day

Most of the beer brewing process is a passive experience, but the first day, dubbed "Brew Day," requires constant activity for the better part of 5 hours. This is how my Brew Day went:

Got home with the supplies (Honey Nut Scooters are not part of this particular brewing session) and started a couple of gallons of water heating up. I would heat that water to 150-155 degrees in order to steep my specialty grains into what brewers call a "Grain Tea." So I dumped all of my milled grain into a grain sock, turned the heat down, and let my grain steep for about 30 minutes. Meanwhile I filled my 7 Gallon Brewer's Bucket with water and sterilization chemical, and put every thing that would eventually touch my beer in that water. Bacterial infection is a big deal in beer making; present and active bacteria make bad tastes and can completely spoil a wort. After 30 minutes I grabbed up my grain sock and let it drain as much as possible. This is what the spent grain looks like.

So now I had a couple of gallons of grain tea to add my extract to. Remember I said it was like really thick syrup, well that syrup has to be diluted down to less viscous consistency so that it can be boiled. I got the syrup diluted down and added enough water to get me up to 6.5 gallons in the biol pot, brought it up to a boil and sat back for a bit. After 30 minutes of boiling it was time to add the Hops. I'm sure you heard of these in a Sam Adam's commercial, but mine are a bit different. Some home brewers opt for the whole hops that you see in beer commercials but the more cost effective version of hops look like this:

Those little pellets break up inside a cheese cloth sock and impart the same sort of bitterness that you would get from whole hops. Now as with almost anything the more fresh and unprocessed your ingredients are the better, and any brewer will tell you to move to whole hops when you can, but for me the cheapness wins for now. So I add those hops with an hour left in the total boil time that is required by my recipe and I wait for that hour to pass. When it's done boiling, I have a true blue Wort, just waiting for a bit of yeast to turn this into a party.

But before pitching yeast I need to do two things. First the wort is much to hot for yeast to survive so I must bring the temp down to an acceptable level for them to live, and the goal is to hit a level at which they do their work the best (more on this later). Second, is to activate the yeast, as my yeast comes dry, like baker's yeast. So a get a bit of warm water and mix in the dry yeast which makes a smelly little paste and I dump about a pound of sterile ice into my wort. I tried power cooling in my fridge and also ice bathing my bucket but nothing was getting the temp down fast enough so I resorted to diluting my wort a bit for the sake of shortening the amount of time the Wort would be in the "Danger Zone." Once it was in the correct range I transferred it over to my Brewer's Bucket and shook the heck out of it to aerate it. The purpose behind aeration is that yeast will reproduce when Oxygen is available, and since I don't necessarily have enough yeast to ferment the entire wort I want some reproduction to happen right off the bat. Also this process allows the Yeast to overrun and rogue bacteria or wild yeast that may have floated in. So after aeration I pitch the yeast in and slosh it around to disperse and clap on the lid and affix my CO2 lock. Which looks like this:

This device is a vertical tube with another bigger tube around it and another around the whole thing. When filled with water, or in my case Vodka because it's sterile, It allows gasses to escape a closed system with out letting gasses back in. But, didn't I just say that we need oxygen? For the very beginning of the fermentation this is true, but after there are enough yeast cells present you want them to stop reproducing and start eating sugars. As long as Oxygen is present they will continue to reproduce and break down the sugars way farther that the alcohol we are looking for. So as their CO2 pushes the oxygen out we want to keep it out. This valve also prevents pressure build up, since yeast make a LOT of CO2 when they are fermenting. At this point the passive part of the brewing process begins. Depending on the Beer the fermentation can take from a few days up to a week. We'll be checking on this one in 5 days.

Blessed are the Beermakers pt. 1 - The Recipe

This is the first part of a several part series covering my second attempt at home-brewing beer. Not that my first attempt was unsuccessful, it was quite successful in my mind, as I made a serviceable Brown Ale. I didn't document my first go and regretted that. From now on I'll be documenting each subsequent attempt.

Preface -
My first batch of beer was made from a canned extract, which means that I opened a can of a concentrated wort syrup (very simply, a wort is the solution of grain, hops and water that is the basis for the future beer, companies concentrate them into syrups for the homebrewer's market) and boiled it with a few gallons of water to make my own wort. I then cooled that wort and moved it to a special fermentation bucket and added yeast for fermentation.

After my first go I do not consider myself by any means an expert in the field, or even all that proficient, but I did feel like I was ready to up the challenge ante a bit. So I moved from the full extract "wort in a can" approach to what is called the "Extract with Grains" method. The "Extract with Grains" method means that I would be using a Malt Extract base and choosing a few grains of my own choosing to build the flavor profile.I think of it like this: if you are building a house you have a few options for foundation. You can have concrete, pier and beam, stilted, etc. Less than 10 choices total, let's say. Virtually every house on the planet is built on one of these types of foundations, and beers are very similar to that. The "Malt" is the foundational base of the beer and what ever kind of beer you are making starts with one of a few types of Malt bases. Many homebrewers buy the malt in extract form because it's difficult to make and doesn't offer a whole lot of customization options, a concrete foundation is a concrete foundation. "Real" beermakers will make their own malt so that they are in control of the flavor profile from start to finish. So I'm not making my own malt, I trust the malt extract available to me and add my own profile of grains. Which brings us to...

Step 1: The Recipe -
As I stated, while I feel comfortable with the process, I'm not by any means expert, so I did not write a recipe for the beer I would make. I went to the homebrew store with two goals in mind: 1. Up the ante with the "Extract with Grains" method 2. Move to a "Two Stage Fermentation Process (more detail later)" The only thing I knew about the recipe was that I wanted to make an Irish Red Ale. So Kayla and I drove down to Homebrew Headquarters in Richardson, propped my elbows up on the counter and told the Shopkeep about my plan for my second go at the process. I told him I did not however have a recipe in mind and that I would trust his judgment for a good recipe for Irish Red. He pulled the following for me:

6.25 lbs Pale Ale Malt extract
3oz. Crystal Malt Grain
7oz. Roasted Barley
1lb 6oz. Pail Ale Malt Grain
8 AAU (Acid Alpha Units) of UK Target Hop Pellets
11g. Nottingham Brewer's Yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae)
1 cup Corn Sugar for Priming

He also milled the grain for me and grabbed me some new equipment (Grain Sock, Glass Carboy, and Hop Sock ) for the more complicated process. With my bucket of syrup and bag of milled grain, and new hardware, I headed home to start the fun.

Part 2 Coming Soon.