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How to Brew – By John Palmer

How to Brew – By John Palmer
Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time

This is the book to own for home brewing. I found it especially useful after I had done a few extract batches and was looking to go into the all-grain realm. The book goes into a lot of detail and it can move quickly at times. As I continued to brew I began to rely on it more and more. Other books out there were either too detailed, or too basic in terms of all grain brewing. This book is very detailed about all grain brewing and it gives a really nice chapter on ‘how’ to do it. There are several other chapters on the specifics behind all grain brewing as well. The appendices on building out your own chiller, mash tun, and gravity system present interesting challenges to tackle as you move ahead with brewing.

The entire book is also available online at this url: https://www.howtobrew.com.

Topics unique to this book:

• Best explanation out there on your first all-grain batch

• Covers details on milling mashing, mash pH, lautering.

• Formulating recipes

• Building your own wort chiller

• Building a mash/lauter Tun

• Metallurgy and brewing

• Gravity systems

• RDWHAHB – Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Home Brew

Posted in Book Reviews | 4 Comments »

Extremes of the BJCP Guidelines 2008

The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) puts out a set of style guidelines for beer, mead, and cider. Across the categories of beer there is a wide variation in average alcohol content, bitterness, and color. This article examines the average for OG, FG, ABV, IBU and SRM for the beer categories and reports the maximum and minimum values found and the accompanying styles.

Alcohol By Volume (ABV) :

Highest, 11.5%:
5. BOCK D. Eisbock

Lowest, 2.85%:
9. SCOTTISH AND IRISH ALE A. Scottish Light 60/-

International Bittering Units (IBUs) – Higher numbers represent a more bitter beer.

Highest, 60 for a tie between:
14. INDIA PALE ALE (IPA) C. Imperial IPA
19. STRONG ALE C. American Barleywine

Lowest at 0 for:
20. SOUR ALE D. Straight (Unblended) Lambic
21. SOUR ALE E. Gueuze
22. SOUR ALE F. Fruit Lambic

Standard Reference Method (SRM) – Measure of color on the Lovibond scale, higher means darker:

Highest, 40 for a tie between all the Stouts:
13. STOUT A. Dry Stout
13. STOUT B. Sweet Stout
13. STOUT C. Oatmeal Stout
13. STOUT D. Foreign Extra Stout
13. STOUT E. American Stout
13. STOUT F. Russian Imperial Stout

Lowest at 2 for the following:
1. LIGHT LAGER A. Lite American Lager
1. LIGHT LAGER B. Standard American Lager
1. LIGHT LAGER C. Premium American Lager
2. PILSNER A. German Pilsner (Pils)
15. GERMAN WHEAT AND RYE BEER A. Weizen/Weissbier
16. BELGIAN AND FRENCH ALE A. Witbier
17. SOUR ALE A. Berliner Weisse

Original Gravity – OG, how much fermentable sugar is present:

Highest, 1.130:
9. SCOTTISH AND IRISH ALE – E. Strong Scotch Ale

Lowest, 1.028:
1. LIGHT LAGER A. Lite American Lager
17. SOUR ALE A. Berliner Weisse

Final Gravity – FG, how much sugar is left behind (how sweet the beer is):

Highest, 1.056:
9. SCOTTISH AND IRISH ALE – E. Strong Scotch Ale

Lowest, 1.001:
1. LIGHT LAGER A. Lite American Lager

Extreme brewers, even a few breweries, have successfully pushed far past theses ‘guidelines’. For example, Dogfish Head’s 120 minute IPA pushing 21% alcohol by volume! It would be difficult to calculate IBU’s for a 5 gallon batch of beer that was brewed with several pounds of hops, but at that point who is counting?

Posted in Beer Styles | No Comments »

Recording Keeping For Extract Brewers

Most beginning brewers start with malt extract. Compared to all grain brewing there is a lot less to track, but it can still be overwhelming at first. Our Brew Day Sheet for Extract Recipes will help you to make sense of this, and brew more consistently.

The most basic thing to track at first is the exact batch ingredients:

• Pounds and type of malt extract (dry or liquid)
• Steeping grains (optional but recommend)
• Hops, variety, alpha acid content, and boil time for each amount
• Yeast
• Other, such as gypsum, Irish moss, gelatin, flavoring herbs, etc
• It is also useful for some people to track the cost of the batch.

The main variables to keep track of for an extract brewer are:

• OG – Original Gravity, basically how much sugar you started with. This involves taking a hydrometer reading before pitching the yeast.
• FG – Final Gravity, how much sugar you were left with. To measure this, take a hydrometer reading at the time of bottling before adding priming sugar.
• IBU – International Bittering Units, how bitter your beer will be.
• ABV – Alcohol by Volume, uses OG and FG to calculate.

Calculators at this site can be used to generate these numbers.

Check out the Brew Day Sheet for Extract Recipes, it is a free resource.

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Money Saving Tips – Repitching Yeast

Update 11/12/2011: Check out the article on Bad Batches to see why you might want to avoid re-pitching yeast, or if you do so, make sure to understand the risks involved.

Did you know you can save ~10% on your next batch of home brew by re-pitching yeast? Some brewers buy new yeast for each batch. That is a good way to guarantee results provided the yeast is within the expiration date and has been refrigerated properly. However, at $7 a hit that comprises about 20% of the cost of the batch! With a little planning in terms of recipes and beer styles you can easily cut this in half or a third. It is a normal thing to do. The commercial breweries reduce their costs by repitching over and over.

Harvesting the yeast cake at the bottom of a finished primary fermentation vessel is easy. After siphoning off the beer into the secondary or bottling bucket the yeast will be left behind. Pour the yeast slurry (also called the yeast cake) into a sanitized container for safe keeping. You may need to loosen it up with some clean water. The yeast can be saved for several weeks in the fridge. It can be siphoned into regular 12oz bottles and capped, or put in a jar with an airlock.

The yeast can also be repitched immediately if you rack or bottle your old batch while you are cooling your new batch.

Do not repitch yeast that came from a contaminated batch, or had a weak or incomplete fermentation. Any yeast that had a healthy fermentation will work for this technique and it can be repeated many times. The maximum I have heard is ten times. That is getting up there and would limit choices of beer styles. Yeast can be a big factor in flavor and body. See a complete list of yeast strains by clicking here.

Posted in Economics of Brewing, Yeast Cultures | 13 Comments »

Expired yeast was a dud

I have only had one bad experience with expired yeast. It was White Labs Southern German Lager. I found out after I got home it was about 6 months out of date!  I made up a normal starter using a half pound of DME and 4 pints of water (half gallon), to get a gravity of ~1.045. I cooled it down and pitched the ‘expired’ yeast into a 1 gallon glass jar. It just sat there for a few days and hardly bubbled through the air lock but a few times. I ended up tossing the whole thing out. This has taught me to always check the expiration date on the yeast.

Posted in Yeast Cultures | No Comments »

Pick the Correct Size Secondary Fermenter

Oxygen is the enemy of beer after fermentation. The main cause of oxidation in beer is exposure to oxygen when racking or bottling. Another culprit is the head space in the secondary fermenter. Make sure to use the smallest size secondary fermenter possible as not to expose the beer to oxygen in the head space. For example a typical 5 gallon batch should use a 6.5 gallon carboy or bucket as the primary fermenter, then a 5 gallon carboy as the secondary. There will be almost no head space in the secondary if done correctly.

Rules of thumb:

• Head space is needed in the primary, since there will be a lot of foam during the krausen phase of fermentation. Oxygen in the head space is not an issue during primary fermentation because it will be replaced by CO2 when fermentation kicks off and any dissolved oxygen will be utilized by the yeast. Some will also be pushed out through the air lock with the escaping CO2.
• Head space is bad in the secondary. Since the beer is fermenting slowly, it will take longer to push oxygen in the head space out through the air lock. This means most of the oxygen in the head space is getting into the beer and causing harmful effects.

Why is oxygen harmful in the secondary?

Oxygen (O2) is a reactive molecule. During primary fermentation the yeast use oxygen quickly as part of the metabolic reaction that produces alcohol. Inside the secondary the yeast metabolism has settled down greatly. This leaves any newly introduced oxygen free to interact with larger desirable molecules responsible for flavor and bittering. When the oxygen hits these molecules it splits them apart making for undesirable byproducts in the beer. Wet paper bag or cardboard taste is generally the telling sign of oxidized beer.

Posted in Brewing, Equipment | 1 Comment »

Lagering At Home Video

This video shows you what an in home lagering setup looks like. Also includes a look at corny kegs and the temperature controller needed for fermentation of a lager.

The beer being fermented is a Munich Helles!

Posted in Brewing, Kegging and CO2, Lagering | No Comments »

Money Saving Tips – Hops Utilization Factor

Minimizing costs and maximizing beer is a wonderful thing to put into practice. This post discusses the idea of getting more bittering potential from hops. With hops going for $32/pound this is worth paying attention to.

Alpha acids in hops are isomerized into bitter flavors during the boil.  The utilization factor is a number that expresses how easily and completely this process takes place.  Higher utilization translates into a higher amount of international bittering units (IBUs). The utilization factor decreases as the boil gravity increases. This means the more sugary your wort is, the less bittering you will get per ounce of hops.   Therefore by lowering the gravity of the boil it is possible to stretch hops bittering quality.

This tip really only applies to extract brewers who are able to add fermentable sugars in a more flexible manner than all-grain brewers who need a full wort boil. All grain brewers do not suffer from such setbacks in hops utilization because their wort boil gravity is essentially what the original gravity of the recipe is. Most extract books say to add all the dry/liquid malt extract at the start of the boil to 3 gallons of water, then dilute to five gallons afterwards. This hurts the hops bittering potential!

The basic procedure to get your wort gravity down is to use half of your extract for the entire boil at the time the bittering hops are added.  With 15 minutes to go (usually after 45 minutes of boiling), add the rest of the extract to bring up the gravity to where the recipe calls for. This will sanitize the extract and sufficiently integrate it into the wort before cooling.

You can see this in action by playing with this website’s IBU calculator.

Let’s consider an example: a simple lager with 2 oz of Hallertauer hops, Alpha Acid rating of 3.9, boiled for 60 minutes, no other hops additions.

In the case of an extract batch with an original gravity of 1.055 for a 5 gallon batch, but only boiling 3 gallons, we get 18.53 IBU’s.

If we tell the calculator the boil gravity was only 1.028 (half the sugars), we get an IBU rating of 27!  For calculation purposes we get close to what we would see with a full wort boil (enter 5 gallons for boil size and 1.055 for gravity) and it comes out to around 25.

A 38% increase in hops bittering potential is pretty good. That translates into a 38% savings in the cost of our bittering hops. It also means more bitter beer which a lot of home brewers really like – including the author!

Note: this practice may throw off the style of beer your batch fits into by boosting bitterness beyond where it needs to be. It will also allow you to make your next IPA much more bitter for the money.  IPAs are particularly expensive to make these days because they call for 2x-3x hops, and about half of that is for bittering.

Posted in Brewing, Economics of Brewing | 2 Comments »

Halloween brew

This is pretty spooky looking. Shine a flashlight through all the gunk that builds up on the inside of the carboy when fermenting a dark or high gravity beer!

Whoo-hahahaah!

If you don’t wash it out after racking I bet it gets even spookier!

Speaking of spooky, I’ve been thinking about some ingredients people used in the past, like dandelion for bittering. That sounds like a witch’s brew. I could be wrong but that *might* be the reason why they don’t make it in today’s time.

I’m going to try a cranberry mead in a week, that should be more in line with my personal taste. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Posted in Brewing | 1 Comment »

Homebrewing for Dummies – by Marty Nachel

Homebrewing for Dummies – by Marty Nachel
A Reference for the Rest of Us!

Covers everything from A-Z in brewing. A good text if you only had one book to buy and were a raw beginner. Some of the specialty chapters are worth checking too and go way beyond a what you might expect from a watered down ‘dummies’ book. The chapters on the ingredients in beer, needed equipment, extract brewing, bottling and kegging are good. The emphasis on secondary fermentation is good. I found the all-grain section a little oversimplified, enough information to get started but not enough to get past the basics. A good chunk of the book (100 pages out of about 400) is recipes, with extract and all grain variations on almost every style of beer. Then the book gets interesting and goes into cider and meads, a topic you rarely see. Then it gets even more interesting with a chapter on gluten free brewing (making beer without standard barley or wheat). Also covers green practices in brewing and organic ingredients, judging beer, and beer troubleshooting.

Topics unique to the book:

• Emphasis on secondary fermentation
• Basic intro to all grain brewing
• First Wort Hopping (covered in chapter 12 on all grain brewing)
• Brewing cider at home
• Brewing mead and its sub categories – traditional, melomel (fruit), and others (braggot, metheglin) in dry or sweet variations.
• Brewing green and using organic ingredients
• Gluten free brewing
• Home brew competitions and beer tasting
• Beer quality troubleshooting

Posted in Book Reviews | 1 Comment »