A Chef's Beer

[theakston]

I usually steep grains in a bag but put hops in the pot directly. I think you get more hop resins that way. I then strain the boiled wort through a cotton sieve thingie. The whole hops help filter out the junk. If I want to dry hop I would add a bag o' hops at that stage (this time I didn't dry hop).

I have used grains directly in the pot before. I think you tend to get a more cloudy brew if you boil them as it would release more starch, but if you're only using a handful that wouldn't be such a bad deal.

[theakston]

And here are some pictures of last night's activity:

Here's the beer ready to rack to the carboy

Here's the syphoning in progress:

and here it is in the carboy:

And here is the gunk left in the bucket:

It is still fairly actively bubbling away. Probably racked earlier than I needed to - it certainly needs to settle out a lot.

[Jim]

My beer's ready to rack and store for a bit at cooler temps. It's dropped quite bright in the bucket with nothing floating or in suspension but with the ususal nasty looking fermentation scum higher up on the bucker sides. My bucket has a spiggot to drain the beer with an inlet above the debris at the bottom of the bin. I plan to move it to a 50 degree storage area and let it recover from racking before packaging in a week or so and storing for referment at 50F for a month to allow carbonation. Right now the beetr smells good: beery and hoppy.

Does anyone think there's a difference in the final brew if you steep grains and hops loose in the brew pot and then sparge, vs. steeping in muslin grain bags with no sparge? I've done it both ways and haven't really noticed much difference, but the brews were pretty far apart in time.

Hops need to be boiled free in the wort because the mechanical action of boiling is part of the mechanism for dispersing the hop bittering acids that aren't on their own all that soluable. Grains on the other hand work perfectly well when soaked in a bag and sparged or not sparged...sparging tends to get more stuff out of the grain but if you aren't worried about that, don't sparge. There's actually a technique in all grain brewing of using more than normal amounts of grain [ by about 4/3] and accordingly more mash water but not sparging; the effect of this is said to be more malty flavours.

[iain]

I should probably say that I used hop pellets. My understanding, which may well be incorrect, is that these are more easily soluble that whole hops. Next time, I'm going to do it without a bag for hops and see if I can tell any difference.

I have a lot of ingredients left over from this brewing, so I might brew another batch pretty soon after this one's bottled. It'll likely be the same beer, but with a few subtle technique tweaks.

[Jim]

Hop pellets do indeed disperse bitterness a flavour more rapidly than hop flowers. The extrusion process by which pellets are made ruptures the lupulin sacs and makes their constituents more available in the boil. The chief drawback to pellets is the difficulty of clearing them from the finished wort and ferment. I avoid them for that reason but many prefer them. They also are said to have better shelf life.

[cdh]

My yeast has arrived! I've smacked it this afternoon, and will aim to brew tomorrow. Pictures of the process will follow.

[cdh]

OK... with inflated yeast smack pack in hand, I brewed today.

My variations from the recipe were:

In addition to the liquid malt extract and the crushed grain, I also tossed in a half pound of Laaglander dry dark malt extract (mostly because it was sitting around and not getting any better with age.)

My hops were:

bittering: 1 oz Kent Goldings, .5 oz Willamette

finishing: .5 oz Willamette, .5 oz Hallertauer

My yeast was the long awaited Ringwood, which I smacked yesterday at 2:30 in the afternoon and found fully inflated this morning. Upon finding yeast so active, I couldn't help making a starter to give it a head start. So I boiled up some of my dry malt extract in about a pint of water, tossed it into a sterilized PET liter bottle, and then put the yeast in. The yeast had a 7 hour headstart, as it went into the starter at 9:00 this morning and then got pitched at 4:00 this afternoon.

On to the illustrated description of the process:

About 2.5 or so gallons of cold water went into the 5 gallon pot.

In went the cracked grain, divided into two nylon steeping bags. It took a good while to get the grains up to near the boiling point... maybe an hour and a half with the pot straddling two burners, each set at a relatively slow temperature. This procedure is more for the health of the stove than for any brewing necessity.

After it got close to boiling, I turned the heat off and removed the grain steeping bags. In went two 1.5 Kg cans of Amber malt extract that had been warmed under the hot water tap of my sink for a little while before opening, and a half pound of dry malt extract as measured by my scale.

Wazzed the stuff with a hand blender for a while to ensure that the malt extracts were fully incorporated and dissolved, and then turned the heat back on and got it up to boiling.

In went the Goldings and Willamette hop flowers, in muslin hop socks, and they boiled there for an hour or so. The finishing hops went in for a minute and a half at the end.

A frozen over ornamental fish pond makes an excellent wort chiller. The lidded kettle melted through the ice and chilled in the pond for about 20 minutes.

In the meantime I mixed up a gallon of activated oxygen sanitizer and gave my fermenter bucket a going over.

And then the chilled wort went into the bucket and got topped up with tap water, then wazzed with the hand blender again to oxygenate and incorporate, and then the yeast starter got pitched in. The bucket is now sitting in a 68F room with a doubled over dish towel rubber banded across the top.

Wish my yeast bon appetit!

[jhlurie]

Wish my yeast bon appetit!

Bon appetit, lil' yeasties!

[iain]

Great pics, CDH. I especially like the custom-built wort chiller. I need to work on something like that for my apartment. I also like the use of the hand blender for aeration and incorporation. Maybe I'll give that a try next time out.

I racked to the carboy for secondary fermentation yesterday and the brew is now mellowing in the office. I'm pretty sure that fermentation is finished, but I'm going to let it sit a week or two to clarify.

I have pictures of the racking process, but they're so similar to theakston's that I won't post them unless someone really wants me to.

[cdh]

So everybody here does the racking and secondary fermentation? In all my time brewing, I've never taken that step, and have been quite pleased with the beers that I've brewed.

What is the reason to rack a beer that is not going to sit around for a long time before bottling?? I always understood racking to be a lager-brewing thing, b/c the lager beer sits around for months on end, and if it did so on its yeast, there was the danger of autolysis and the attendant funk that came along with it. I may have gotten close to that problem once, when I let the beer sit in the primary fermentor for a few extra weeks during a warm summer, but generally I've noticed no problems of that nature when the beer gets bottled within a month.

Any comments?

[iain]

I've been racking mostly because I like to think it gives the beer a chance to clarify a little. I also never know when I'm likely to have time to bottle, so this gives me a little insurance against it sitting around in it's own waste. This isn't much of a problem lately, though, as I work from home and can make the time to bottle. Truth be told, I do it because I've heard it can help and I figure it can't hurt.

[theakston]

Same here. I do it mostly to allow it to clear. After the major krausen dies down there is a lot of gunk on the bottom that it doesn't hurt to get rid of. It's mostly dead yeast cells but also other forms of trub that settled out of the wort.

It also makes sense to transfer it from an open fermentation vessel to an air-locked carboy to protect against oxidization once the head has died down and the CO2 production is less active. My fermenter lid doesn't seem to be air-tight as I can never get an air lock to bubble even when it's obviously fermenting like crazy, so I like to finish it off in a carboy just to be sure. And as Iain points out you can afford to be a bit more flexible with the bottling schedule that way.

A couple of days "rest" at the end of fermentation will also allow the remaining yeast to consume the diacetyl it may have produced during the fermentation. Of course after that it starts to consume itself (autolysis) and it helps that there are less dead yeast cells available at this point so it won't end up quite so funky.

CDH - great pictures. I used a similar wort chiller myself - I put it outside on the deck when it was about 9 degrees with wind chills around zero! In fact when I topped it up with water from the fridge it got too cold and I had to boil some water to bring it up to pitching temp.

Edited January 19, 2004 by theakston (log)

[cdh]

Am glad my wort chiller is providing amusement. Making do with what's available is a key skill in homebrewing.

Now that the yeasties have had about 40 hours in the wort to munch away, here's a snapshot of their progress:

Edited January 19, 2004 by cdh (log)

[iain]

Looking good, CDH.

Has anyone thought about naming their brew?

[cdh]

Well... I'd wait until it is done brewing. If the Ringwood is true to form and leaves a little diacetyl character I might be tempted to do something punny like calling it Butternut Squash Ale... We'll see if that happens or not.

Edited January 19, 2004 by cdh (log)

[Selski]

I was going through some storage items and found a bag I had forgotten about.

I found powdered malt extract in sealed plastic bags and crushed biscuit and caramel malt in a closed paper bag. These are probably a year old.

Are either of them still useable?

[theakston]

The extract is probably OK but the crushed grains are not much use: a bit like coffee that you ground a year ago and left in a paper bag. Not too appetizing!

[cdh]

Really?

I was wondering about this and don't really have a clue. My issue with the coffee analogy is that coffee is all about the volatile oils and such that can either go rancid or dissipate. Since sugar lasts forever, and malt extract lasts forever, why wouldn't cracked malt also last forever. How much of the stuuff extracted from malt is not sugar, and of that stuff, how much of it is vulnerable to oxidization, rancidity, etc.

I wonder if Harold McGee's encyclopaedic book has a chapter on malted grains and such. Will have to pull it out and check.

[theakston]

I have always heard that you should usually use milled grains within a few days of grinding or they loose flavour. I don't think that they wouldn't go rancid and the whole grain itself would probably last a long time. The coffee analogy was more to do with the period between ginding and brewing.

I'd be interested to see what your book says.

How's the brew coming? I plan on bottling mine this weekend.

[cdh]

The brew was going like mad all week, and has now settled down and the frothy head has all but dissipated. I think I'll give it another blast with the hand blender to rouse and stir things up, and aim to bottle next weekend.

As to McGee, nothing definitive, however, in his section on malt, he does say that ater malt is kilned, it can be stored for "several months" indicating that even whole malts are perishable. no reason why is given, however.

[iain]

Anyone bottle yet? I would have by now, but I have no caps. I'm ordering now, though, and will bottle when they arrive.

[cdh]

Had a taste of mine in its flat state. It is very nearly there, but I think I'll await the weekend to bottle.

[iain]

Anyone know where I can buy bottle caps in NYC? Seems silly to pay $7 shipping on $1.50 worth of caps.

[cdh]

Check out NYCBeer.org and have a look at their homebrew resources. Nothing in Manhattan but lots of options in the near suburbs. No idea how accessable by transit they are, but maybe they might deliver.

[theakston]

Anyone bottle yet? I would have by now, but I have no caps. I'm ordering now, though, and will bottle when they arrive.

I bottled on Saturday. Didn't get to take any pictures as I was running late.

Beer tasted OK but had a kind of "chalky" aftertaste that I hope will dissipate after conditioning. I'm on vacation in less than 2 weeks. I guess I'll try one before we leave. Should be ready after we get back.

Cheers!!