Home Brewed Beer Part 1

[StephenLee]

With some fairly simple equipment you can brew 'Pub' quality beers at home at a fraction of the pub price. Also, with practice, you can tailor a recipe to your own exact taste and requirements.

I believe that there are three stages of home brewing:-
a. Kit Brewing
b. Malt Extract Brewing
and
c Full Grain or All Grain

The equipment needed and the time and complexity increases from stage to stage but the quality/taste/flexibility also increases and the unit cost decreases.

Essential Equipment
1 25ltr Brewing Bucket with lid
Large Saucepan
Long Spoon
Hydrometer and Jar

An old style Burco 'nappy' boiler is worth its weight in gold. I got mine from Freecycle. Don't worry about its previous use, they are easily cleaned.

As 25 ltr. is about 40 pints, a 25 ltr. Pressure barrel (Wilco's under £25, ebay or Freecycle) saves the soul destroying chore of collecting, washing, sterilising, rinsing, filling, priming and sealing 40 beer bottles each time.

The beer kit procedure could not be simpler, first buy your kit (Wilco's, Tesco's, Local Home Brew shops, etc.). Follow the instructions. This is usually along the lines of stand the unopened tin in hot water for 20 minutes or so. Take the lid off and pour the treaclely contents into your 25 ltr. sterilised brewing bucket followed by 2 kettles of boiling water. Stir to dissolve. Add any sugar that may be needed (Be careful here, more sugar means more alcohol up to a point but too strong can ruin the balance of the brew. It is perfectly possible to achieve strengths of 12 to 14% by volume but would you drink wine by the pint ?). Top up to just above the 25 ltr. Mark leaving an inch or two headroom.

It is now time to deploy the hydrometer. This is an essential piece of kit as it gives exact measurements of the progress of the brew. In essence, the hydrometer floats in the liquid. Water should show a reading on the scale on the neck of the hydrometer of 1.0000, the datum point. If you dissolve sugar in the water, the specific gravity (the thickness of the liquid) increases so the hydrometer will ride higher in the liquid, a bit like floating more easily in the dead sea because of the high level of dissolved salts. Anyway the initial reading (the Original Gravity or OG) should be recorded. A range of 1.035 to 1.040 will give a nice 'session' beer.

Finally, for now, pitch the yeast into the brew or wort as the professionals would say. A quick word about yeast, always use a proper beer yeast not bakers yeast. Beer yeast is formulated to produce the ideal balance of alcohol and Carbon Dioxide (The two main products of fermentation). Bakers yeast is more inclined to produce Carbon Dioxide than alcohol as this is useful in bread making. Also, bread yeast is harder to clear and can give some off flavours. It is often useful to make a starter bottle the day before brewing commences. This is simply a 1 litre plastic bottle (I use tonic bottles as I seem to use them quite a lot), sterilised, 500ml of tepid water added along with a teaspoonful of white granulated sugar. Shake to dissolve and add the contents of the yeast sachet. This will allow the dried yeast to recover and begin to feed off the sugar. When this is added to the mail brew the yeast has a flying start. However, chucking the yeast straight in works perfectly well but adds a day or two to the process.

Put your brewing bucket somewhere warm and where you won't trip over it. After a few hours you should see a foam forming on the top that becomes quite thick. Periodically skim this foam off and discard it.
After a few days, fill you hydrometer jar with the wort and take a reading. It should have fallen. 1.020 to 1.015 being typical.

After a week to 10 days (depending upon temperature) the hydrometer reading should have dropped to 0.995ish. This means that all fermentable solids have been fermented and it is now safe to bottle but first you need to clear it.

Obtain some Beer Fining's if these are not included with the kit and follow the instructions. Fining's work by making the yeast particles cling together becoming heavier and therefore dropping to the bottom of the brew more quickly.

Once the beer is clear, run it or syphon it into your pressure barrel. Add two tablespoons of granulated sugar, seal the barrel, give it a good shake and leave it for a week then enjoy. The first pint of two may gush out like 'Old Faithful' in Yellowstone Park but it will all settle down.

If you do choose the bottle route, put just under half a teaspoon of sugar in each bottle and fill up with the beer leaving at least 1 inch headroom (that is one 12th of a foot for anyone over 45), seal and leave somewhere quiet for a week. Do not Do not Do not exceed the amount of sugar in the bottles as this causes another fermentation (a secondary fermentation) that gives the beer its head from the carbon dioxide generated. Any more sugar gives you 40 glass grenades with very unpredictable fuses.

You can calculate the strength of your brew by subtracting your final gravity (Hydrometer reading) from the Original gravity reading and multiplying by 131. This gives the % alcohol by volume. For example :- 1.035 – 1.000 = 0.035 x 131 = 4.6% abv.

Hope that this is useful. If there is positive feedback, I will post a method for Malt Extract and Full Grain beers. Also a guide to wine-making if there is any interest.

Stephen

[preppingsu]

Thank You. I will need to have a go at this - maybe over half term. How long does the beer last once bottled?

[StephenLee]

It improves markedly during the first month, then levels out. It should keep at least 12 months without issue.
I did find some beer that I had forgotten about for about 4 years and it was perfectly drinkable.
Good Luck and happy to help if you get stuck.

Stephen

[DeltaSierra]

Great write up mate, Home brewing is something I've wanted to start doing for a long time as I'm aware of it's cost benefits in comparison to buying in from the shops etc, so always good when your having a party haha.

It's then another skill in the book, and something to occupy my time too. I'll have to give this a shot sometime soon for sure.

[The-Great-Nothing]

Hi Stephen.

Great article. I have been doing a bit of home brew over the last 6 months and it has worked out great.

But...

The last batch of 40pints of bitter I had in a fermentation bucket with lid loosely fitted, is still there 3months on because I forgot about it! So I would appreciate your thoughts.

Could I still bottle it? Or is it to be poured away?

Cheers

Matt

[silverrider]

Thanks Stephen, I may try home brewing next year, I found this very interesting and would welcome more 'articles' regarding beer and wine brewing.

[StephenLee]

Hi Stephen.

Great article. I have been doing a bit of home brew over the last 6 months and it has worked out great.

But...

The last batch of 40pints of bitter I had in a fermentation bucket with lid loosely fitted, is still there 3months on because I forgot about it! So I would appreciate your thoughts.

Could I still bottle it? Or is it to be poured away?

Cheers

Matt

hi Matt,

You are very probably Ok. The alcohol and the hops act as preservatives.

First, give it a sniff. If it smells vinegary then you are snookered, tip it away and sterilise your kit thoroughly. You could use it to make malt vinegar but, to be honest, I've not had much success as the hops make the flavour unpleasant (to my taste, at least).

If no smell, the next step is to check that the fermentation progressed to conclusion. Simply measure the gravity with the hydrometer, if its about 1.000 or below you're Ok. If the gravity is higher then the fermentation stuck for some reason. First, give it a good stir, leave it a day or so and see if it has started bubbling again. If not, try re-pitching some yeast, this should get things going again.

If the gravity is Ok, take out 500ml of the beer and put it into a clean 1lt fizzy drink bottle, add a good pinch of sugar, seal it and put in the airing cupboard (or somewhere warm) for 48 hours. After this time, open the bottle, if you get a good loud whoooshing sound of gas escaping and the beer foams up or bubbles a bit, then you have viable yeast in the brew and you can bottle it as normal. If not, take about 3 litres of the beer and dissolve 250gm sugar in it. Mix this with rest of the beer and re-pitch some yeast. Check with a hydrometer and as soon as the gravity reaches 1.000 bottle as normal. This may take a couple of days.

Once in the bottles leave somewhere warmish for 3 or 4 days then move somewhere coolish for a couple of weeks then open, pour, enjoy.

Hope of use and good luck.

Stephen

[The-Great-Nothing]

It turned out to be nasty / vinegar smell - so down the toilet it went. Ah well. Lesson learnt!

Cheers

Matt

[maverick71]

I realise this is an old post but as a former commercial brewer with my own microbrewery (few years ago now)would like to say nice guide, its a very good a simple guide, i hope to continue some full grain mash brewing at home. If anyone in London North Kent area wants to group buy some materials let me know i usually buy my pale malt in 25kg sacks.

[nickdutch]

If you wanted to go down the dirt cheap diamond white kinda route, just use 5 gallons of water, 5 Kg sugar, some wine nutrient, three sachets of bread yeast, some wine finings. Remember to use beer and wine steraliser to kill off any germs prior to fermentation.

After about a month I had alcohol nearly 10% volume according to the beer and wine hydrometer. So that's five gallons of rotgut for substantially less then a tenner.

I didn't drink mine, i just used it to be the mash for fuel distillation, but I did taste ti when I was racking it into the distiller. A sweet yeasty muck, the kind of stuff I used to drink when I was a student and thoroughly socially undesirable.