For the last time I’m back to continue the month-long series on homebrewing in honor of National Homebrew Day which was May 7th.  In previous posts we performed the actual brewing, and then after allowing the beer to complete its primary fermentation we transferred to to a secondary fermentation vessel to clean up after itself and begin the conditioning process.  We then bottled the beer and allowed it to finish conditioning for a suitable amount of time.

Now we can enjoy the product of all this work at last, and just in time for Memorial Day — a perfect pre-summer holiday to ignite the grill, visit with friends and family, and sit back and relax with a cold, delicious beer.

Certainly nobody needs to be instructed on how to drink a beer… that sort of process comes naturally.  But, since this particular brew was made at home rather than at a brewery, there are certain things to keep in mind regarding storage and serving.  Homebrew is a living product, and with that comes an extra step or two toward its enjoyment.

First, as instructed during bottling, store your beer in a dark, cool place — not the fridge, but not the garage — in a convenient closet, pantry or cabinet perhaps.  Even now that the beer is ready to consume, if allowed to remain at room temperatures, it will continue to condition and refine it’s character, so only chill what you intend to consume.

While the brew has been allowed to finish conditioning in the undisturbed bottles, the yeast have consumed the small amount of sugar we added at the end and produced enough CO2 to carbonate the beer.  They then expired, and along with many trace proteins that remained in suspension, have settled out to form a thin trub on the bottom of the bottles.  Refrigerating the beer for a minimum of 48 hours before serving will force more proteins to settle, and compact the trub into a denser mass, making it more difficult to disturb when pouring from the bottle.  This is not to say that it is impossible to disturb that trub, and in fact care should be taken when pouring to minimize how much you do.

Whenever possible, pour your brew into a glass to drink it.  First, by drinking from a glass rather than the bottle, you are engaging your sense of smell to contribute to the experience, and as any wine connoisseur will tell you being able to inhale the aroma of what you’re drinking will deliver a more rounded experience, expose more character and produce a slightly better taste.  Second, when you drink directly from the bottle, every time you tip it up and back to take a sip you swish the liquid back over the trub, disturbing it and mixing it back into the brew again.  This isn’t harmful in any way, but will contribute a yeasty taste to the beer.  There are some folks who rather enjoy the flavor of the yeast, but more often than not, that yeasty character is what has turned people off to homebrew in the past.

When pouring the beer into your glass, do so in one slow, smooth motion.  Avoid tipping the bottle back during the pour to prevent kicking up the yeast any more than is necessary.  Some yeast will inevitably be stirred up, but if you leave a little beer behind you should also leave that yeast behind as well — with practice you can get all but the last ¼” of beer out.  If you rinse your bottle out with a few vigorous shakes of clean water, you’ll have an easier time of cleaning and reusing it for the next batch.

Once your beer is poured… drink it!  Share with your friends and family while trying not to babble on and on about how it was made (a near-impossible task indeed for any homebrewer, as we’re all very excited and exceptionally proud of what we’ve made).  You can take this opportunity to try to recruit brewing partners from those who seem interested… interest in this case is displayed by not making excuses and escaping at a run.  *grins*

Cheers!

Once more I’m back to continue the month-long series on homebrewing in honor of National Homebrew Day which was May 7th.  In previous posts we performed the actual brewing, and then after allowing the beer to complete its primary fermentation we transferred to to a secondary fermentation vessel to clean up after itself and begin the conditioning process.

Now that those two processes are complete, we’re ready to divvy the beer up into individual bottles for future enjoyment.

We get started after the jump below…

Bottling isn’t the only method to condition and store the beer for serving.  Kegging is a great option, and kegs are available in a variety of sizes from 3 gallons on up.  With kegging you have the option to allow the beer to carbonate naturally, or you can “force carb” it with the same CO2 you’d serve with.  You’ll still want the beer to continue to condition further for several weeks as the same flavor changes must still take place no matter how it is stored prior to serving.  Unfortunately kegging requires additional equipment and expense, sometimes considerable.  As bottling is an easily accessible option for every brewer, I’ve chosen to demonstrate that process.

Now that we’ve given the beer two weeks to clear up a bit and allow the yeast to clean up behind themselves, we’re can transfer the beer into bottles to finish the conditioning process, carbonate, and let the flavors meld into a harmonious melody — all this is part of “bottle conditioning” the beer.  At this point the beer is still considered “green” and while likely tasting, well, like beer, there is still some aging left to do to mellow out.  There may be some residual harshness from the hops and the flavors produced by the grains and the yeast will definitely benefit from the extra time.  Just like some dishes may be tasty the evening you prepare it, it can be so much better the next day after it’s had time to let the ingredients mingle — a good gumbo is a prime example.

The time this takes depends on the type of beer, but prevailing practice is to wait a minimum of 3 weeks before serving.  One rule of thumb is the darker and maltier the beer, or the higher the alcohol, the longer to leave it to bottle condition.  A deep, rich stout should go 4 or 5 weeks before serving (and your patience will be rewarded), but a pale ale might be just right at the 3 week mark.

Before we get started, there is one very important thing to consider: the bottles.  Beer, when exposed to light — especially sunlight or fluorescent light — will develop a skunky character.  This is the result of a photo-chemical reaction with hop and sulfur compounds.  Brown bottles are best suited for storage, where clear and green bottles are completely ineffective at blocking much, if any, light.  Unless you are fanatical about storing your beer in absolute darkness, brown bottles will serve you best.  Beer bottles come in a variety of sizes, with 12 OZ being fairly standard, but if you’re particular selective, you can use 16 OZ (pint) bottles, or even 22 OZ.

As before, thorough cleaning and fastidious sanitization of everything that touches the beer is absolutely necessary to avoid contamination or bacterial growth.  I know, I’ve stated it at every part of this process, and I cannot reiterate enough just how important this is.

Start by moving your secondary fermenter to an elevated location anywhere from several hours, to a day, before you’re ready to bottle.  This will allow any of the sediment in the trub that stirs up from the move to settle back down again.  Be sure to cover or wrap the carboy to prevent light exposure until you’re ready.

Regardless of active fermentation being complete, and the 2 week rest in the secondary fermenter, there are still some residual yeast doing laps in the beer.  We’re going to press then into service one last time before they give up the ghost: we’re going to put them to work carbonating our beer.  By adding a small amount sugar (aka “priming sugar”) to the beer before bottling, we’re feeding those yeast and causing them to generate CO2 (and a small amount of alcohol, but the amount is minuscule and will not affect our overall ABV).  Adding an airtight cap to the bottle will trap that CO2, and once the pressure is great enough, the CO2 will have nowhere to escape to and it will dissolve back into the solution, carbonating the beer.

The amount of sugar used will vary based on on the level of carbonation you desire, how much residual CO2 remains in the beer from fermentation, and what volume of beer you have to bottle.  There are some great online tools to help determine how much sugar is needed, and generally what level of CO2 is standard for different styles of beer.

We’ll be using powdered dextrose as it ferments 100% leaving no residual sweetness or flavor behind, but any fermentable sugar will do — cane sugar, honey, etc — you just have to adjust the amount accordingly, and know that some may leave behind a trace flavor.  This can be desirable depending on what you are after.

We’re going to dissolve our sugar in boiling water.  Boiling the water sanitizes both the water itself and the sugar once it has been added, and also facilitates dissolution.  Dissolving the sugar will allow it to mix rapidly with the beer without excess agitation.  Agitation introduces oxygen, and that’s a bad thing at this stage.

Bring 2 cups of water to a boil, measure out out your sugar and add it to the water and boil for 2 minutes more.  Kill the heat and allow the mixture to cool below 100°F.  You can either employ an ice bath for this, or just do this first, prior to beginning the other bottling steps.

Gather up your clean bottles for sanitizing.  There are a number of great tools to assist with sanitizing bottles, and they are worth the few extra dollars to have.  Bottling seems to be the biggest thorn in any homebrewer’s paw, and any tool, shortcut, or process change that can help make it a more enjoyable process is worth consideration.

A bottle tree is one of the handiest of these tools.  It stores bottles upside down, allowing them to drain and preventing dust, wild yeast, and insects from drifting into the open neck on the bottles, contaminating them.  It’s a compact tower of rings, each ring having a number of posts that fit easily into the neck of the bottles.  At the bottom is a base that collects the drained out liquid.  The bottle tree is handy not just for sanitizing, but for drying bottles as you clean them between bottling days.

The second handiest tool is the Vinator.  Filled with sanitizing solution, it will squirt a strong stream into an inverted bottle with a downward push or two.  It’s a dream to use, compared with pouring sanitizer into a bottle, shaking it around, and pouring it out.  You can also toss your bottle caps into the Vinator to sanitize while you do the bottles themselves.  My particular bottle tree was designed to have the Vinator attached to its top, making a single compact unit.

The process is simple: take a bottle, give it a pump or two on the Vinator, and hang in on the tree to drain.  A 5 gallon batch of beer will use between 52 and 54 bottles, and my tree can accommodate all 54.  Once all the bottles are sanitized, move them to the side and prepare for the next step.

To dispense the beer to the bottles, I employ a bottling bucket, which is simply a plastic fermenting bucket fixed with a spigot at the bottom.  Pour your now-cooled priming sugar solution into the bucket and siphon the beer from the secondary fermenter into the bucket, just as you did when racking from primary to secondary.  The goals here are to move the beer into a vessel that is better suited to bottle from, and to get it off the last of the trub in the carboy.  Also as before, be sure to rack the beer “quietly” to avoid splashing and aeration.  Once the siphoning is complete, give the beer a gentle stir to make sure the priming sugar is well incorporated.

Move your bucket to a high surface — we’re going to be using gravity to our advantage to fill the bottles.  Typically I’ll place the bottling bucket atop another bucket (or my inverted brew pot) on the counter.

To fill the bottles in a controlled and “quiet” manner, I use a bottling wand, which is a thin acrylic tube with a spring-loaded nozzle on the end.  When the nozzle is inserted into a bottle and pushed against its bottom, liquid is allowed to flow.  Once you stop pushing, the flow is cut off.  Simple.  I attach the wand to the bucket’s spigot with a short length of tubing so I can keep my hands free.

Fill the bottle to the very top, and when the bottling wand is removed it will leave approximately 1″ of headspace in the bottle.  Place a bottle cap on top and set to the side.  If you have an assistant, they can crimp the cap down while you carry on, otherwise continue to fill a number of bottles before taking a break to seal them.

I use a bench-top capper to seal the bottles, but there are hand-held models available.  One advantage of the bench-top model is that is will cap any style of pop-top beer bottle, where the hand-held type can be stymied by the height of the collar at the top of a beer bottle, and that can restrict the types of bottle you use.

Simply adjust the capper to the height of the bottle and pull down the handle in one smooth motion.  You should end with a neatly crimped, and leak-proof cap on your bottle.  Carry on until you’ve capped all of the beer.

Once you have dispensed all the beer into bottles, store them in a dark, cool (not cold, as in refrigerated… just not in a 100°F garage — aim for 65°F – 75°F).  Practice your best zen-like patience while you wait the several weeks for the beer to finish carbonating and aging.  If you must, you can take a bottle at the 2 week mark, chill it for 48 hours, and test its progress.  In fact, if you’ve tasted the beer at every stage, including bottling time, it’s a great way to see just how the flavor is evolving.

What about the storage life of all this freshly bottled beer?  If your sanitary and bottling practices are sound, and you keep the bottles stored in a cool dark place, homebrewed beer should stay fresh and drinkable for up to a year… maybe more.  Of course some types of beer will benefit from being consumed young as some of the flavors dissipate rapidly (hops are the most notorious for this), and some will definitely age very gracefully (stouts, porters, etc), and some are specifically required to age a very long time before consumption — barleywines should age anywhere from 9 – 12 months for optimal conditioning before enjoying.

Next week we’ll conclude with the best part: properly enjoying the end product of all this hard work.

And I’m back, continuing the month-long series on homebrewing in honor of National Homebrew Day which was May 7th.  This is also American Craft Beer Week, so get out there and support the small and independent craft brewers that are bringing tradition, quality and passion back to an industry that got hijacked by gargantuan-batch manufacturers that cater more to frat-boys than to beer lovers.  A lot of the craft brewers got their start brewing 5 gallons at a time at home for their own enjoyment — you just never know where your dreams and interests will take you.

Last week we did all the hard work of brewing the actual beer, and we waited patiently while it fermented.  Patience is a virtue, and you’ll need plenty of it if you’re homebrewing.

We continue after the jump below…

As I stated before, secondary fermentation is a misnomer, and is more accurately a “conditioning” process.  Now that the yeasties have made pigs of themselves, gorging on all the lovely sugars, they’re ready to clean up behind themselves… as is only right for a dinner guest.  To quote John Palmer from his book How To Brew:

The conditioning process is a function of the yeast. The vigorous, primary stage is over, the majority of the wort sugars have been converted to alcohol, and a lot of the yeast are going dormant; but there is still yeast activity. During the earlier phases, many different compounds were produced by the yeast in addition to ethanol and CO2, e.g., acetaldehyde, esters, amino acids, ketones- diacetyl, pentanedione, dimethyl sulfide, etc. Once the easy food is gone, the yeast start re-processing these by-products. Diacetyl and pentanedione are two ketones that have buttery and honey-like flavors. These compounds are considered flaws when present in large amounts and can cause flavor stability problems during storage. Acetaldehyde is an aldehyde that has a pronounced green apple smell and taste. It is an intermediate compound in the production of ethanol. The yeast reduce these compounds during the later stages of fermentation.

The yeast also produce an array of fusel alcohols during primary fermentation in addition to ethanol. Fusels are higher molecular weight alcohols that often give harsh solvent-like tastes to beer. During secondary fermentation, the yeast convert these alcohols to more pleasant tasting fruity esters. Warmer temperatures encourage ester production.

Secondary fermentation can be done by either leaving the beer in the original fermenter, or by “racking” it off into a clean fermenter thus removing it from the “trub” that forms in the bottom of the primary.  The trub is composed of dead and settled yeast, settled proteins, grain and hop residue, and can range from ½” thick, to many inches.  There is a division in the homebrew community about the necessity to rack to a second vessel.  Some say that leaving the beer on the trub can cause an increase in off flavors, and that racking will prevent this.  Others say that the amount of time required for off flavors to occur far outdistances the time a brewer would leave a beer on the trub to complete secondary fermentation, and that racking introduces an unnecessary infection or oxygenation risk.  It’s up to the individual brewer to determine what is best for them.  Myself, I prefer to rack to a secondary vessel.

Leaving a beer in a fermenter to complete this second phase this is known as “bulk conditioning”, and is more efficient for the yeast than if the beer is put directly into bottles.  Additionally, since there is considerably less activity from the yeast, there is less turbulence in the beer, and this allows protein solids, and dead and dormant yeast to “flocculate”, or clump together and settle out of suspension.  This causes to beer to clear up considerably and will contribute to the overall taste and stability of the beer.

As before, thorough cleaning and fastidious sanitization of everything that touches the beer is absolutely necessary to avoid contamination or bacterial growth.  This is a long journey, and you don’t want to derail it by cutting corners.

Where, when we originally brewed the beer, we used a fermenter of a larger capacity than our brew to allow sufficient headspace, we want to avoid that extra headspace from here on out — in what seems like a contradiction, we’re avoiding the introduction of oxygen to the beer.  At the start, the yeast required that extra oxygen to reproduce, and it is consumed completely in those early stages.  Going forward, sufficient exposure to oxygen can cause staling in your beer, affecting its flavor and longevity.  Most commonly a 5 GAL carboy is used to secondary in, but a 5 GAL food grade plastic bucket is also sufficient.

Start by moving your primary fermenter to an elevated location anywhere from several hours, to a day, before you’re ready to make the transfer.  This will allow any of the sediment in the trub that stirs up from the move to settle back down again.  Be sure to cover or wrap the carboy to prevent light exposure until you’re ready.

There are several tools available to siphon the beer from one vessel to the other, but there are two very common ones to mention.  The first — and least expensive — is a racking cane, which is a rigid plastic or metal tube that typically has a 90° bend on one end, and a plastic cap on the other that helps reduce the transfer of material from the trub.   Flexible vinyl line is attached to the end with the bend, a siphon is started, and the other end of the tube is inserted into your empty fermenter.  It is worth noting here that you should not use your mouth to start the siphon as that will introduce contaminates.  The other tool is an auto-siphon, which is composed of a racking cane that fits inside of a larger tube, and uses a rubber seal between the two to create suction when they are slid apart, then back together — this is, in my opinion, worth the difference in price for the convenience and ease of use it provides.

Place your empty and sanitized fermenter on a surface lower than the primary.  If using a no-rinse sanitizer such as StarSan, you will be left, as before, with a white sudsy foam in your carboy after draining.  This foam is nothing to worry about, and in fact is beneficial to the yeasts during the fermentation stage… there is a phrase in the homebrew community: “don’t fear the foam”.  Insert the racking cane into the primary and hold it with the bottom tip approximately 3″ below the surface of the beer.  If you’re using an auto-siphon, simply put the other end in the empty fermenter, positioned so that when the liquid flows, it flows out smoothly without splashing, then start the siphon with a long, smooth stroke.  If using a standard racking cane, start your siphon as you prefer, then insert the tube into the empty fermenter, positioning it so that you minimize splashing as well.

The minimizing of splashing, in any context, is also known as doing so “quietly”, as in racking quietly, pouring quietly, etc.  This reduces the amount of oxygen that will be introduced into the liquid.

As the beer flows out of the primary, lower the tip of your racking cane to keep it below the surface.  As the surface approaches the bottom of the fermenter, you will need to be vigilant about keeping from drawing up too much of the trub from the bottom — remember, we’re doing this to remove the beer from as much of this material as possible — but it is impossible to avoid getting any of it without leaving a large proportion of beer behind, and we don’t want that.  *grins* A little bit won’t hurt.

When you reach the very bottom of the fermenter, you can gently tip it to concentrate the remaining liquid to one side, enabling you to siphon out as much as possible.  Once done, you should be left with the trub, and a little bit of beer.  The trub can be swirled around and added to a compost heap, or even poured directly into a garden as the dead yeast and proteins are a rich fertilizer.

Once you’re done, you should be left with just a few inches of headspace in the new fermenter.  Seal the fermenter and install a fresh, clean and sanitized airlock.  Return the fermenter to a dark, climate controlled space — and unless your environment is going to get above 75°F, you shouldn’t need the ice-chest water bath to keep it cool… the worst of the temperature sensitivity is past.  You may see some bubbling through the airlock for the first day or so, but it’s nothing to be alarmed about.  That’s just a bit of the CO2 that is dissolved in solution from fermentation being released by the agitation of racking.

Over the next two weeks, the yeast will do their job of cleaning up after themselves.  As they die or go dormant they will flocculate and settle to the bottom of the fermenter, as will more of the suspended proteins.  The beer will get clearer, and a small trub layer will form.  At the end of two weeks, we can bottle the beer, and prepare for the impossible wait before we can properly enjoy it.  *grins*

Shown below are three homebrews in secondary.  On the left is an “traditional”  orange-blossom mead (which will be racked from carboy to carboy over the course of several months as it clarifies), the center is an American pale ale (not looking very pale stored in bulk as it is), and the right is an oatmeal stout that is so dark that is borders on being black.

Next week we’ll tackle the next phase: bottling day.

Until then, I present you with a few links to small Austin (and neighboring) breweries and brew pubs of note.

• St. Arnold Brewing Company
  
• Live Oak Brewing Company
  
• Real Ale Brewing Company
• (512) Brewing Company
• Independence Brewing Company
• North by Northwest  Restaurant and Brewery
• The Draught House Pub & Brewery
• Uncle Billy’s Brew & Que

Last week I kicked off a month-long series on homebrewing in honor of National Homebrew Day which was May 7th, providing you some background information and the mile-high view of the process.  Over the next four weeks I’ll go into more information on the four “days” of brewing.  This week is the big mamma-jamma, the day of the most work: Brew Day.  As a result this is a long post, so make yourself comfortable.  *grins*

We get started after the jump below…

Day 1 – Brew Day
First, gather your ingredients.  There are quite a number of local and internet-based vendors, and here in Austin we have Austin Homebrew Supply.  They are a wealth of supplies and information, and one of the largest suppliers in the US.  They have recipe kits that reflect a wide variety of beer styles, as well as clones of popular commercial beers.  It’s as easy as walking in (or clicking online) and selecting the kit you want, and the staff will assemble everything you need.  The kits come complete with all the ingredients necessary: grains/extract, yeast, hops, priming sugar for bottling, etc, as well as detailed instructions.  While their instructions are thorough and serviceable I tend to deviate and follow a method that I’ve pieced together from my own research.  As stated before, everyone eventually develops a style and process of their own.

On average, the contents of a bottle of homebrew will cost less than the contents of a bottle of a similarly styled beer.  This is for the ingredients alone, and does not include the cost of equipment and other supplies.  You may pay $42 for a recipe kit, but you’ll get 48 – 54 bottles of beer from that and compared to the price of most of the craft beers on the market now, $0.78 a beer is mightily inexpensive.  But again, you will have to make a small investment in equipment, and this is a hobby after all… you don’t take up a hobby to save money.  *grins*

Next, gather your equipment.  For a partial-boil mini-mash I use a 24 QT pot as a primary, and a 12 QT pot as a secondary.  You’ll also need other equipment: grain bag, large spoon, colander, thermometer, etc… which we’ll discuss as we go.  Everything should be clean, and anything that will be used after the wort has been boiled should be sanitized to avoid bacterial growth.  There are as many long and bloody fights over proper sanitizing methods as there have been wars on this earth.  Personally, I use StarSan, a no-rinse sanitizer that uses a high  acidity to kill off any surface nasties.

I would like to take a moment to define a few oft mixed-up terms, and I’ll let John Palmer do it best, from his book How To Brew (I will quote from him every so often, as he has done a masterful job of defining many important concepts):

The definition and objective of sanitization is to reduce bacteria and contaminants to insignificant or manageable levels. The terms clean, sanitize and sterilize are often used interchangeably, but should not be. Items may be clean but not sanitized or vice versa. Here are the definitions:

• Clean – To be free from dirt, stain, or foreign matter.
• Sanitize - To kill/reduce spoiling microorganisms to negligible levels.
• Sterilize – To eliminate all forms of life, especially microorganisms, either by chemical or physical means.

Cleaning is the process of removing all the dirt and grime from a surface, thereby removing all the sites that can harbor bacteria. Cleaning is usually done with a detergent and elbow grease. None of the sanitizing agents used by homebrewers are capable of eliminating all bacterial spores and viruses. The majority of chemical agents homebrewers use will clean and sanitize but not sterilize. However, sterilization is not necessary. Instead of worrying about sterilization, homebrewers can be satisfied if they consistently reduce these contaminants to negligible levels.

All sanitizers are meant to be used on clean surfaces. A sanitizer’s ability to kill microorganisms is reduced by the presence of dirt, grime or organic material. Organic deposits can harbor bacteria and shield the surface from being reached by the sanitizer. So it is up to you to make sure the surface of the item to be sanitized is as clean as possible.

Now to start!  Bring a volume of water in the 12 QT pot up to the appropriate temperature to mash your grains… the volume and temperature do vary, and is a topic for another time (sketching out the process here… remember?).  Kill the heat and place your grain bag into the pot and overlap the pot rim to keep the bag open (use clips to hold it if so desired).  Slowly pour in your grain, stir thoroughly, insert your thermometer and put the lid back on.  The goal is to maintain a consistent temperature during the mash process, which can range from 30 to 90 minutes, depending on the recipe.  This will facilitate a better conversion of the enzymes/starches to sugar.  I wrap a large towel around the pot to help insulate it, and that works just fine.  Stir once or twice during mashing.

Near the end of the mash, bring another volume of water in the 24 QT pot up to the appropriate temperature to “sparge” your grains… again, the volume and temperature vary.  Sparging is the process of rinsing free as much of the thick mash sugars that will be clinging to the grains as possible.  There are a lot of ways to do it, and to varying degrees of efficiency.  We’ll be doing a “bulk sparge”, which means we will simply dunk and swirl the grains into the full volume of water at once.

Once mashing is complete, lift the grains in the bag from the 12 QT mash pot, place a colander beneath it and let it drain.  Do not squeeze the grains as that will extract tannins, imparting an astringent, puckering flavor to your beer.  Once the grains have drained, transfer them (in the bag) to the sparge pot and dunk and swirl them around.  Open the bag and give the grains a few gentle stirs to allow the fresh water in.  Continue doing this, occasionally, for 10 minutes.  Lift the grains in the bag and place the colander beneath them again and allow them to drain once more.  Once drained, the grains can be discarded — preferably in a compost heap, a garden, or even better you can make high fiber bread or dog treats from them (that’s what we do).  Clean your grain bag, we’ll be using that again in a bit.

Combine the mash and sparge liquids in the 24 QT pot.  Fill the now empty 12 QT pot up with 2½ GAL of clean water and bring to a full boil for 5 – 10 minutes.  We’ll use this to top off with later, and since this water will be added after the wort has finished boiling, we want it to be sanitary.

Bring the mash/sparge liquid up to 4 GAL with clean (unboiled) water and bring to a boil.  Once boiling, kill the heat and add your extract.  If you’re using liquid, you can set it in a sink of hot water to loosen it up, then use a spatula to scrape the container clean.  Stir thoroughly for several minutes to dissolve completely avoiding any buildup on the bottom of the pot — this will scorch and contribute nasty flavors to your beer.  Once mixed, turn the heat back on and resume the boil for several minutes.  Congratulations, you’ve made wort.

It is at this point that we want to add hops to our brew.  Hops add bitterness, flavor, and aroma to beer, as well as being a natural preservative and stabilizer.  Fun fact: IPA (India Pale Ale) beers, which are tremendously hoppy beers, came about around 1840 as a means to transport beer from England to India.  The enormous amount of hops preserved the beer for the long journey, as well as lending it a desirable bitter tang.  The bitterness of hops dissipates over time, so the longer a brew is aged (or “cellared”), the milder the flavor.

Hops are added at various points during the boiling of the wort.  The longer they are boiled, the more subtle flavors and aromas are lost as the alpha acids are isomerized into a bitter compound.  The less time they are boiled, the more aroma is retained and less bitterness and flavor is extracted.  Typically, recipes call for a 60 minute counting down boil, adding hops at the 60, 15, and 5 minute marks.  Quite often, different hop strains are used, depending on what they are best suited for.  Having re-used the grain bag to contain the hops, removal of the hops is as easy as removing the bag and allowing it to drain before disposing of the hops themselves.

Once the boil is complete, the wort should be cooled as rapidly as possible.  This will accomplish a number of things: first it promotes a good “cold break”, the coagulation of proteins that cause chill haze and cloudy beer.  Next, it speeds the wort through the contamination zone between 140°F and 80°F as rapidly as possible, reducing oxidation and the generation of dimethyl sulfide which will produce off flavors.  Chilling can be accomplished in a number of ways, the two most common being the use of either an ice batch, or a wort chiller.

The ice bath is simply a volume of water and ice that the wort, pot and all, is placed in.  The water is changed a few times, more ice is added, until the wort is in the target temperature zone — this can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes.  A wort chiller is a device, typically a coil of copper tubing, that is immersed into the wort.  Cold water is then circulated through the tubing as the wort is gently stirred, bringing the temperature down — this can take anywhere from 7 to 15 minutes.  A lot of chillers hook directly to a sink or hose faucet, and rely on the temperature of the tap water to chill the wort, the water then being allowed to drain away into the sink, lawn or gutter.  I constructed a chiller that uses a garden pump to recirculate ice water to do the trick, wasting less water and being more efficient in the process.  When using an immersion-style chiller, you can simply place it in the boiling wort for the final 10 – 15 minutes to sanitize it.

At this point it is critical to ensure that anything that the wort touches — hands, tools, etc — is clean and sanitized.  Bacteria can lurk on a clean and shiny surface, and bacterial will ruin a batch of beer wasting all your time, effort and money.  Thorough sanitizing is the most important step you can ever take while homebrewing.

Once the wort is cooled to your target temperature — preferably very close to the temperature you’re going to ferment at (65°F to 70°F) — you must transfer it to a fermenting vessel of some sort.  Some folks use clean food-grade plastic buckets (that haven’t previously been used to store something that will permanently stain the plastic with a persistent aroma or flavor… pickle buckets, for example, will always smell like pickles, and will impart that flavor to your brew), some use carboys — which are a 3 – 7 GAL glass or plastic bottle (made of PET), similar in design to the type used for water-coolers (but not those actual bottles… they are gas permeable and as a result aren’t suitable for fermenting) — the design isn’t important as long as it can be sealed and have some sort of airlock installed in it.  I choose to use glass carboys as they do not scratch easily and do not absorb odors or flavors.  It is also noteworthy that since we are brewing a 5 GAL batch of beer, we would use a 6+ GAL fermenter.  As the beer ferments, it forms a foamy layer on top (called a kräusen) that needs room to expand.

Using a funnel and a strainer to catch any grain that may have escaped the bag, I pour the wort into the fermenter.  Some folks siphon from pot to carboy, I simply use a sanitized pitcher to do the transfer.  Once all the wort is in, I add the previously boiled (then cooled to the same temperature as the wort) top-off water to bring the level of liquid in the fermenter to 5¼ GAL  — that extra ¼ GAL allows us to take samples, and lose some liquid during transfer, and still end up with 5 GAL of beer in the end.  At this point you should take a gravity reading using a hydrometer.

In short, a hydrometer measures the specific gravity (or relative density) of a liquid in relation to the density of water, by how high it floats when immersed — in this case it measures the ratio of sugars in the wort.  You should take a sample of the beer from your fermenter using a sanitized tool of your choice (in the case of a carboy, a wine thief is the handiest tool around).  This first reading is your original gravity (aka “OG”), and will be measured at the end of fermentation against your final gravity (aka “FG”, also know a “terminal gravity”) to determine how much alcohol is in your beer, and to determine when fermentation is actually complete.  Do not return the sample to the fermenter, as you increase the risk of infection if you do.  Instead, take a sip and see what you’ve produced.  It should be sweet, with a tongue pinging bitterness on the back end.  These flavors will change and mellow dramatically as the beer ferments, then is allowed to age/condition.

The next step is to aerate the wort by any of a number of effective methods: shaking, stirring vigorously, bubbling oxygen through it, etc.  As you can see, I got a little overenthusiastic with a drill-operated stirring tool on this batch, and created a large foamy head… and while not a bad thing, it did make it difficult to pitch my yeast.  You can simply put a stopper in and shake/rock the fermenter vigorously for 5 minutes to achieve sufficient aeration.

Yeast go through multiple stages during fermentation, the first being a reproductive one.  Again, quoting John Palmer from How To Brew:

Yeast use oxygen in the biosynthesis of the compounds that make up their cell membranes that allow them to process sugars for food and grow.  Being able to process food and grow more efficiently allows them to reproduce more effectively also.  Without oxygen, yeast cannot reproduce as fast.  Therefore, to ensure a good fermentation, we need to provide the yeast with sufficient oxygen to allow them to grow quickly and reproduce when they are first pitched to the fermenter.  Once they have reproduced to sufficient numbers, we can let them get on with turning our wort into beer.

Once the wort is sufficiently aerated, you can pitch your yeast.  Some yeasts come in powder form, some in liquid form, and most times which you choose comes down to personal preference.  Powdered yeast should be rehydrated to check for viability before use.  Liquid yeast, in most cases, can be pitched directly into the wort but will benefit from being made into a “starter” a few days before brewing to allow the yeast to reproduce and multiply their numbers greatly, ensuring a fast start to fermentation, and a through fermentation process.  I choose to go the starter route… I’ve never been one to walk the simple path.  *grins*

Once the yeast is in the wort, shake/rock the fermenter to disperse.  Transport your fermenter to its home for the next 3 weeks — this should be a place that is dark (light, especially sunlight, will cause a photochemical reaction with the hop compounds and “skunk” your beer) and has a stable temperature between 65°F to 75°F.  I go one step further and place my carboy into an ice-chest, and fill with water to half way up the carboy.  This allows for more stable temperatures,  a slower thermal shift in the fermenting beer, and allows me to moderate the temperature with ice bottles or hot water as necessary.

Once the fermenter is in position, insert your airlock.  In the case of a carboy a rubber stopper is used to seal the neck and hold the airlock, in the case of most commercial brewing pails, a hole is drilled in the lid, and a rubber grommet is put in place to hold the airlock.  The airlocks themselves are available in several designs, but accomplish the same thing — they allow CO2 to exit the carboy while keeping oxygen and other undesirables out (wild yeasts, bacteria, critters).  The two most popular are the double-bubble (or “S” type), and the 3-piece.  I user the 3-piece, but again, that’s just my preference.  Once fitted, the airlock is filled with a sanitary liquid to create the one-way passage.  You can use sanitizer, distilled water, or even a very cheap alcohol such as vodka.  Since there is a remote chance the liquid may get drawn back into the fermenter, I’d say stick with sanitizer or vodka.

In addition to the airlock, there is another option — a blow-off tube.  There are times when the fermentation is so vigorous that the foamy kräusen will surpass even the empty headspace in the fermenter, and blow out of the airlock — sometimes with enough force to paint your ceiling a lovely shade of foamy beer tan.  In these cases you’ll want to use a tube inserted into your stopper or lid that leads to a smaller vessel — such as a small bucket, bottle or milk jug — which has a small amount of sanitary liquid in it.  The end of the tube in the bucket or jug should be submerged below the level of sanitizer, effectively becoming an airlock.  Any foam that exits the fermenter will simply go into the jug.  Some brewers will use a blow-off tube for the first 24 – 72 hours of fermentation when the likelihood is greatest, then switch to a conventional airlock to finish.

Lacking closet space, and desiring to check on my fermenting beer frequently, I opted to make little “huts” out of discarded Dell boxes to place over my fermenters.  I can store them anywhere I have space, and they fit conveniently over the ice-chest I use for primary fermentation.

As the beer ferments, the foamy kräusen will appear and rise — perhaps very little, perhaps to explosive proportions.  The airlock (or blow-off vesssel) will bubble rapidly as CO2 escapes the fermenter.  Your beer is alive, and the yeasts are hungry and gorging themselves on all that lovely sugar — think of microscopic piranha-like sea monkeys.  *grins*

Primary fermentation will take approximately 7 – 10 days to complete.  At this point the kräusen will have risen, then collapsed and dissolved back into the beer, the CO2 output should be drastically reduced (as is evident by the reduced bubbling in the airlock).  The only reliable way to determine if fermentation is complete is to use your trusty hydrometer to check.  If the gravity is stable over the course of 2 – 3 days, primary fermentation is complete.  As before, do not return your samples to the fermenter, but taste them to gauge how things are going.

Once primary fermentation is complete, your beer is still nowhere near done.  We’ll move on to the following phase next week: secondary day.

Gemma and I are makers.  We are driven to use our hands to create — from woodworking to crafts, from gardening to baking.  We also love nothing more than to share our creations with others, their delight bringing us as much joy as the process of making itself.  This is the spark from which Curious Confections was born, and the flame we are trying to fan into a bonfire.  We want to do what we love, make people happy, and earn a living doing it.

Being a maker most often means sacrificing convenience (and frequently cost) for quality.  Taking the long road on a journey doesn’t get you there faster, but it means you get to choose your own path and enjoy the scenery along the way.  Nowhere is this more true than when you brew your own libations at home — aka: homebrewing.  It’s so much easier to stop at the corner store and pick up a six-pack of beer for a few bucks than it is to spend many hours of your time preparing, much more of your money equipping, and weeks of waiting for your own to be ready.  But done right — even close to right — and you end up with something so much more rewarding.  Homebrewing is a hobby and a passion, and like any good hobby it means that you’re going to invest more time and money into it than you will save on either in the long run.  You do it because it’s interesting, fun, and it allows you to make something you can take pride in.

I’ve taken up brewing beer and mead at home, with more variations to follow (wine, cider, perry, etc).  With May 7th being National Homebrew Day,  and The American Homebrewers Association sponsoring the Big Brew in its honor on May 1st, we thought it would be a nice treat to post a series throughout the month of May about the process of brewing beer.  I’ll break this up into five parts — first providing some basic information on beer and brewing here today, then four future posts representing the four basic “days” involved: brew day, secondary day, bottling day, and enjoyment day.  Look for the rest on the subsequent Mondays.  Also, be warned, I tend toward being very… exuberant, so these may run a little lengthy, but I guarantee they’ll be informative at the very least.

This will by no means be a complete guide to brewing your own beer.  I intend to lay out the basic steps involved and give you my own take on the whole ordeal.  There is no single comprehensive method for brewing beer — everyone eventually develops their own means — but there are some core principles, chemistry, and processes that should be known.  By no means am I an expert, nor am I all knowing… and quite frankly I may be off-target about a few things.  *grins* Homebrewing entails a constant search for knowledge, whether it be tweaking your own process, or finding new and interesting variations on a recipe.  You can stay small, or go as big as you like.

We get started after the jump below…

Basic Beer Brewing Background

Beer is, loosely defined, as a lightly alcoholic beverage made from grains (principally barley, but also corn and wheat, etc).  Take this one step further with distillation, and you have whiskey.

The grains are “malted”, which means they are soaked and allowed to partially germinate, thus releasing enzymes and starches that will later be converted to sugar.  Once the critical stage of germination has been reached, the grains are dried to halt the process.  Further, some grains are toasted or roasted to varying degrees to achieve specific flavors, and other grains are used specifically for flavor/color/aroma, contributing little to no fermentable sugars.  This is all purely for your own education as the vast majority of homebrewers are purchasing their grains already malted… but there are a few zealots out there.  *grins*

These grains are combined in varying quantities and “mashed”.  Simply put, they are steeped in hot water to release the enzymes and starches that the malting process created, the enzymes then act on the starches converting them into sugars — this is what the grains would do in nature to provide a self-sustaining seed that would grow into a new plant, those sugars providing the fuel to grow.  The mash is then diluted to become “wort”, which is the liquid the yeast is added to (or “pitched”) to become beer.  The yeasts consume the sugars and produce alcohol and CO2 as a byproduct (they poop booze, and fart carbonation… a lovely image, no?).  Once fermentation is complete, the liquid is consumed.

This is, very basically, how beer is made.

These days, beer can be made using a variety of core methods: from extract, using only grains (aka “all-grain”), or a combination of the two (aka “mini-mash”).  Malt extract is essentially a bulk produced wort that has been either dehydrated completely into a dry form (DME – dry malt extract), or had a considerable amount of its liquid reduced out, leaving a thick syrupy substance behind (LME – liquid malt extract).  Either way, it is rehydrated at some point during the process.  Like beer, there are many varieties of extracts ranging from extra-pale to dark, each providing a distinct flavor and color.

The process of brewing beer very rudimentarily breaks down into the following: brewing, primary fermentation, secondary fermentation, then bottling (or kegging).

• Brewing is, well, brewing — it’s where the wort is made and yeast is pitched.
• Primary fermentation is when the yeast reproduce, consume the bulk of the fermentable sugars and other components in the wort and produce ethanol, CO2, and a number of other compounds (cetaldehyde, esters, amino acids, ketones, diacetyl, pentanedione, dimethyl sulfide, and a array of fusel alcohols).  This process takes approximately 1 week.
• Secondary fermentation is a bit of a misnomer, and is more accurately a “conditioning” process.  The yeasts, having consumed all the low-hanging-fruit in the form of the wort sugars, will go back and begin to consume the other compounds that they produced, thus cleaning up the overall flavor of the beer.  This process takes approximately 2 weeks.
• Bottling/Kegging is just that, putting the beer into individual bottles or kegs.  At this point the beer will benefit from several weeks of rest to finish the conditioning process, allowing the flavors to meld and mellow, making for a nicer tasting beer.  In the case of bottling a little extra sugar is added just before, so that the last few yeasties in the beer can naturally carbonate the brew in the bottle.  This process takes approximately 3 weeks.

Start to finish, a batch of beer will take six weeks on average to go from shopping to popping.  Some will take more, some less.  This follows the 1-2-3 guideline as outlined above: 1 week in primary, 2 in secondary, 3 in bottles.  Patience is your friend… so is making several batches back-to-back.  *grins*

I will be demonstrating this process using the mini-mash method.  This combines the ease of using extract adding the fresh and vibrant taste of freshly mashed grains.  It can be easily accomplished using the same basic equipment as extract alone, and by further doing a “partial-boil” (only using a portion of the overall water required for the full recipe to mash and create your wort, and topping up the rest later), it can be done on the stove-top in the relative comfort of your home — otherwise, you’d need a much larger pot and a propane or natural-gas powered burner.

Tune in next week, as we’ll roll up our sleeves and jump into making some beer!

Here are some links you might find useful, educational, or entertaining.

• The American Homebrewers Association
• CraftBeer.com
  
• Austin Hombrew Supply
  
• “How To Brew” – By John Palmer (1st edition, completely free online)
  
• HomeBrewTalk.com Forums
  

Cheers!

We made a caramel ganache to go in some molded truffles, and a cherry bounce cordial, we even coloured the chocolate accordingly. Our favourite piece (and the piece with the most reviews) was a white chocolate lemon truffle piped out and then it had sugar crystals grown onto it to form a protective shell.

Our first attempt at taffy was mostly a success, made with Godiva chocolate liqueur it had a nice smooth flavour. A little too chewy perhaps but fun to make!

We finished with peppermint sticks. Hand pulled and twisted, we definitely need more practice there!

We also made some bacon dog treats for the pups in our lives. All reports indicate that they went down very well indeed!

We hope 2010 brings you nothing but happiness.

We briefly considered a tiered cake, with each person getting a tier each, but put that idea to the side after deciding that it would be unfair to have one person get a large cake while the person who got the top tier would get a tiny one.

In the end all four cakes were 9″ round, with the flavour and the base colour as the favourites of the intended recipient. The patterns are in the other three colours to tie the cake together. Each cake was able to move around the centre pole so they could be positioned as desired, but we felt the spiral looked best.

The top purple cake is a super intense, chocolate fudge cake made with 100% Venezuelan Black Cacao with a chocolate fudge icing.

The blue is a spice cake with a pumpkin buttercream, a new recipe for us that we were very excited to be able to use.

The red cake is a pina colada, a pineapple cake with a coconut buttercream.

The red cake is a red velvet with a cream cheese icing.

A highly technical two tiered cake with extensive piping, pastillage and gumpaste flowers.

A devils food cake with cocoa painting and modeling chocolate details.

And a sculpted cake of tea and cookies.

Enjoy!

Now, this is apparently an entirely English thing that I’m introducing America to, but it’s a good cake, even if it is a fruit cake.

But it’s a good fruit cake (I’ve seen the ones in the shops here, I wouldn’t eat one if you paid me!), and here’s the important bit, it’s soaked in alcohol!

The cake making is in fact a process that takes a few months, starting by soaking the fruit in alcohol, then making the cake. Once the cake is made it then gets soaked in alcohol. In this case we used Cherry Bourbon.

A week before Christmas it’s covered in marzipan (homemade, and less sickly sweet than the shop bought marzipan here), and once that’s dried out it’s covered in fondant. From there you can decorate it as you wish.

For this cake we made some white modelling chocolate and dyed it, cutting out several hundred leaves (no, I’m not kidding, it was 800 in total). Then we decorated the cake to look like a Christmas wreath.

Happy Holidays

Why come to us, 500 miles away?  Because we are the best there is!  That, and she initially contacted our friends at Flour Power Confectionery back home, only to be told that they were booked solid.  After calling every specialty bakery between New Orleans and Austin, she found that none had the skill, nor the inclination to produce a realistic and disturbing horror cake.  Realism, perfection, and the opportunity to create a cake that could evoke a strong reaction on sight from a room full of guests is our bread and butter — generally we like an “ooooh!” or an “ahhhh!“, but an “eeeew!” will do just as well.

So, we set forth to bring to life The Zombie.

The Zombie is composed of four individual pieces, and made to full human scale.  The entire cake measured 4ft x 2ft.

The torso is the primary piece, and is constructed from “green velvet” cake, which is tender and moist with a dark mossy-green color.  The layers were filled with an English buttercream icing tinted the color of muscle tissue, and sprinkled with tropical flavored gummy bones.  Then hands are green krispie treats over an armature.  The head is a white chocolate “brain-pan” filled with a sweet, deep red sauce and covered with green krispie treats.  The teeth and eyes are white chocolate, as are the miscellaneous exposed bones on all pieces.  Everything is iced with the English buttercream and covered in fondant, then airbrushed and hand detailed.  The “dirt” is composed of a mixture of graham cracker, chocolate cookie and ginger snap crumbs.

This cake was meant to be interacted with before serving.  The hosts had first to dispatch this zombie, who was gradually digging himself free of his grave!  The most reliable way to do that is to destroy the brain.  A hammer was brought into play, and the head was smashed, shattering the chocolate brain-pan and allowing the blood-red sauce to flow out.  Guests — reluctantly at first, and then with great glee — took to smearing the top of their serving of cake with the sweet sauce.

“Icky, disgusting, gross and delicious.“  Mission accomplished.