The fun part about about making beer is the ability to brew any style you want. There are 23 different styles of beer and numerous subcategories. In brewing your own beer, you can experiment with different styles and recipes. You can also modify recipes to what you think would taste good. It’s just like cooking in that way. You can take a recipe and follow it exactly, or change some of the ingredients. Once you make your initial investment in all the brewing equipment, home brewing is less expensive than store-bought beer.
There are three different methods of brewing:
Extract – You take a malt syrup, boil it, add the hops and ferment it.
Partial mash – This uses extract and speciality grains. Then the grains are steeped, the extract is added and it’s boiled.
All-grain – You’ll use only grains for the mash.
The four basic ingredients used to make beer are water, barley, hops and yeast.
Here is the basic four-step process to make all grains beer.
The mash:
You take the crushed grains, and mash them (steep) in hot water, approximately 140-160 degrees. This will convert the starch to sugar. This process takes about one hour. Then you need to slowly rinse the grain with 170-degree water for about an hour. The run-off goes into a brew kettle and is placed on a heat source. This run-off (wort) is very sweet. You boil the mash for 60-90 minutes. ( Note: When using extract, the mashing process is eliminated because the extract is actually the run-off from the mash. Extract will either be a thick syrup, or a dried powder.)
The boil:
Hops are added to the boil at different times depending on the function of the hop. Hops are used for bittering, flavor, and aroma. (Without hops, the beer would be too sweet.) Bittering hops are added to the boil when 60 minutes remain. Flavoring hops can be added later in the boil when 10-30 minutes remain. Aroma hops can be added the last 10-0 minutes. Some reasons to boil have to do with killing germs and bacteria, and extracting the hop oils.
Fermentation:
After the boil, you need to chill the beer to approximately 70-75 degrees and put it into a fermentation vessel at which time you pitch (add) the yeast. You ferment the beer for approximately 1 week until active fermentation stops, then you rack (transfer) to a secondary fermentation for approximately 2 weeks.
Carbonation:
After two weeks, you can bottle or keg your beer. If you are bottling your beer, you would add sugar before bottling in order to carbonate it. This is called bottle conditioning. (The sugar reactivates the yeast, producing CO2.) If you bottle condition beer, there will be some residue on the bottom of the bottle. If you keg your beer, most people use old 5-gallon soda kegs. You can either force carbonate it by using C02, or cask condition, which is adding sugar to your keg (similar to bottling).
If you bottle your beer, you’ll be ready to enjoy your home brew in about 2 weeks. In force carbonation, you’ll have your beer anywhere from 2-7 days. Cask conditioning would take approximately 2 weeks.
Don Williams has been brewing beer for 5 years. He started out brewing extract beer, then went to partial mash, and has brewed all grains for three-and-a-half years. This is the first year he has planted his own hops. He keeps between six to eight different styles of beer on tap. Don belonged to a large brew club in San Diego, and hopes to be involved in starting one in the Redding area. He is a recognized beer judge. He will teach an all-grain brewing class on Sat., April 26 at Wine Time on Highway 273 in Anderson. To learn more or register for the class call 365-9463 for more information.
