Basic Homebrewing: All the Skills and Tools You Need to Get Started
By Jim Parker and James Collins
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Basic Homebrewing - Jim Parker
Introduction
Welcome to Basic Homebrewing, a guide to help you brew your first batches of beer. Everything you’ll need to learn the craft is here:
• Detailed descriptions and photographs of the equipment you’ll need.
• Information about the ingredients that go into beer—malted barley, hops, water, yeast, and other adjuncts.
• Step-by-step instructions for brewing seven different beer styles, each step accompanied by clear photographs that show you how to brew.
• An introduction to some advanced brewing techniques and equipment.
• A list of publications and organizations where you can find supplies and information.
You’ll learn how to brew several classic beers—an amber ale, a pale ale, a porter, a stout, and a lager—as well as two more unusual beers: a barley wine and a witbier, or white beer. One chapter is devoted to each beer style, and each chapter includes the following:
• A clear list and photograph of the necessary ingredients.
• The history, unique characteristics, and commercially available examples of the style.
• A graphic that shows you the timing for adding the ingredients.
• Clear, illustrated, step-by-step instructions for brewing the beer.
In addition, each successive chapter introduces new techniques into the brewing process, so you’ll develop your skills and expertise as you try new styles.
Parker’s Amber Ale, a very basic brew, is the first recipe. This introduces you to culturing yeast, boiling and adding the ingredients, adding the yeast (called pitching) and beginning the fermentation, monitoring the fermentation, and bottling the brew. The importance of cleanliness and sanitation is emphasized throughout the book.
Brewing our Paradise Pale Ale will introduce you to the techniques of wort chilling and dry hopping. The Parliamentary Porter recipe teaches you how to handle roasted barley grains and add them to your beer for flavor and color. The Old Bald Fart Barley Wine chapter sums up the techniques introduced in the first three recipes, as it requires a yeast starter culture, added grains, and dry hopping.
The Moo-Juice Milk Stout recipe introduces the addition of adjunct ingredients (in this case, lactose), as well as kegging and force-carbonating your beer in the keg, using carbon dioxide. The Old Country Lager chapter explains the lagering process for producing clean, crisp, traditional German brews. Finally, the Wedding Wit beer, a more complex recipe, uses spices and a mini-mash before the boil to steep and extract flavor from added grains.
At the heart of brewing is the process of fermentation, which involves the action of yeast on sugars to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. Learning how to control this process to produce your own tasty creations will appeal to those interested in cooking, chemistry, or just high-quality beer and the pleasure of creating and sharing it with friends and family. Best of luck to you as you begin your adventure into Basic Homebrewing.
1
Equipment and Ingredients
Most of the basic tools you’ll need to start brewing are available in beginners’ kits. These usually include plastic or glass fermentation containers, a bottle capper, airlocks, corks, hoses, and possibly a hydrometer or thermometer. Available at reputable suppliers for around $50 or $60, these kits can be a good way for the absolute beginner to get started, since they include nearly everything you’ll need to make your first batch. Most kits don’t include a boiling kettle, though, so you’ll have to supply that on your own. It’s a good idea to check with a store clerk to make sure you have everything you need.
For more adventuresome brewers, or those who already own a bit of equipment, the à la carte method of buying gear is the way to go. Sometimes you can pull together the necessary individual pieces of equipment for a price that is quite comparable to that of a kit—and you might also enjoy scrounging at your local hardware or restaurant supply store for an unusual or high-quality bit of gear.
The kit on the previous page includes a 5-gallon glass carboy with a carrying handle, rubber stopper, and airlock; a plastic primary fermenter bucket; a glass Erlenmeyer flask with stopper and airlock; a kitchen strainer, boiling kettle, and stainless-steel spoon; a bottle capper, filler, brush, and caps; a hydrometer and a dairy thermometer; a racking cane and siphon hose for transferring beer between containers; and mesh sacks for steeping grains before the boil.
Familiarity with the basic ingredients that go into beer is also essential for a first-timer. Common varieties of malted barley, which provides body and the basic character of your beer, include liquid malt extract, powdered dried malt extract, and malted and roasted barley grains. Hops, a plant whose oily, aromatic flowers provide the beer’s bitterness, smell, and bite, comes in both plug and pellet form. (It is also sold in a loose-leaf form, not shown in the photograph.) Other ingredients include yeast for fermentation and priming sugar for in-the-bottle carbonation.
This chapter illustrates and further describes the equipment and ingredients you’ll need to start brewing. Essential tools are given first, followed by ingredients, and then optional and additional tools that might be helpful as you gain experience. Each item is accompanied by a description of what it does and how it is used.
KETTLE
Although the choice of a brewing kettle is often determined by what’s available in your home kitchen, you should not brew with anything smaller than a 4-gallon kettle. This will enable you to comfortably boil 3 gallons of wort (the term for beer in the process of being brewed) then add 2 gallons of cooling water in the fermentation container to make a standard 5-gallon batch of beer. Larger kettles that enable you to boil an entire 5 gallons are preferable but not as readily available. Stainless steel is recommended.
SPOON
The spoon also should be stainless steel to avoid contaminating your beer with bacteria or other microorganisms that can live on the surface of plastic or wooden utensils. It should be large enough to allow you to easily stir a full brewing kettle.