What You Need:

Mash tun – you can make one of these if you want

A couple of brew kettles

Something to spread out the flow of water – we fit an upside-down colander into ours.

Process

The first step, once you’ve gotten your kit and the grains, is to heat up the water to 170 degrees. You will be steeping your grains in this for an hour or more. Normally at 170 degrees, you would leach out undesirable flavors into your beer, but at this point in the process, you’ll add the water to 12-14 pounds of grains and into your mash tun — this will cause the temp to drop. Your target temp is 156 degrees Fahrenheit — though this is only true if your mash tun is made from a cooler. I would recommend using a cooler over the stovetop for this part of the process, since it allows you to use fewer kettles, and since a cooler will lock in the heat consistently for an hour, as compared to having to regulate the temperature yourself if you do it on the stove top.

When mashing your grains, first put in the water, then add the grains to the mash tun. Stir up the mash tun so that all the grains are wet, and close it up. Every fifteen minutes, open it to stir the grains and check the temp (you should already have a thermometer from the previous instructions). If you find that the temp is dropping too quickly, you can add in more hot water to keep the temperature up. Otherwise, after an hour, you should be able to drain a little of the liquid off the bottom and taste it. It should be sweet to the taste; this means that you’ve gotten most of the sugars out of the grains. If you don’t think it tastes sweet enough, close it back up again and let it sit for another 15 minutes.

During this hour, you should be heating more water — basically the amount of water that you want for your brew, so probably 7-8 gallons of water, since some will boil off later and you won’t take all of it back out of the grains. This water is also heated to 170 degrees.

The next step after the mash is the sparge. Sparging is how you collect any of the extra sugars that are still in the grains. The first thing you’ll do at this point will be to drain off a little of the current liquid in the mash, enough until the liquid coming out has cleared up (this is one area that I messed up the first few times — by “cleared up,” I mean that there isn’t any sediment coming through anymore, not that the liquid has become clear like water). Take this liquid and slowly pour it through your upside-down colander (or whatever you are using to disperse the water); this allow all the grains to filter out any of the sediment that was in the liquid. Taking the water that you’ve heated, start slowly draining the water from the mash and adding to the top of the mash so that the top of the grains are always covered. By doing this slowly, you are draining out the water that has been sitting there first, and allowing the added water to pick up remaining sugars that have stuck to the grains. The recommended length of time this should take is between 30 and 90 minutes, and it appears that, in general, the slower the better.

Now that you’ve done this, you have the equivalent of your boil ready to go with the malt extract incorporated into it, and the rest of the steps are the same as extract brewing.

——————————————————————————————

So just a quick little set of notes:

Why would you want to switch to this type of brewing? Because all malt extracts are the same recipe, you can create different-tasting malts or tweak the flavors by using the grains yourself.

How hard is this compared to extract brewing? It is definitely harder. I had a couple of batches that went bad or that we didn’t get all of the sugars out of. A lot of brew supply stores will have classes that you can take (often for free) about brewing, and that is a good way to learn, or you could just ask the people working at the store, and most will be able and glad to help you.

Is the extra time worth it? I would say yes — it might add more time to the process and require more equipment, but I think that it is; it gives you control over another aspect of the beer. I’ll actually be doing an article on that in the future (a while from now), and I’ll talk about what can influence the taste of your beer.

——————————————————————————————

So that has been a quick overview of brewing and beer. There will be more coming in the future, when I’ll give a more in-depth look into creating a recipe, how water and yeast influence taste, and even more things about beer than you’ve ever wanted to know!
———————————
Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

What do you need?

A brew pot –  6- to 8-gallon brewing pot.

A carboy – glass over plastic

Siphon

Extract Brew Kit

A Large Spoon

An Airlock

A Thermometer – Digital Kitchen Thermometer

Sanitizer

Brew Bucket

Bottles

Bottle Caps

Capper

The Process

First step in my process is to sanitize everything. It’s most important to sanitize the stuff that will come in contact with the beer after you’ve boiled it, so that means the carboy, airlock, thermometer, and spoon. The reason for this is that you don’t want to introduce any bacteria into the brew after the boil. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to wear surgical gloves and breathe through a mask after the boil — in fact, I’ve cooled off the beer during the winter by setting it outside, uncovered — but it’s better to sanitize and control what you can. While completing this step, if I have liquid yeast I activate it so that it is warm and active at the end of the brew, since the yeast should be kept in the fridge until it’s ready for use.

Next, you fill the brew pot with 3-5 gallons of water and start to heat it up. During this process, you’ll steep the grains. A kit will come with a bag to put the grains in, like a cheese cloth, and the grains themselves. Most brew shops will help you grind up the specialty grains, but if you are going to get a kit and not brew for a few days, you shouldn’t grind the grains. Just before steeping the grains, you can prepare them by crushing them with a rolling pin, or grinding them in a grain grinder. While steeping the grains (generally 20-30 minutes), you’ll need to keep the temperature of the water between 120 and 155 degrees. Any lower and you won’t pull out the sugars and flavor form the grain; any higher and you’ll start to get a bitter flavor from it.

Once the grains are steeped, bring the water to a boil. Once it boils, add in the malts. Recipes will often recommend that you take the brew pot off the heat at this point, because you can burn the sugars on the bottom if you aren’t stirring constantly. If you have someone helping you, one of you can pour while the other stirs; otherwise, just turning down the heat works nicely, as this will keep it from burning as quickly. After the malts are added, return it to a boil. At this point, the boil goes on for an hour. During that hour, you’ll be adding in hops at different points — the recipe will tell you when. Remember that the early hops are added for the nose, and hops added later will make more of a difference with flavor.

Taking the wort (the product you’re left with after the boil) off the stove, you’ll then need to cool it down. There are wort chillers you can use, which basically run water through copper tubing to cool the beer faster. I’ve also put it in a bathtub that was filled with cold water. Or you can come up with some other way to cool it off, like setting it outside in the dead of winter. Once it has dropped to 80 degrees, which can take a while, you can move it to the carboy.

This is where the siphon comes in — you’ll now siphon the beer from the brew pot into the carboy. Alternatively, you can use a funnel instead of a siphon, but you’ll get more of the residue into your fermentation that way, and you’ll need a siphon later anyway. At this point, you’ll probably find that you have less than five gallons of water, so you’ll need to add some — taking water from the sink, or using filtered water, fill the carboy until there are 5 gallons. Next, add the yeast to the carboy, then put the plug from the airlock on and cover up the opening. Then, shake the beer up for one to two minutes to circulate the air into the beer. This will help the yeast work faster and keep less of it from dying.

To finish up on day one, fill the airlock with a little bit of water so the bottom of it is covered and air can’t pass through it. Next, put it on top and move the beer to a dark room. If you don’t have a dark room, you can cover the carboy with a towel, which is what I typically do. If things have gone correctly, within a few hours (or by the next day at the latest), you’ll start to hear air bubbles escaping through the airlock. This means that the yeast is doing its work. You then let the beer sit for two weeks, checking in on it once and a while. After a few days, you’ll notice that the bubbles are infrequent or may have completely stopped. This is normal, but continue to let it sit for the full two weeks so the flavors marry.

After that time, if you are going to keg the beer, move the beer to the sanitized keg with the siphon, so that any sludge that has settled on the bottom of the carboy is left behind. Closing the keg, put it under pressure and in a refrigerator or kegerator immediately. Cooling off the beer to the temp of a fridge or kegerator will stop the yeast from eating away any more sugars or doing anything else that might make your beer taste funky. The beer is put under 30 PSI of pressure for 24-48 hours to get it carbonated, and then find your serving pressure between 4-8 PSI.

If you are bottling, you’ll use the priming sugar from the kits, turning it into a simple syrup. Add this to a beer when you move to to the brew bucket. Use the spigot to fill the sanitized bottles. Taking the caps and the capper, put a bottle cap on each bottle. Once all the bottles are filled, the beers need to sit out for two more weeks out of sunlight.The yeast will eat the newly added sugars, but since there is nowhere for the air to escape, the beers will carbonate. After two weeks the beers are ready to enjoy.

And that’s how one brews from an extract kit. Next week, we’ll talk about how all-grain brewing differs and what you’ll need for that process.