Home Brewing

By: Dan Stewart
November 19, 2018

Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew!

Before your Brew

• Read How to Brew and don't be overwhelmed or intimidated. You can do this!
• Find a recipe and buy the ingredients.
• Use a kitchen scale to measure out the recipe.
• Buy 5 gallons of water if the water from your tap is not very good.
• Check your equipment.
• Fill a 6.5 gallon fermenter carboy with 3 gallons of warm water and 6 tablespoons of PBW. Clean it with a new sponge.
• Pour that soapy water into the bottling bucket and clean it.
• Pour the same soapy water into the brew pot and clean it.
• Put 5 gallons of water into the fermenter and sanitize it with 1 ounce of Star San. Make sure every square inch of the carboy is exposed to Star San for at least 30 seconds. You can use a PH meter or stick to make sure your Star San is still potent.
• Pour the Star San into the clean bottling bucket for future use.
• Sanitize the lid to the carboy and cover it.

Day of the Brew

The day of the brew, "relax, don't worry, have a homebrew".

Don't let the huge list of things to do stress you out. Enjoy the process. You are brewing beer!

• Check your yeast instructions. Do you need to take the packages out of the fridge? Start a starter?
• Fill the brew pot with 3 gallons of water.
• Bring to 150° using a thermometer.
• Follow the instructions for steeping grains in your recipe gently stirring with a spoon.

• Once the grains have steeped, remove the bag, but do not squeeze it. The problem with squeezing out the bag is that bitter tannins will get released into the beer. Here's how my wort looked after steeping.

• Save the spent grains. They will make great dog treats.

• Follow the recipe and add the extract, stirring constantly to avoid burning the sugar to the bottom of the pot.
• Once you are sure the extract is dissolved, start boiling.

The Boil

• The boil is a very exciting time, be sure to watch for it to boil over. We have had one. It happens really quickly. I have a squirt bottle of cold water ready to stop it from happening again.
• When the foamy hot break dies down, review the recipe for hop addition times. I noticed the hot break was down enough after 10 minutes. That's when I started the boil timer for hop additions. Here's a picture of the hot break.

• When the boiling time is up, remove the hops.
• Chill the wort ASAP. I used a copper wort chiller.
• Pour the wort into the fermenter.
• Add extra gallons of clean water to bring it up to 5 gallons.
• Clean and sanitize a beer thief and hydrometer.
• Fill the beer thief and measure the gravity with a hydrometer. This measurement is the original gravity (OG) reading. Take a taste from the thief, but don't judge the quality yet. The yeast will eat up the sugar, release flavor, and alcohol.
• Pitch the yeast into the fermenter.
• Place a sanitized cap and airlock on top of the fermenter.
• Shake it up for 2 minutes to add oxygen.

Fermenting

• Check your yeast instructions to find the best room temperature.
• It should be bubbling in about 18 hours.
• After four weeks it is safe to bottle if the final gravity (FG) reading is what you expect. If you are concerned, take a reading and wait a few more days. Take a reading again, and if it's the same, you should be safe.
• Using your last reading, calculate the Alcohol By Volume (ABV).

Bottling

• Clean the bottles with PBW and a bottle brush.
• Rinse the bottles with water and sanitize with Star San.
• Clean and sanitize a bottling bucket or another carboy.
• Prepare a simple syrup to prime the bottling carboy. We boiled ¾ cup of corn sugar in 2 cups of water.
• Sanitize the auto-siphon and food grade tubing.
• Now that the bottling carboy is primed with sugar, gently rack the beer from the fermenter into it. Be sure to leave any settled yeast at the bottom of the fermenter alone.
• Place the bottling carboy on a counter and a towel on the floor.
• Put a large Tupperware bowl on top of the towel to catch spilled beer.
• Sanitize the siphon, tubing, and the bottle filler.
• Fill the bottles to overflowing. As you remove the bottle filler, the volume will drop to just the right amount. Gently stir the beer after filling six bottles.

• When all of the bottles are filled, place them in a dark place for 3 - 6 weeks.

• Clean everything. Bottling takes minutes, but cleaning takes hours. Just enter a meditative state and dream of beer.

Enjoying

After cold conditioning in the fridge for a week, I opened my first bottle of homebrew on April, 12th, 2013. There was some sediment at the bottom of the bottle, but that is normal.

You should open a bottle of homebrew in a sink just in case it's over-carbonated.

Pour with vigor into the glass! The sediment should stick to the bottom if the bottle is still cold.

After pouring, save and clean the bottle for the next brew.

Some beers taste better with time. Our Crimson Hefeweizen didn't start tasting really great until it was about four months old. Our Belgian Tripel took 6 months before we let other people try it.