Beer 101 [General]
2007 Mar 31
The Boil
Now boil the sweet "wort" for 60 for more minutes. Most beers these days are 45 to 60 minute boils for brewery efficiency reasons. Traditional Czech-style Pilsener is boiled for about 120 minutes to carmelize lots of the sugars which leaves a sweeter beer to balance the hops you are going to add. Hops are the 3rd balance point in beer when speaking of the flavour profile and general tasting. Beer balances malt, hops and alcohol on the palate. And a good beer will always be mindful of this. Unless of course you are a hophead in which case you just add more hops for the heck of it :-)
After you boil, you chill quickly in a heat exchanger and then add your fresh yeast. Ferment 2 weeks to 2 months, bottle or preferably keg.
Serve Chilled!
When tasting, remember to look for a balance between hops, malt and alcohol. And just good fresh flavour on all of those elements.
Now boil the sweet "wort" for 60 for more minutes. Most beers these days are 45 to 60 minute boils for brewery efficiency reasons. Traditional Czech-style Pilsener is boiled for about 120 minutes to carmelize lots of the sugars which leaves a sweeter beer to balance the hops you are going to add. Hops are the 3rd balance point in beer when speaking of the flavour profile and general tasting. Beer balances malt, hops and alcohol on the palate. And a good beer will always be mindful of this. Unless of course you are a hophead in which case you just add more hops for the heck of it :-)
After you boil, you chill quickly in a heat exchanger and then add your fresh yeast. Ferment 2 weeks to 2 months, bottle or preferably keg.
Serve Chilled!
When tasting, remember to look for a balance between hops, malt and alcohol. And just good fresh flavour on all of those elements.
zymurgist
You grow some grain - pretty much any grain malts well though it is not generally considered "beer" unless there is barley and to a lesser degree wheat in it. e.g. Bavarian Hefeweizen which is actually part of Beer 201 so we won't get into it at this point :-)
You take the grain seed that you would normally plant to grow more next year, and you soak it in water for 2 days. Soak it well for an hour then drain and let sit atop a screen or into a tightly-strung piece of cotton - even a shop towell works if you only ever used it for this after buying it. Soak and drain every few hours for 2 days and it will start to sprout the barley, wheat, rye and even corn.
As the grain begins to grow into a little plant, the hard seed starts to get broken down by certain enzymes, which are designed turn the seed into food for the new plant. Once the sprouted rootlets get to be about the same length as the grain itself, you half the malting process normally by kilning the fresh malt. It's called "malted" at this point and now must be kilned. In kilning you must preserve these enzymes so that the brewer can reactivate them during the mash to convert it all into sugar.
Kilning
On a home malting scale you can actually put your malt into a pillow case with a white cotton towell and dry it in the dryer. The gentle agitation also breaks off the rootlets which you do not want going into the beer. Incidentally there is a fellow on my site presently who moved from New Zealand to the Phillipines where there is no malt available so he is buying farmers seed barley and sprouting it himself and drying it on screens just in the 50C sun in the back yard! And he has built a solar oven for the darker malts for making stouts and such. You kiln your malt at a higher temperature to produce dark malts for brown ales, milds, dark lagers, stouts, porters and other darkers beers. You can also really allow the grain to "modify" further to bring out the sugars, then stew them a bit in water before drying them at a temperature slightly higher than regular brewing malt temperatures, but not high enough to produce the darker coffee and charcoal flavours of the chocolate, black patent, carafa and other black malts. These lighter coloured malts are steeped longer to fully develop are then kilned quickly at a slightly higher temperature which cyrstalizes the sugar making crystal or carastan malts. Different maltsters have different trade-secret ways doing things, which gives the brewer a tremendous variety.
Brewing
The brewer selects first a "base" malt which means a malt which still has active enzymes in it and can convert all of it's own starches to sugars, and more often then not it has enough enzyme to convert extra starches which leads way to adding things like corn, rice, and even rye, oats, and just about any other similar type grain you can think of.
The brewer measures out the grains, mills them through a special 2 or more roller mill that crushes the grains without pulverizing the grain husk. The husk is actually very important to have in tact in the ensuing mash, so as to provide an efficient filter-bed at the end of the 90 minute mash, which means the now sweet sugar-liquid will drain freely in an optimally-efficient manner, without the lines clogging or anything like that. The mash must be held at 150F to 160F for about 90 minutes. You then drain the liquid off into the boiling kettle, then fill up the mash tun again with more hot water, stir it a bit, recirculate a few gallons to clear the turbidity out of it, and then drain it off again into the kettle.