Homebrew Step by Step: Cream Ale Extract Kit w/ Specialty Grains
6I just recently got into brewing my own beer at home and I've decided to document my third brew.
Cream Ale Extract Kit w/ Specialty Grains
http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/cream-ale-extract-kit.html
http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/beerkits/CreamAle.pdf
I am brewing with an extract kit, which is recommended for beginners. An extract kit means that all of the fermentable sugars has been extracted from the grains already. So, the kit gives me six pounds of Pilsen malt syrup. I could extract the sugars myself, but I don't have the equipment to do it.
For my third brew, I am going to create a yeast starter. The starter will generate more yeast cells for fermentation. Yeast has a lot to do with the flavor of beer, much more than any other ingredient. So, healthy yeast makes for healthy beer.
I plan on brewing four days from now. This will give enough time for my yeast cells to replicate and then settle out.
So, let's get started with the starter....
Here is what you need
- 1000ml erlenmeyer flask with foam stopper (you guys should know what this is)
- 1/2 cup of DME (Dry Malt Extract, 1lb shown in photo)
- Sauce Pan
- Liquid yeast
- 650 ml of water
Put 650 ml of water in to a saucepan and bring to a boil
While the water is coming to a boil, get your yeast ready.
Be very careful when opening this type of yeast vial. Open it very slowly. Turn it just until you hear some hissing, then immediately close it. Give it a good shake, then twist the cap until you hear hissing, then close again. It might take a good 10 minutes to open it up, be patient with it.
There is another liquid yeast that comes in a smack pack. It's a foil pouch where you give it a good smack to release yeast nutrients then wait for the pouch to inflate. Be sure to read the instructions, you'll want to give it a good day to incubate before you actually use the yeast.
Once your water comes to a boil, slowly add in the DME and stir. It has a tendency to foam up, and it can make a mess. Essentially, what we are doing is adding in enough fermentable sugar to allow the yeast to replicate.
Once all the DME has been added, bring it to a steady boil for 15 minutes.
In the mean time sanitize your flask. Star San is a concentrated no rinse sanitizer. One ounce of the stuff can be diluted into 5 gallons of water. What I like to do is add a bit to a spray bottle and use liberally to anything that comes in contact with my beer.
This flask is ready for the wort (beer without yeast). Notice all the bubbles inside, that is what you want.
So here is the flask just before the yeast is added in. We lost a good 200 ml of water during the boil, but isn't a problem
The wort is too hot for the yeast to be added in, and it needs to be cooled down. You can make a little ice bath and plop in the flask for about 20 to 30 minutes. The flask was floating in the water, so I put a vase over the flask and that provided just enough weight to make it sit down.
Pour in the yeast then give it a good stir.
There we go, the starter is starting. I'm going to give it a good 3 days before I crash cool it (which will make the yeast sink to the bottom)
I've left it on my kitchen counter, and I'll give it a good stir every now and again to aerate it.
And that's it for now, I'll post updates when it's time to brew.
- 18 comments, 25 replies
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Awesome, thanks for posting the process! I'm excited to see the next steps. Maybe I'll be inspired to take the plunge and start homebrewing myself.
It's an expensive hobby. Maybe you can convince your boss that it would make for good blog content?
What do you think @dave? Time to make some Mediocre brand beer?
I bet HR hasn't had to deal with "making beer on the job" distinct from "drinking beer on the job."
How is the Star San removed from the container? Evaporation? Does it leave anything behind? What is it?
I do love that making beer involves our logo.
You mentioned it's expensive...is that mostly in the start-up equipment costs, or are the ingredients pretty pricey as well?
From talking with others, I think it's expensive on a unit price basis. A bottle of beer, even a fancy one, is cheaper at the store.
@fgarriel It's a food grade phosphoric acid
Check out this informative video...
@dave The equipment is pretty expensive. It is a hobby, so most equipment is priced a bit higher. Although, you can find some work arounds. For example, you can get a wort immersion chiller for around 70 bucks -- but you can build one yourself for 40 to 50 bucks a home depot (3/8" copper pipe, some PVC tubing, and a hose or faucet adapter).
The ingredients aren't that expensive. You'll get about 2 cases of beer from a 5 gallon batch and it'll cost between $30 to $50 -- which is about the same for a case or two of craft beer.
As far as start up prices, it depends on what you want. You could just buy a lobster pot and a 5 gallon bucket from home depot and you're half way there, but would you really want that? The nice thing is that the equipment you do buy is a life time investment, you'll always use it.
This is where the magic is at with home-brewing. I've had the opportunity to use this set-up to brew twice and it was magic. Literally. Magic.
Brew Day
Now for the fun part, time to brew beer.
The day before I put the starter in the refrigerator. I got worried that there wasn't enough wort for the yeast, so I put it in the fridge to make the suspended yeast drop and force it to go dormant. If you leave it too long the yeast cells will die off.
This is what I'm brewing with
This cost about $40 with shipping included
First, I filled up the fermentation bucket with 5 gallons of water and used it to soak the paddle, wort chiller, and blow off tube. You don't have to do this first, but I figured to do it now since I might forget later.
Since I have some specialty grains, I need to heat up about 4 gallons of water to 170 degrees. It takes some time. Bring a book or...
Drink a beer in the mean time. This is a Hefeweizen I brewed, and it came out pretty good. I hope the cream ale comes out just as well.
It's also a good idea to warm up your malt syrup. It will make it easier to pour when it is time.
Soak your grains for 20 minutes. Think of it like coffee, the hot water draws out the sugars from the grain. Swirl it around making sure that all the grains are soaked, then tie it to the handle of your kettle.
Rose woke up from her nap.
Time is up, and we've got some nicely colored water that smells like grain. Bring it to a boil
Once you've got a nice boil going, start to add in your malt. Be sure to add it in slowly while stirring. You don't want it to sit on the bottom of your kettle and caramelize. Mix it in well.
Bring it back up to a boil, and look out for overflow. I was a bit surprised that it was so full. I expected more water to evaporate. Besides the mess, this is actually pretty good -- I won't have to add in too much extra water at the end.
Here are the hops. They smell wonderful.
Time to add in the hops, and boil for 60 minutes.
Now it starting to smell like beer.
I had another overflow and some hops stuck to the side of the kettle. Try to stir it back into the wort.
I decided to boil the wort chiller as another way to sanitize it. I left it in there a bit too long and the plastic started to get soft. I took it out and put it back in the star san bucket.
Here is a pretty crucial step. Before the yeast is added in (also called, pitch) the wort needs to be around 80 degrees. Otherwise the yeast will die.
Luckily Boston has some cold ground water, and the immersion chiller works really well. For you people in Dallas, you might be better off using your sink as an ice bath. Your neighbors might get upset that you're "wasting" water. You can get an immersion system that uses two copper coils, one as a pre chiller, and the other as the actual chiller. You can also get a pump to recycle the water, that would probably be a better idea.
Now, while the wort is chilling. Figure out a way to filter out all the trub (sediment) that is in the wort. I used two pasta colanders, they also provide some aeration -- which is useful for the yeast.
It's ready to transfer into the fermentor. I added in about one gallon of cold water to the fermentor, to make a five gallon batch. It turns out that I misread it, and I should have added in two gallons.
Here's all the suspended trub, you don't want any of that in your beer.
Here's what was caught, it did a pretty good job.
Now it's beer.
Time to clean up the mess.
I don't have a clue on how to read this. I do know that this measures the sugar in the beer. I'll take another reading in about 2 weeks and it should give a different reading, since the sugars turned into alcohol.
I put the fermentation bucket in a storage bin, just incase it overflows. I'm also using a blow off tube, instead of an air lock. Once the beer is fermenting, CO2 will be released, so this set up allows CO2 to escape without anything getting inside. A blow off tube can handle vigorous fermentation. I'm being overly cautious. In a few days I'll put on an air lock.
That's it for now. Time to figure out what you're going to put your beer in. I've already got a bunch of bottles, but make sure you have caps for them!
In all it took about 4 hours from start to finish
Very cool to see but further reaffirms my thinking that I'll remain on the beer consuming side instead of the beer creating side for now.
It's awesome that you documented it so well.
@jont If you ever find yourself with too much time on your hands, consider taking up the hobby. :)
It's fermenting already, I think the starter is really helping.
https://vine.co/u/1076604021759983616
Sweet thread, yo. Rose has the same ABC Giraffe we have! Our child loves it, but it sounds like it says ‘Z’ in place of ‘G’ and ‘V’. Is yours the same?
Now that you mention it, I don't think i'll be able to unhear it!
Fermentation is still going strong. I haven't had a beer that has fermented this well, it appears the starter really helps!
Racking into a secondary fermentor
Since fermentation went so well, I decided to transfer the beer into a secondary fermentor. This should help clarify the beer, plus I really wanted to see what it looked like.
I'm using a bottling bucket to sanitize everything
I don't have a funnel to pour the star san into the carboy, so I just used the racking wand to do it for me. Besides, this will also sanitize the wand for me. That's what you call efficiency.
My racking wand was an auto siphon, but a clip broke and it isn't auto anymore :(
All you've got to do is suck up enough liquid to the top of the wand, aim your tube down, then let gravity do the work. So long as no air enters the tube, it will suck up all the liquid.
In the meantime, I opened up the primary fermentor. You need to be aware, that the head space is filled with CO2, so don't put your face right on top of the bucket when you take the lid off. Before taking off the lid, I just took out the blow off tube, and pressed on the lid a few times to get a bit of oxygen in there.
All that stuff floating is called krausen. When the wort is fermenting it creates krausen, and it is like a foam. After it's done fermenting, it'll drop back down and leave that stuff floating. You can tell where the foam stopped, it grew about two inches. Each yeast strain produces different krausen, if you don't have enough headspace in the fermentor it can blow off the top. This is part of the reason why I used a blow off tube. A blow off tube lets CO2 escape quicker than an air lock.
After dumping out the sanitizer, time to rack the beer.
Racking is a term used when you want to fill a vessel from the bottom up. This needs to be done for a few reasons. First, you just want the beer. There should be a big yeast cake at the bottom of the fermentor, and we don't want any of that. Second, and most importantly we don't want to aerate the beer. If you directly pour the beer into the carboy, it'll splash around.
I'm happy with the way it looks right now. It's really clear, I can't wait to see what it will look like in a glass.
Don't fear the foam
I'm drawing the beer off of the top, not from the bottom. All of the yeast and sediment settles to the bottom. Racking into a secondary should help clarify the beer.
Honestly, I don't need to do this. If I wanted to dry hop a beer, then it would need to be done.
That's the yeast cake. I'm really happy to see it cover the entire bottom. It looks like it was pretty healthy and converted all of the sugars.
Four gallons of beer. If I would have paid closer attention on my brew day, I'd have five gallons.
So the hydrometer dropped to 10, and it's finished fermenting.
The approximate ABV is 5%. There is another scale on the hydrometer, that tells you aprox abv. You take the reading before fermentation, and a second after, then subtract that it'll give you the percentage.
The OG was at 50, which on the ABV scale is 6. Now, it's at 10, which is about 1 on the ABV scale. So, I've got a 5% beer.
I really don't care much, so if it sounds confusing it's because it doesn't matter to me.
It still needs another week to go before bottling. Since the carboy is see through, I covered it with a jacket. This will protect it from UV light and also help insulate it from temperature changes.
That's it for now. Next up is bottling.
@Kevin Very cool, I'm excited to see the next step. This entire process seems very precise and makes me wonder about the quality of what more ancient brewing techniques produced.
I'm going to have to do some googling now.
I had a similar thought - how the hell did anyone ever figure this out? I guess it's probably that everyone drank terrible terrible beer for a long long time until each step was invented.
@JonT @dave
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-gave-us-civilization.html
Beer was the catalyst for the civilization we live in today. If you're into hyperbole, then watch How Beer Saved the World on Netflix.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1832368/
I love hyperbole more than anything in the universe.
I want to collect all the "this thing changed the world" items. I've seen salt, oysters, and the Basque people all from one author.
@jont What if scientists discover another universe?
Bottling Day
I'm going to need about 40 12 ounce bottles. There is 128 ounces in a gallon, times four is 512. Divide that by 12 is 42.6667 bottles. Since we are working with discrete numbers, I need at least 43 bottles.
Now, I also have a few bombers (22 ounce bottles). I'll have more than I need.
Sanitize everything. I have...
I also had to dismantle/clean out the spigot on the bottling bucket, and sanitize that.
Here's what eight days will do. It looks like the fermentation worked, because there was no extra krausen in the secondary fermentor. It looks super clear in the car boy. This is the clearest beer I've made so far!
I took 4 ounces of corn sugar, and dissolved it into boiling water. This will introduce extra fermentable sugar that the yeast can eat up to produce CO2 and become carbonation.
I racked the beer into the bottling bucket.
Hook up the bottle filler to the plastic tube then to the braided spigot -- and open up the tap.
Press the bottle filler on the bottle of the bottle, and fill it up. I put all of my bottles in a large storage bin, to help keep things clean.
Looks great so far. I took that 6/10th and put it in a glass. It tastes ok, but it still needs some conditioning and carbonation. I don't expect an amazing beer since it's a cream ale.
Cap and label
I don't get too much into the label, so i just like to write the bottling date on it.
But, since i'm documenting this I'll name it, meh. It'll be a very mediocre beer. I'm still a noob at this, so i'm just excited to make beer. Maybe once I become more seasoned, I'll get excited to make good beer.
It should take 2 weeks before I start drinking it. Once I crack one open, I'll post a photo of the finished beer.
Very nice and I love the name. Looking forward to the next report on the taste. How illegal is it to mail us some?
@jont I don't think it's illegal to ship homebrewed beer. Are you guys still at 3200 Belmeade Drive, Suite 100 Carrollton, Texas 75006?
That's correct, but let me check with HR to make sure there aren't any issues with us receiving it (I doubt there will be). Thanks!
Let me know. If you want, I can mail it directly to you.
Beer me! @kevin Looks delicious! And since @jont checked in with HR, I expect at least one of those bottles to find it's way to my desk...
@jont hey bud, I haven't forgotten about shipping the beer. Just have to find the right packing material.
@jont The beer is on the way. I hope it survives.
the tracking number is 1zw020a40309252480
should get to you by Thursday or Friday
Awesome! You're officially my favorite Kevin. We'll be sure to post pictures of us enjoying it as soon as it's here.
I hope it gets there in time for your launch party. I also threw in some Harpoon IPA for good measure.
@jont be on the look out, it should get there today.
@Kevin I came back from lunch to my desk and was greeted with this:
Awesome, I love IPAs and harpooning things.
Luckily there were no explosions, so the ziploc bags weren't needed (but smart thinking).
Bonus Heely wheel.
Chilling and awaiting our site launch toast shortly.
My ugly mug.
Sincerely, thank you @Kevin! You're too kind and we don't deserve this kind of good treatment. Can't wait to taste how mediocre they are when we toast to how meh we all are. I'll post some more pics after that.
Glad it made it in once piece! I work at Harpoon so if you're ever around Boston let me know and I'll give you a tour of the Brewery.
I'd love that, I'll add it to my list of places I need to travel.