Home Brew - Ingredients.

I know some of you have been interested in home brewing yourselves, and i hope my previous blogs about the process of brewing have been helpful in that regard. I'm now going to go back to basics and look in more depth about the ingredients that go into making your beer. Looking at how each ingredient affects that overall flavour, colour, style and indeed drinkability of the beer. With your help at each stage, through the comments section at the bottom and voting through the facebook page - i'd like to come up with a crowd brew recipe for my next brew and one collaborater will receive a case of 6 bottles of the finished brew.

So, this post will give a general overview of the ingredient areas and how they affect the beer, and then i'll do seperate blog posts giving different ingredient options for each area from which we chose what goes into the final brew. So those areas are Water, Malt, Hops, Yeast.

Water is a lot more important than you'd think. It's the biggest part of your beer in the end and you'd be surprised how much of an affect different impurities and additives to the water supply in different areas of the country can radically change the taste of a beer. This is why different countries and different regions produce vastly different tasting beers even when the other ingredients are fairly similar. To this end a lot of home brewers use mineral water where the local water supply is not so great, or boil their water first to boil off impurities. Additives can be added, to change the characteristics of the water as well, such as the Gypsum i've used in my Hefeweizen recipe. Water quality is that important that in Germany there was a law (now not enforced) called the Water Purification Law that set a standard of water purity that must be used in the brewing process.

Malts inform the colour and the base flavours of the beer as well as providing the majority of the sugars that will be turned into alcohol in the brewing process. They can come in the original grain format, which needs mashing (essentially boiled in water for a long period to extract the sugars and flavours and create a wort (the liquid extraction of the malt). It can also come in liquid malt extracts which make for easy home brewing by providing a wort in a can that just needs poured into your beer mix. Lastly, Dry Malt extract which i haven't actually encountered yet but which is a dry powder that you add to hot water to create a wort. There are a world of different malt varieties to choose from and you would normally use a mixture of malts to create a complex flavour base. The main characteristic you'll get from a malt is its colour rating, which will be found as a score under the Standard Reference Method (SRM) scale. I've read a bit about this scale and don't quite understand how it works but essentially a lower score is a lighter colour and a higher score is a darker colour. A lighter colour will generally have a more delicate flavour and a darker one a more intense flavour. Low levels generally being single figure and a higher level being 20+.

You can also get speciality grains that will have flavourings such as whisky malts which can be added to add an extra flavour dimension to the brew.

Hops provide the top notes of the beer and affect the aroma, and the aftertaste of the beer. These provide the spicy, floral notes that you get in some beers. Like malts these can come from a more than one form, you can get pellets which are a concentrated form of hops or leaves which is the natural form of the hops. The main characteristic you'll look at in a hop is the alpha acid level. This will normally be given in the form of a percentage level from a low acid hop of around 3-4% to a high level of around 13-14%. This figure affects the bitterness of the beer, the higher the alpha acid level the more bitter the beer will be.

Yeast is the ingredient that will determine how much of the sugars in your brew will turn to alcohol and how quickly this will happen. Yeast has a huge say in the style of the beer you will produce and how strong it will be. There are two scales that you can look at to see what a yeast will do to your beer. These are attenuation and flocculation. Attenuation is a simple percentage that refers to the percentage of sugars in your beer that will be turned to alcohol. Flocculation refers to the clumping together of the yeast once it has been turned into alcohol. The level for a yeast will be given as high, medium or low. This refers to how quickly the yeast forms together and either rises to the top of the beer or sinks to the bottom out of the main body of liquid. A high flocculating yeast is quicker than a low one. Yeast can either come in liquid form or as a dry powder.

When making a recipe it is important to make sure all these ingredients compliment each other and are well balanced. Too hoppy and you'll get an overly bitter beer, too malty and it'll be more cloying, not enough malt or sugar and you'll have a very low alcohol beer, too much and you'll have a high alcohol beer.

So, we'll begin with Water - and ill have a blog up about that in the next few days.

Home Brew - the difficult second brew (this time theres no kit)

Okay so I've talked you through my first brew from a kit, now onto a brew from scratch. I don't have a mash tun and i don't have the room to acquire one to do a full mash brew - though i was able to improvise and do a part mash brew and make the first step towards my dream of making the perfect German style Weiss bier (or hefeweizen). I took my queue from a recipe in a brewing book i have and ill take you step by step how i went through the recipe to produce my brew.

Step 1 - Heat 3 litres of water to 75 degrees Celsius. Then add the Vienna Malt Grains (1.5kg) and the gypsum. I used my wife's Jam making pan which has a large capacity for such an occasion and a sugar thermometer that hung over the edge of the pan would allow me to keep an eye on the temperature of the water so I'd know when to add the grains.

Step 2 - Then bring the temperature of the grain and waters mixture down to 65 degrees Celsius. I found that putting the pan on the smallest ring at the lowest setting on the ring kept it at a nice steady 65 degrees.

Step 3 - Mash the liquid for an hour. I have no idea what happens in a mash tun
but i assumed that keeping the temperature of the mixture for an hour at 65 degrees and covered would do the trick. I found that our largest frying pan would act perfectly as a lid for the pan.

Step 4 - Strain out the grains, pouring the water into a second pot. I achieved this by pouring from the pot through a sieve into the fermenting tub as a temporary storage.

Step 5 - Heat 2 litres of water to 75 degrees and rinses the grains with it. I just boiled my kettle with 2 litres of water in it and after letting go a little bit of the boil, i poured the contents through the grains in the sieve into the liquid already in the fermenting tub.

Step 6 - Add the malt extracts (1.5kg Amber Malt and 1.5kg Wheat Malt) and Hallertauer Hops to the water and boil for 30 mins. I basically cleaned out my jam pot and poured the liquid (wort) from my fermenting tub back into it. Then as with my kit i warmed my cans of malt extract in warm water before opening and pouring the contents into the liquid and measured 42g of my hops on my scales and added, and after raising the temperature of the liquid to a rolling boil before setting a timer for 30mins.

Step 7 - 28 mins into the boil add the Chinook hops (9g)  As above just weighed 9g of hops on my scales before adding to the pot.

Step 8 - Put 8 litres of water into your fermenter and add the hot wort. Top up the water so the volume reaches 23 litres. This is straight forward, there are markings all the way up the fermenting tub to show what the volume is.

Step 9 - when the wort temperature reaches is 25-27 degrees Celsius, pitch the yeast. Cover the mixture and attach the airlock the airlock. The temperature could again be gauged using the sugar thermometer. Pitching the yeast is really just a fancy term for adding it to the mixture. I used a liquid Hefeweizen yeast - this comes chilled and it needs to be removed from the fridge 3 hours or so before adding so it can get up to temperature. The airlock works just by half filling with water and placing in the hole in the lid of the fermenting tub. This shows you the activity in the tub without having to open he lid as bubbles appear to indicate how much fermentation is going on below - no activity means fermentation is over.

Step 10 - Ferment for at least 10 days before transferring and conditioning. I decided to do a secondary fermentation in my barrel after 10 days and then bottle condition. I'm experimenting with bottle conditioning and did my first batch after 4 days in the barrel - 14 days after brew day. This involved adding a little sugar to each bottle before filling with beer from the barrel. Doing it this way should mean i get maximum carbonation rather than losing most of it while bottling as i did with my first brew. I shall do another batch 3 weeks after brew day and then a last batch 4 weeks after brew day. This should determine the optimum fermentation time for the future. The beer will be bottled for at least 2 weeks before drinking.

Early indications from appearance and aroma are that it has all the characteristics of a Weiss bier - which is very encouraging.

Tuesday Home Brewing Update.

Okay, I've decided to do a regular weekly feature on home brewing. It seems to me that there's a real lack of plain talking (no jargon) brewing blogs or help sites out there and it may be useful to anyone interested in brewing to follow the exploits of a complete novice. Especially as i've noticed that there's a lot of snootyness from some brewers on the forums online. I've searched many times online for answers to what i assumed where simple questions, only to be forwarded to forums where someone has asked the same question and either been mocked or been hit with daunting jargon. I'll also be interested to field any questions people may have and even more happy to listen to any advice seasoned brewers may be able to impart.in simple terms,

So as you might've read already, I've started my first home brew adventure by using a simple start-up equipment set i got for christmas from my wife and a golden ale brew kit i ordered from the Wilkinsons sale online. I've been through the fermentation process and my beer is currently, conditioning in my barrel and is a week away from being ready to bottle up and drink.

Out of curiosity, i opened the tap to take a little sample of my beer last night to taste to check on it's progress. I'm not sure if doing this will affect the finished product and that it would be better to leave it alone, but anyway the signs were encouraging. The beer is indeed a nice golden colour and the taste was not too bad - a little bit chemically tasting still (I'm assuming that's because it still needs a week to condition), and a little bit flat but definitely drinkable and definitely beery. Woo hoo - i haven't completely ruined it.

The flatness is something that i expected because i know that co2 needs to be added to the barrel to encourage carbonation but i had no idea how to do that. Sadly, my starter equipment kit, was a little bit lacking in labelling and explaining what each element does. A search online and some reading finally showed me that the little red nozzle thing and silver weighty thing that were in my kit was a tap and gas canister for the very purpose of carbonating my barrel (there being a screw on the barrel lid to attach the tap and canister too). Unfortunately, no instructions were present on how to put the thing together and in playing about before attaching to the barrel - i managed to let the gas out of the canister. I did work out though that it all come together by screwing straight into the barrel lid. What I'm unsure of whether the entire contents of the canister (which is not much to be fair) are to be released into the barrel at once or if it can be done in stages. This is because I've read blogs suggesting that co2 needs to be added at various stages when bottling your beer and also the barrel has a warning not to exceed a certain amount of pressure. It's be annoying to come this far and go gung ho adding co2 and lose the entire batch though an exploding barrel. Good i wish I'd paid attention at science in school.

Anyway, i am visiting the Brew Store at the weekend for a look around and ill pick up another canister then and try the carbonation before bottling on Tuesday - as i feel the beer would be lacking without it. The brew store is the largest shop for home brew equipment and ingredients in Edinburgh and as my hobby takes hold i think it's going to become almost a second home for me. So next week ill be able to let you know how the finished beer pans out. Exciting times.

There's a secondary purpose to my Brew Store visit at the weekend and that is to source ingredients for my first non-kit brew. I've got a brewing book (which my wife also got me at Christmas 2012) with some recipes and that also gives descriptions of the taste characteristics of different malts and hops. So using a Weizen recipe from the book as a base, I've concocted a recipe for a wheat beer that should have a balance of caramel, spice and bitter flavours and that recipe is:

42g Hallertauer Hops - A Bavarian hop, used in many German beer styles. Has a mild spicy flavour and gives a pleasant aroma.

9g Chinook Hops - Piney, Herbal and spicy flavours with hints of grapefruit.

11g Munich Wheat Beer Brewing Yeast

140g Caster Sugar (for conditioning)

1.5kg Wheat Liquid Malt Extract - Well it is a wheat beer

1.35kg Amber Liquid Malt Extract - ~Biscuit, bitter and toasted flavours.

1.35kg Vienna Malts (grain) - Subtle grain flavours and caramel aroma.

1 tbsp Gypsum - Is used for raising the acidity level of the water


The process for this will require a longer fermentation and conditioning period so that beer will be ready 2 months from brew day, instead of the 3 weeks that a kit takes. So in order to keep beer supply constant, i shall be likely getting a second barrel so i can continue making kits while this brew is conditioning.

I'm also currently researching ways of adding different flavours to the beer, such as fruit flavours or I'm interested in perhaps adding a slight aniseedy hint to a beer so something may be added to that recipe in the future to give more depth.

It'll be intriguing to see how it turns out and of course I'll give full details of how i go about the whole brewing process for this - so you can see my mistakes so you can avoid them.