Brew Your Own Beer
(Page 2 of 5)
October/November 2008
By Nathan Poell
Speaking of which, you’ll also need airlocks and rubber stoppers. When I was a kid and my grandpa made wine, he put a balloon over the top of the fermenter. It made a comical sight when filled up with carbon dioxide. You could conceivably put a balloon on a glass carboy, but it wouldn’t stay there long given the vigorous fermentation involved with beer making. Better to use purpose-made airlocks and/or rubber stoppers to allow off-gassing while preventing bacteria and wild yeasts from finding their way into your precious brew.
RELATED CONTENT
SUN BREWED TEA May/June 1979
Spring and summer are the seasons
fo r....
...
This easy-to-make beer bread recipe can be baked to perfection in a Dutch oven. From the October/No...
A guide to brewing beer at home, including the formula, stirring and clearing, materials and cost l...
Brewing home beverages, sarsaparilla, including recipes for syrup, making extract from fruit....
Food-grade plastic hose. This is necessary to transport the fermented beer from vessel to vessel without allowing it to oxidize. It is typically clear and sold at all reputable homebrew shops. Be sure the hose is of a diameter that will fit on the spigot of your fermentation vessels (if yours has a spigot). You’ll need at least two lengths of hose that are 2 or more feet in length and one that is about 12 inches.
Bottles and/or jugs with caps/lids. You’re going to have to put your finished beer into something, after all. I keg now, but I used to prefer to bottle in half-gallon growler jugs like you’d get from a brew pub. Most beginning brewers decide to bottle their finished beer in 12- or 22-ounce bottles. To bottle up a 5 gallon batch, you’ll need about 53 12-ounce bottles or about 29 22-ounce bottles. Also, if you decide to bottle in 12- or 22-ounce bottles, you’ll need a capper to attach the caps to filled bottles. It’s especially convenient to use swing top bottles. These type of bottles are used by the Grolsch and Fischer breweries and some high-end French lemonade bottlers, so you may be able to find some to reuse.
Sanitizing liquid. Wild yeasts and bacteria are hardy microbes, and it is simply not worth going to the trouble to brew if you’re going to ferment and bottle your beer in unsanitary containers. One of the better sanitization methods is to use a non-bleach, no-rinse sanitizer such as StarSan or iodophor (available at homebrew stores) in your fermentation vessel, then reuse the same solution to sanitize your bottles or jugs.
Your local homebrew shop may have a “beginner’s kit” available for sale. These will include almost everything listed here, but double-check to make sure everything is present! There’s nothing worse than brewing up a batch of beer only to find out you have no way of transporting it to another vessel or bottling it.
The Basic Process
There are a few generally accepted methods of brewing beer: extract only, extract with specialty grains, partial mash and all-grain. In this case, we’ll be using extract with specialty grains. This means that we’ll steep some specialty grains for a bit to extract a little sugar and flavor from them, then add malt extract — freeze-dried maltose and other sugars and solids extracted from barley — as the main source of sugar (which the yeast that we’ll add later love to eat and turn into alcohol and carbon dioxide).
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
Next >>
