I was given a beer making kit for Christmas and shortly afterwards followed the fairly simple steps to make 20 litres of real ale.
After a couple of weeks in the fermenting bucket and another 4 to bottle condition, it's time to bring in the harvest!
Watching the cricket with a pint of home brew on #beersaturday
Here's how we got to this point!
Step 1 - Sanitisation
First things first, before beginning the brew, you need to get everything clean. I've got myself a sachet of Sodium Percarbonate which should kill anything it comes into contact with. I dumped all of the kit inside the same bucket which i'll be using for fermentation and let it sit for 10mins while I got everything else ready.
Step 2 - Getting the Malt Extract Out
The basic ingredients of any beer are malt, hops, water and yeast. Most beer kits come with the first 2 ingredients mixed into 1 extract that comes in a can or in this case 2 cans.
The malt extract is incredibly sticky! If you've ever tarred a roof then it's on par with that the kind of consistency. Therefore, much like tar, you need to warm it up to work with it. I've put mine in a bowl of just boiled water to soften it up a bit and I can then pour it like syrup making it easier to get out of the cans and less likely to end up on me!
Step 3 - Taking a starting gravity reading
A starting gravity reading will ultimately help you determine what the ABV of your final product is. To do so, you need to tip a bit of your extract and water mix into a tube and then use a hydrometer.
A hydrometer works on Archimedes' principle of buoyancy, floating higher in denser liquids and sinking deeper in less dense liquids.
Your starting brew will have a high gravity because it's full of sugar. Your final product will have a lower density as the yeast breaks down those sugars. By measuring the change between the start and end, you can calculate the ABV.
Step 4 - And then we wait...
The last step is to add the yeast and stick your bucket of unfermented beer in a warm place to ferment.
The exact temperature that you need depends on the type of yeast you are using. For example a lager yeast will ferment at a lower temperature (in fact the German verb to lager means to condition a beer at a cold temperature) while other strains of yeast will need warmer temperatures.
I'm brewing a real ale which needs between 18C to 24C to ferment. You can buy all kinds of paraphernalia to help you achieve these temperatures and maybe I'll invest in this in the future.
However, for this first try I'm bunging my bucket in a cupboard downstairs that has the hot water pipes from our boiler (in the attic) coming down to the radiators and taps. In other words it's a nice small space in the middle of our house with a near constant supply of heat via the warm exposed pipes.
I took a temperature reading when we were out for the day without the heating on in what was pretty cold weather and the cupboard maintained a temperature of 18.5C so I reckon throughout the process it'll be at between 18 to 20C in that space. That is on the lower side so it'll probably take a little longer for the fermentation process to finish.
During the first few days of fermentation the bucket is very noisy as the cardon dioxide the the yeast produces as it breaks down the sugar escapes from the vent in the top.
This is worth considering when choosing a location to store the brew because you're essentially gonna have a big farting bucket in your house for several days!
Step 5 - Bottling up
It's important to make sure that the fermentation process is finished before you transfer the brew into bottles.
Why?
Well remember all that gas that was escaping from your bucket with a vent. Imagine what will happen when it can't easily escape from a sealed bottle...
To make sure the fermentation is finished you can observe a few tell tale signs i.e. it's not still farting like a bastard, but ultimately you want to take another couple of gravity readings over consecutive days. No change? Then it's stopped or close enough to stopping to put into bottles.
The readings will of course also give you a finished ABV. My readings suggest this ale is around 3.8% ABV. I was aiming for a bit higher than this (4%+) but being at the cooler end of the temperature range makes that harder to achieve.
I happened upon the glass bottles on a trip to Ikea and then picked up a couple of dozen plastic ones from the local brew shop
Again when it comes to bottling up, you want to make sure everything is clean and sterilized otherwise you're getting beer and who knows what else in that bottle.
Another nice bit science at work here as you use fluid dynamics to siphon the beer from the bucket (at a higher level) than your bottles (lower level). No need for a pump, just give the the pipe a bit of a suck with your mouth and the beer starts to flow!
Within each bottle I'm putting a carbonation drop which is basically a bit more sugar. The yeast in the beer is still very much alive so it'll begin working to break this down and (in a controlled manner) produce the CO2 necessary to give by beer a head.
C02 is also useful in keeping the beer fresh. By contrast, oxygen is your enemy. You need to get the beer out of the bucket and into the bottles as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Step 5 - Bottle conditioning
Then it's a case of waiting again.
I tried my first bottle after about 2 weeks and while it was drinkable it still had quite a sweet after taste suggesting not all the sugar had been broken down. It also had some 'greener' tones generally caused by the presence of acetaldehyde a natural by product of the yeast.
I've read on some forums that the general rule of home brew is that the last bottle is the best bottle i.e. leave it to condition as long as possible!
Perhaps by luck (or not) I then got a bit of a chest infection and was on a short course of antibiotics. No alcohol of me for a week.
As I don't tend to drink midweek anyway, it meant the beer sat for another fortnight before I tried it again and this time it was significantly better! No sweet after taste, no green tones just a nice easy drinking real ale.
As a first try, I'm more than satisfied with the end product and took myself off to the local home brew shop (I'm lucky to have one 5mins drive away which has a huge range of kits) to buy the next kit.
This time I'll be trying a European style lager (see above for easier brewing in colder conditions) which will hopefully be ready by the time we get some warmer Spring weather.
I prefer drinking ales and stouts in the winer and lagers and ciders in the summer. I've also seen a couple of youtube videos with people brewing cider using shop brought apple juice so I might give that a go after the lager.
Ultimately, if the first few easy brews are successful I'll consider doing a bit more experimentation with some mini-mashes which would involve using real malt and hops to add more flavour and character to the beer. Watch this space...