Beer Craft: A Simple Guide to Making Great Beer - Softcover

Bostwick, William; Rymill, Jessi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605291331 ISBN 13: 9781605291338

Publisher: Rodale Books, 2011

Synopsis

Six easy steps to making world-class beer in your kitchen! Beer Craft by William Bostwick and Jessi Rymill is your guide to drinking the best beer you've ever tasted—by making it yourself. This kitchen manual has everything you need to turn your stove into a small-batch, artisanal brewery. Hone your craft by perfecting the basic beer styles, or go wild with specialty techniques like barrel-aging and brewing with fruit. Beer Craft is the ultimate modern homebrewing resource, simple and clear but packed with enough information to satisfy anyone making their first, or four-hundredth, beer.

· Master simple stovetop recipes for all your favorite styles, from pale ales and barleywines to fruit and sour beers
· Flavor your beer with spices, special grains, and a pantry full of deliciously unexpected extras like coffee, chocolate, and homegrown hops
· Create labels and bottle caps for your home brewery, and get inspired by retro designs of beers gone by
· Get pro tips on advanced techniques like barrel-aging and wild bacteria from interviews with brewers at Rogue, Sierra Nevada, Stone, and more of today's best craft breweries
· Learn facts from beer history, like recipes for ancient bog-myrtle and heather beers, the story of the great London beer flood of 1814, and even brewing advice from Thomas Jefferson

About this title

About the Author

WILLIAM BOSTWICK is a writer and beer critic. He likes brewing old-school styles like heather beers (but understands why some of them have gone extinct).

JESSI RYMILL is a designer and editor. She collects labels and bottle caps and wonders why the beers with the weirdest designs usually taste the best. Together, they live, work, and brew in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

LEARN

BREWING STEPS AND INGREDIENTS

WHAT'S IN YOUR GLASS

Beer has only four ingredients--which means it's easy to make, and easy to make it your own. Just by changing the types of those ingredients, and their ratio, you can brew pretty much every beer style there's a name for-- and even some there isn't. Beyond these basic components, everything about beer is up for grabs, so have fun!

Water and grain, mixed with some sort of spice, and fermented by yeast: That's all beer is. Of course, the choice of grains, spices (hops, mostly), yeast, and, yes, even water, make all the difference--but we'll get to that later. First, let's go over the basic beer-making process.

Yeast turns sugars into alcohol, and in beer, those sugars come from barley. Brewers steep barley in hot water to make a sort of sweet, grainy tea called wort (pronounced "wert"). Different kinds of barley make the wort darker or lighter, sweeter or toastier. Brewers will then boil the wort and balance some of its sweetness by adding bitter, aromatic spices-- almost always hops, though in the past, brewers used dozens more, and you can too. Hops need to be boiled to release their flavors.

Once the hopped wort cools down and brewers add yeast to it, their job is basically done. The yeast takes over, eating the sugars from the malted barley and producing alcohol and carbon dioxide in a process called fermentation. This can take a while, but when the yeast stops working, wort has turned into beer, ready to bottle, cap, and enjoy. In this chapter, we'll go over those steps in more detail, then talk about the different kinds of ingredients you can use, and how to combine them to make great- tasting homebrew.

YOUR OVERVIEW OF SIX BASIC BREW STEPS

BREWING BASICS

Clear off the kitchen stove and follow these six basic steps to your first batch of homemade beer. The following pages will go over each step in more detail, and there's a full equipment list on page 160. Consider this an overview, and a handy reference to flip back to when things get a little more complicated. Get to know this simple process, and you'll be bottling our recipes--or inventing your own--in no time.

1 MASH

Beer starts as a sugary, grain-flavored tea called wort. Make your wort by filling a mesh bag with malted grains and steeping it in hot water for an hour. You're converting starches in the grains into fermentable sugars that yeast will be able to digest into alcohol. This is called mashing.

2 SPARGE

Sparging, or rinsing your grains with hot water, extracts every last drop of sugary wort. Lift your grain bag out of the stock-pot, let it drain, and dunk it in a second pot of hot water to rinse it. Then mix this water in with your wort.

3 BOIL

Hops balance wort's malty sweetness. The longer they're boiled in wort, the more bitter they'll make the beer. Typically, you'll add hops three times during an hour-long boil, for bitterness, flavor, and aroma.

4 CHILL

Chill your wort down to room temperature to make it a safe new home for yeast. Most beer yeasts will quit working--or even die-above 80°F and will hibernate below 60°F. Make sure everything that touches your beer from this point forward is sanitized!

5 FERMENT

It's time to put your yeast to work. Strain the chilled wort into your fermenter. Add your yeast and plug the fermenter with the stopper and tube, submerging the other end of the tube in a bowl of sanitizer. This will catch foam that will spew out when the yeast starts working. After a day, replace the tube with an airlock and wait.

6 BOTTLE

Yeast creates carbon dioxide as well as alcohol, and will naturally pressurize your bottles. Siphon your beer into a stockpot, leaving any sediment behind, and mix in a corn sugar solution. Siphon the sugared beer into bottles, cap them, and let them sit for 1 week. Then label, refrigerate, and enjoy!

LEARN: BREWING STEPS

FIRST THING

CLEAN AND SANITIZE FIRST TIMING

INGREDIENTS

Water Sanitizer

EQUIPMENT

Large bucket or tub Spray bottle

This is the most important part of making great beer. You can fudge the other steps, but whatever you do, don't skip this one. Seriously! No matter how vigorously you scrub those counter-tops, your kitchen is crawling with food-loving bacteria. Your kitchen is also your brewery, and unluckily for you, there are few things those bacteria crave more than jumping into a warm bath of sugary wort. When brewing, you want your yeast to work alone.

After your beer has been boiled, keep it safe by SANITIZING EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES. Sanitizing before then is overkill--even to us--since boiling will kill anything that managed to survive up to that point. This means that your strainer, funnel, fermenter, airlock, tubing, and--when it's time-- bottles and caps, should be clean and sanitary.

By SANITARY, we don't mean sterile--you're a brewer, not a chemist--so you can get what you need to treat your equipment at any homebrew shop or drugstore. Mix up a bucketful of solution (see chart at right) and soak everything in it. It helps to have a spray bottle of solution on hand, just in case anything needs a last-minute spritz.

Star-San, an acid blend, is probably the easiest sanitizer to use, since you don't need to rinse it off. Professional brewers use iodine because it's cheap to buy in bulk, but plain old bleach works, too, as long as you rinse well.

WHAT TO SANITIZE

CHILL STEP

Stockpot lid, thermometer, strainer, metal spoon, funnel, fermenter

FERMENT STEP

Blow-off tube, rubber stopper, airlock, turkey baster, hydrometer and tube

BOTTLE STEP

Bottling pot, tubing, racking cane, bottles, caps

|TYPE |BRAND NAMES |AMT. PER GAL. WATER |CONTACT |RINSE | |Acid |Star-San, |1 tsp |30 sec |NO | | |Sani-Clean | | | | |Iodine |Iodophor, IO-Star |1/2 tsp |1 min |NO | |Chlorine|Clorox bleach |1 tbsp |20 min |YES |

A HOMEBREWER'S BEST FRIEND

The two most annoying things about homebrewing are peeling labels off of old bottles to reuse as your own, and cleaning out dead yeast gunk from your fermenter. Not so with Oxy-Clean. Fill a big bucket, your sink, or even a bathtub, with hot water and add a scoop. Soak your bottles for 15 minutes and their labels will slide right off. Dunk a fermenter in the bucket, and use a stiff nylon brush, or a bent toothbrush, to clean the hard-to-reach curve just below its neck.

1 MASH

INGREDIENTS

Grains Water

EQUIPMENT

Stockpot, at least 3-gallon Stockpot, at least 2-gallon, with lid Fine-mesh grain bag Kitchen scale* Measuring cup Wooden spoon Thermometer Timer

SEE ALSO

Water, page 48 Malt, page 50 Equipment, page 160

*If you don't own a kitchen scale, you can measure your grains by volume. See Grains by Volume, inside front cover.

MASHING grains in hot water turns their inedible starches into a sugary banquet for beer yeast. How much grain and water you'll use, and how hot you'll steep, are determined by what beer you're making and by the behavior of enzymes in the malt. But in essence, mashing is as simple as making tea.

Start with the water. Pour 2 quarts water per £d of grain into the smaller of your two stockpots. Heat the water in your mash pot to 163°F (or the temperature specified by your recipe), then turn off the burner. This is called STRIKE WATER.

Weigh out your grains, pour them into a mesh GRAIN BAG, and sink it in the strike water. (The mesh bag will make it easy to strain out the grains later.) Fit the mouth of the bag around the lip of the pot, so it stays open but doesn't fall in, and stir the grains until they're thoroughly soaked and submerged, breaking up any dough balls that form.

The MASH temperature should drop about 10°F once you stir in all the grains. A mash temperature of 153°F is ideal, but some beer styles benefit from mashing hotter (up to 158°F) or cooler (down to 140°F). (See HEAT AND ENZYMES, at right.)

Now put a lid on the mash and wait. You'll hold this temperature for about 1 hour to give the enzymes time to work. (Some kinds of malts, called under- modified malts, have slower-moving enzymes, and these take a bit longer to mash. Most malts you'll find these days are fast-acting and well modified, so don't worry.)

Making a DOUBLE BOILER is a perfect way to keep a steady mash temperature-- just float the covered mash pot inside a larger stockpot filled with an insulating layer of 153°F water (or whatever temperature you want your mash to be). If you don't have a second stockpot big enough, you can mash in just one stockpot. Keep a closer eye on the mash temperature and turn on the burner when needed.

Check the temperature of the mash every 15 minutes, and record it in your brew log (see page 164). After an hour, it's time to sparge.

HEAT AND ENZYMES

Enzymes are the machines that turn starches into sugars in a process called saccharification. Different enzymes work best at different temperatures, and produce different-tasting beers. Alpha-amylase, for example, converts long-chain starches into sugar molecules called dextrins. Beer yeast can't ferment dextrins, so they remain in the finished beer, making it rich and sweet. Alpha-amylase likes a warmer mash. Beta-amylase, on the other hand, operates at cooler temperatures, and converts starches into easily fermentable sugars like maltose, which makes for a crisper, drier beer. Adjusting your mash temperature will affect your final beer, but only to a point. Enzyme activity shuts down below 140°F and above 158°F, so always keep your mash between those bookends.

2 SPARGE

INGREDIENTS

Mashed grains Water

EQUIPMENT

Stockpot, at least 3-gallon Stockpot, at least 2-gallon Fine-mesh grain bag Measuring cup Thermometer

SEE ALSO

Equipment, page 160

When your mash is finished, it's time to collect your WORT. This is what brewers call the sweet grain tea--a kind of proto-beer--that remains after you remove your spent grains. Since all your grain is in a mesh bag, this is as easy as lifting the grain bag out of the mash pot and letting the wort drain back in. Be patient and don't squeeze, or you'll extract bitter tannins from the grain husks. (If your pot has a pasta insert, you can rest your grain bag inside it for about 5 minutes to drain.)

On average, grains in a mash soak up 1/2 quart of water per £d, so if you mashed 3 £ds of grain in 6 quarts of water, you'll drain off about 4 1/2 quarts of wort. This wort is called the FIRST RUNNINGS. It's super sugary and very dark.

If you grab a few grains out of the drained bag and chew them, you'll notice they're still a little sweet. You want to get every bit of sugar out of the grains and into your beer to give your yeast as much food as possible, so after you drain the first runnings, you'll rinse the grains in SPARGE WATER.

SPARGE means "to sprinkle," and in professional breweries and large-scale homebrew setups, that's literally what happens--a hose sprays warm water over the mashed grains; the water trickles through and is collected as wort.

All you need to do, though, is dunk your grain bag in a pot of fresh hot water for a few minutes, then mix those SECOND RUNNINGS in with the first. If you mashed in a double boiler, just use your big insulating pot. You'll have to add more water to it, though.

You need to collect 2 gallons (8 quarts) of wort total before you boil because in an hour of boiling about a gallon of wort will evaporate. So measure your first runnings, then use enough sparge water to bring the total volume up to 2 gallons.

Add the sparge water to a second stockpot and heat it to 165°F. (Be careful not to go hotter, or you'll leach out astringent tannins.) Sink your grain bag, slosh it around a bit, but try not to squeeze. Let it soak for 15 minutes, then drain as before. Combine this water with the first runnings in the smaller of your two stockpots, and you're ready to boil.

SPARGING BIGGER BEERS

The amount of wort you'll collect from your first and second runnings--and what you'll do with it--changes slightly if you're brewing bigger beers. Barleywines and strong abbey beers need to be boiled longer than the usual hour (up to 90 minutes or more). This concentrates the wort, making the final beer stronger, and the more intense heat caramelizes some of the sugars, adding complexity. Some breweries will make a strong beer from the first runnings alone, and a weaker "small beer" from the second runnings. But in 1-gallon batches, it's easier to stick with a longer boil. Because more wort will evaporate during a longer boil, you'll need to collect more wort to begin with--2 1/2 gallons, at least--so use more sparge water.

3 BOIL

INGREDIENTS

Wort Hops

EQUIPMENT

Stockpot, at least 2-gallon, with lid Gram scale* Timer Large metal spoon

SEE ALSO

Hops, page 58 Equipment, page 160

*If you don't own a gram scale, you can measure your hops by area. See Hops by Area, inside front cover.

You should now have a stockpot filled with 2 gallons of wort. This will serve as your BREW KETTLE. (If your brew kettle is filled to the brim, you might want to start your boil in the larger stockpot--then transfer it to the smaller one after about 30 minutes--to avoid a boil-over.)

Turn on the heat and bring the wort to a vigorous boil. BOILING your wort sanitizes it, concentrates its sugars, smooths out its body by coagulating proteins from the grains, and lets you flavor your beer with hops or other spices, since the heat extracts their bitter acids and aromatic oils.

On average, the boil will take 1 hour and you'll add hops at three different points.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rodale Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1605291331
• ISBN 13: 9781605291338
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176