Brewing day 3 - Tuesday - erm, brew!

No blogging yesterday because brewing really is something that takes all day - at least with the equipment I've got at the moment. I started yesterday at 9.00 in the morning and ended up pitching the yeast (as they call it) at 10.00 at night! Most of the time at the end was spent cooling the boiled beer* down to a temperature at which you can add the yeast. I might look into quicker ways of doing this for the future..

*One thing I've learned recently is that once you've added the hops (see below), you call the liquid you've got in your bucket 'beer' as opposed to 'wort'. So there you go.

I took a few pictures as the day went on and thought I'd post them up here for posterity. The first, at the top of the post, is of my most random Heath-Robinson type equipment. Constructed from a butchered sleeping bag and a load of bubble wrap of various sizes that we acquired while moving house, the insulating jacket is the most outre thing I use. It looks rather like some cut price Doctor Who alien - but it kept my mash at a nice steady temperature, allowing all that crushed grain to release its sugars (hopefully!) which will then ferment to alcohol. It's a nice moment, when the hot water's in the mash tun and you tip in the carefully weighed grains. For the recipe I'm following, the majority was Maris Otter pale malt, with some crystal malt (kilned slightly darker for body) and a little black malt (for colour). I was a little disconcerted by the flaked maize (cornflakes!) recommended as a replacement for the maltose syrup in the recipe - so time will tell whether this has worked or not. It all makes a great smell when it's tipped in and stirred into the water (or liquor). Those with sharp eyes will make out a stain on the bathtowel - which is from a near disaster when a tap started to leak. Fortunately I could replace the original bucket with a more reliable one before too much was lost. And hopefully it won't affect the end product..


This steeping produces, after a couple of hours or so, the 'wort' which will be boiled up for another couple of hours, with the hops, to produce the pre-fermentation beer. The mash tun contents are run off through the tap at the bottom, while all the grots from the grist are held back by the perforated false bottom within, into another container (the second pic above). What you're left with then is a dark, malty liquid which smells delicious. Sadly I don't have the equipment at the moment to then 'sparge' the grain left behind in the mash tun (basically, very hot water sprinkled gently on the grain bed to rinse more sugars out). What I do is a more primitive 'batch sparge' or re-mashing - topping up the mash tun with hot water, letting it settle and then running it off. I did this 5 times or so to get a good amount of wort for the boil. Pretty time consuming!

The boil is next - into the boiler, the hops thrown in as it starts to boil (the final picture is of the hops weighed out - working with leaf hops is one of the things that makes this such fun), lid on and boiled for 2 hours. This recipe uses three types of hop. Bramlings and Fuggles go in at the beginning of the boil; and East Kent Goldings a quarter of an hour before the end.

When the boil's finished, the mash tun turns into a 'hopback' - the beer is first bailed than poured from the boiler into the hopback, so that it can be filtered leaving the hops and other grots behind. Or as much as possible anyway! Then comes the worst bit - cooling it down. I really need to find something to make this easier and take less time. It's quite a relaxing job in itself - standing the bucket of beer in a container with cold water, stirring it, taking the temperature and measuring its gravity with the hydrometer. But it just takes so long - and all that time there's the danger of something nasty getting into it. Also, I've read that apparently if you cool it down quickly, some of the stuff that makes it cloudy can be precipitated out of it.

Anyway, by my inefficient methods, the beer finally got down to around 25c, at which point I aerated it, getting the oxygen into solution for the yeast to work on by pouring it from one bin to another, slowly through the tap. Then a final check of the temperature (around 22c) and in went the yeast, a quick stir and upstairs into the airing cupboard, which keeps a nice steady temperature between 22c and 24c, fingers duly crossed that the magic of fermentation would start soon....