Adventures in Brewing

As many folks know, Chris and I have been home brewers of beer for the past four years, and we’ve convinced several of our friends to start their home brewing adventures as well.

Mmmmm…cookies.

We recently put together a batch of our Belgian tripel recipe, and I wanted to share it on the blog.* While some home brewers brew with whole grain, so far, we’ve stuck to using malt extract, which is a short-cut method that doesn’t involve as much time or equipment expense.**  We normally find a recipe online (you can just search for “home brew tripel recipe” or whatever type of beer you’d like to make), then head to our local home brew shop, What Ale’s Ya, to pick up ingredients and supplies.  When we started out brewing, we began with the ingredient kits that sell everything you could need, but since then, we’ve branched out into buying ingredients separately, so we can customize a bit more.

We’ve made the tripel once before, and it turned out really well, so wanted to replicate our success.  The bill for the ingredients was on the higher side - $75 – and we ended up with liquid and dry malt extract, hops, yeast, candy sugar (a normal addition to this style of beer), and crushed grain.  We also purchased six gallons of spring water and a few bags of ice at the grocery store.

Hoppage!

For this recipe, we made a yeast starter the night before, which consisted of combining some of the malt extract with the vial of yeast and some water, stirring them around, and letting them sit overnight.  The day before, we also threw three of the gallon jugs of water into the fridge, so they’re cold for the next day.

Yeasty goodness!

Brew day starts with sanitizing everything that will come into contact with the beer.  This includes things like stirring spoons, thermometers and hydrometers (for measuring the gravity of the beer, which will eventually give us the Alcohol By Volume), the brewing kettle (a 22 quart stainless steel pot), the primary fermentation vessel (a food-grade 6 gallon bucket), and everything else we might need.

Let’s get sanitary!  In the bathroom!

After placing the loose grain in a grain sock, the sock is steeped in slowly warming water in the brew kettle, almost like a bag of tea.  What it produces even kind of looks like tea:

Compression tights are essential to proper brewing.

Is it tea you’re looking for?

Each recipe varies a bit after that, but eventually, the brew kettle is brought to a boil, and the malt extract is added in (some, all at once, but for other recipes, the malt extract is added in different sections throughout the boil).  Hops are then added to the boil at different stages, depending on what variety of hops is being used and how bitter you want the beer to be (our tripel isn’t very bitter, but other types, like India Pale Ales – IPAs – have massive hop bills). Hops grow in cone formations, but most home brewers use compressed hop pellets like the ones here:

Yes, kind of like bunny poo.  I mean food.  Bunny food.

The tripel has a few other add-ins, including candy sugar and spices (we add cloves, cinnamon, and other spices to ours), so those go in the boil, too.  Once the boil is done (this generally lasts about an hour), you have wort, which needs to be cooled down to a reasonable temperature.  There are various methods for doing this, but we use the time honored “fill a sink with ice and plunk the brew kettle inside until it stops steaming” process.

Everyone needs an ice bath now and then.

Once the wort is the right temperature, it’s poured into the primary fermenter bucket, the rest of the cold water is poured in to bring it up to five gallons total, and then the yeast is added.  Everything is sealed up, and an airlock is added to the top of the bucket, to allow the carbon dioxide from the yeast to escape.***

Since a fermenting batch of beer needs to be kept between 68-72 degrees****, we’ve constructed an evaporative cooling system for our fermenting beer.  Sounds fancy, right?  Not totally.  We have a plastic Rubbermaid container filled with water hooked up to a fountain pump, and the ceiling fan blows cold air onto the apparatus.  The pump circulates the cold water through a hose that dumps the water onto a towel rigged on the outside of the fermenter.  It’s not the cutest thing ever, but it works.

Many beers are fermented twice, once in the primary fermenter for about a week or so (or until the airlock stops bubbling, meaning the yeast has stopped its work); after that, beers that need more time before bottling are moved to a secondary fermentation device.  In our case, this is a 6 gallon glass carboy.  The tripel spent a week and a day in primary, and then almost three weeks in the secondary vessel.

Keeping things under wraps

Once fermentation is done, the beer moves to the bottling stage.  Some folks purchase equipment to keg their beer, but we like to give a lot of ours away to friends and family, so we prefer bottling; it’s also easier for us to store this way.  We sanitize the bottles in our dishwasher (essentially, an at-home autoclave), and transfer the beer to a bottling bucket (also a 6 gallon food-grade bucket but this time with a spout.  Oooh, a spout!).  We also add some bottling sugar, which is boiled with 2 cups of water for a few minutes until it dissolves. 

Chris generally fills the bottles…

…while I cap them and get them into boxes to be stored in a cool, dark place until they’re properly conditioned.  In our house, this is inside the wine fridge.

Capped!  Toes!

Wait, you’re not wine!

After a few weeks of conditioning (during which it carbonates in the bottles), the beer is ready to drink!

Salut!

Amy

* Not that there aren’t a million how-to-home-brew blogs out there with far more informational content on them than this.  But do they come with this sort of snarky commentary?  Yeah, I think not.

** My boss at work calls it brewing “cheater beer.”  He’s a hipster.  What can you do?

*** Essentially, the yeast “eats” what’s in the wort and excretes CO₂ – carbon dioxide.  Some of it bubbles up through the airlock, which is filled with sanitizer.  This allows the excess gas to escape safely without anything falling into the beer.

**** For an ale-style beer.  Lager-style beers like Budweiser, Corona, and the like have a different type of yeast that needs to be fermented at cooler temperatures.  Since it’s hard to even maintain 72 degrees in the middle of the damn desert, we don’t do many lager-style beers.