Brew Day Walkthrough Guide

On this page I'll take you step by step through the Brew Day itself. One caveat before I launch into it, the following illustrates how I personally brew. I guess everyone everyone has their own way of doing things, but this should serve to illustrate the at least the principal of brewing your own beer, to be adapted by the individual as they see fit.

This guide will detail the "all grain" brewing processes. Grain brewing allows for control over flavour, colour, teture, strength and taste and will provide the platorm to start creating your own ale recipes, based on your own experience. Alternatively "Kit" brewing, where the wort is provided in the form of a tin of condensed extract, is more straight-forward and will come with perfectly good instructions that, if followed fairly closely, will produce a decent enough pint. It will, though, be limited to whatever the manufacturer puts in the condensed extract leaving you little chance to change it other than with perhaps "dry hopping" (adding hops to the fermentation). 

Preparation
It's a good idea when first starting out to prepare as much in advance as possible, to avoid timing issues during the day. Sanitising equipment the night before for example will save you some time in the morning, as will weighing out the grain and hops to be used in the brew.

As an aside, it would be a good idea to check your containers for true values if they are marked with values up the side, or to make some marks if they haven't. I used a meauring jug to fill up the containers in stages and mark off in 5L increments (which took a while - need a bigger jug). While you are at it, measure the "dead space" in the bottom of all the containers that will be lost when transferring brew about. This will be what's left underneath the tap in the boiler and mash tun, and the FV for that matter, but that's not so important for the brew.

1. Sanitise!

First off then, sanitise ALL equipment, this includes everything thay will come into contact with the end product wort, so spoons, jars, jugs, boilers, FV, mash tun, hydrometer, the lot. Boiling will do a good job of killing off anything that will turn your beer bad but it is just good sense to sterilise everything that will be used up to that point too as well. Again, this is especially true of the equipment to be used after the boil, which will have sterilised all that has gone before.

2. Heat on

Check the tap is closed on your HLT, or boiler if you have just the one, fill to 25L and switch it on. At the same time hydrate the 5g Irish Moss by putting it in some warm water in a cup or glass or similar. Crush up a Campden tablet and put in the water in the HLT. I have made this bold in case, like me, you are notorious for not reading the last line of a paragraph. In my return from haitus brew #13, I read this guide I'd handily written for myself 10 years earlier, but managed to miss the campden tablet part completely. 

3. Grain Bill

Weigh out the grain as per recipe and throw it all in an FV, then mix it up thoroughly. Depending on what you're brewing you'll have more or less of the specialty grains and base malt but making 20L of standard strength ale will all fit in an FV, usually being between 4 and 6kg in total.

4. Hops

Weigh out the hops as per recipe, stick them in separate containers and label them. Doesnt have to be in cyrillic script, just so you know what's in what. Hops can be stored once opened in a freezer and will keep for several months. My cascades had been in there about 6 months, I think, and were perfectly usable.

5. Dough in

When your HLT reaches 76 degrees C, check the tap on mash tun and fill it with 2.5 ratio of liquor to grain. This is simply, in the case of the Director's recipe, 3.84kg x 2.5 = 9.6L. This is where having the clearly demarkated HLT pays off. Why76 degrees you may be wondering? This is 10 degrees C higher than our required mash temperature, 10 degrees which will be lost when the water hits the mash tun. This is known as the "strike temperature". Some people pre-heat the mash tun by boiling a kettle of water and putting it in the tun for a few minutes before emptying it out again ready for the liquor. A good habit to get into as I have personally found it helps keep the temperature over the duration of the mash, if it starts off warm. Add the grain slowly, stirring all the while, to ensure even temperature all round the tun (this step is known as "doughing in". Take a quick temperature reading before sealing the tun lid to make sure you are at the required temperature. If you are a little out with the temperature, add cold water or more hot from the HLT until it's right, and make a note for next time to adjust the temperature in the HLT accordingly. A little extra than 2.5x liquor won't change the mash outcome too much - the temperature is more important. Wrap some old duvets or blankets around the tun if you have any to help keep that heat in. If you don't have a second boiler, now would be a good time to clean out and sanitise your FV as you will need it to hold your wort while you use your boiler to sparge.

6. Sparge preperation

60 mins into the 90 minute mash, re-fill and heat the HLT to 85 degrees C in preperation for sparge - I usually fill mine to 25L again to supply enough liquor to sparge and top up the wort if necessary, which will be explained later. 85 degrees is the temperature, adjusted for loss of heat when hitting the tank, that is hot enough to stop enzyme action, but not so hot as to start extracting tannins that are soluble at the higher temperatures - these would give an astringent taste to the finished ale. At 90 minutes, you're ready to start sparging. Take the blankets etc. and lid off the mash tun and take another quick temperature reading. If more than a degree or two has been lost, you might need to look at insulating the mash tun better. Some cool-box mash tuns have a lot of space in the lid, which can be filled with polystyrene to help with insulation.

7. Sparge!

This is where it get's interesting! Take some tin foil and place it over the top of the grain, piercing it with lots of holes all over. This is to ensure that liquor from the HLT descends evenly through the grain and there that aren't any channels that the liquor will go down, avoiding the rest of the grain. In my setup I have the HLT ready to add water to one side of the mash tun, so I cover that side with more foil to avoid channeling at that side.

The HLT comes into play later though. First you need to clear as much of the "bits" that will be in the grain, by collecting in your pyrex jug what is now the wort from the mash tun tap (known as the "first runnings"), slowly, and returning it to the foil on top of the grain bed. This will drag the bits down the grain bed, clearing the wort. You are looking for as much clarity in the wort as possible, so this may take a few litres to get clearer. Don't get too obsessed with clarity though, as I've spent a lot of time on this stage before now with very limited difference to the final outcome.

When it's as clear as it's going to be, grab your second boiler, or your sanitised grain FV, and put it under the mash tun. Start to run the sparge water into the mash tun, ensuring that the grain bed (and foil of course) is covered by a couple of inches of water at all times, and open up that mash tun tap again. Let the wort run out at about a litre a minute into the FV/boiler. along the way, make sure you regularly do the following:

a) check the gravity by collecting the wort in your test jar and dropping the hydrometer in. Spin the hydrometer to remove bubbles from it and keep it clear of the side of the jar. The level to read is explained very well in the image below:

b) check the grain bed is covered by those couple of inches of water!

When your hydrometer reads .990 it's time to stop sparging. This is because those pesky tannins, again, can start to be extracted below this number, which is a temperature corrected 1.008. It's a good idea to make sure there's as little splash in the boiler/FV as possible when sparging, as "hot side aeration" ( which can increase the concentration of oxidized fatty acids, shortening the shelf life of the beer) can occur. I used to do this at first but I forgot once, with no appreciable effect on the brew but I may have got lucky. So, if it's possible, you might want to tilt the FV/boiler to allow the wort to run down the side of the boiler/FV, to avoid splashing.
 
8. The Boil

Check what you have in the boiler/FV now. If you have 20L or more, great. If not, you just need to add some more liquor from the HLT. I personally like to play it close to the mark and fill to as near the top of my boiler as I dare, so that I've got a good 20L or more at the end of the boil for fermenting! Even then, I add more HLT water if it drops too low.

When you are happy with what you have got, empty the HLT and transfer the wort to it for boiling, or simply switch on the boiler if you are using your second one. If you used your only FV, sanitise it again ready to receive the boiled wort. When the wort in the boiler hits a rolling boil, which can be around 98 degrees, start timing for the boil (the duration of which is dicated by the recipe) and add the start of boil hops. As you go along add any hops that are required during the boil. 15 minutes from the end, add the Irish Moss, which will be a sludgy cabbagy type affair by now, and stick the chiller into the boiler to sterilise it for the remainder of the boil. DON'T SWITCH IT ON YET!

9. Flame Out

At the end of the boil add any post-boil hops and switch off  your boiler. Immediately, switch on the chiller and wait for the temperature drop down to 20-25 degrees C. This should take about 20-30 minutes but no great shakes if it takes a little longer, but the quicker the better.

10. FV

At 20-25 degrees C or so (but certainly no higher than 28 degrees C, which can kill the yeast!), transfer the wort to your FV with as much splash as possible this time. Aerate the wort by taking your long spoon and stirring, nay thrashing, the wort until it begs for mercy, then pitch your yeast (which is the brewing term for, in our case, emptying the sachet into the wort). Take another gravity reading at this point, for use in calculating your ABV after fermentation, then put the lid on and leave it.

11. Fermentation

Your ale will now ferment away in the FV. If you have an airlock you can use it to see whether the fermentation has finished, when no more bubbles go through it. Another way is to check the gravity and, when it is the same for 2-3 days in a row, it's finished. It can be left for 3 weeks or longer but I tend to leave mine no less than 10 days and no more than 14. In my oppinion this gives it plenty of time to clear but not too long to risk infection.

12. Bottle or Keg

Bottling/Kegging is another subject on it's own, which I will happily share in another section.

Thanks to this post on The Home Brew Forum for providing the inspiration, and much of the detail, for this page!