Filling in the gaps

Reading over my series of entries about my first batch I realized that I may have glossed over or not mentioned some things that I will try and fill in with this entry.


First thing is cleanliness, keeping all your equipment and bottles clean is very important. Dirty equipment can cause foul flavors, wild fermentation, or poor function of equipment. The latter is not so much an issue at this point as it will be when I get in to all grain brewing.

When I purchased my brew equipment one of the things that came with it was a cleaning product call BLC (beer line cleaner) and it works fairly well. However over time experimenting with different cleaners I find the BLC works great for beer tap systems and general cleaning, but I found something else that I will be using to clean my fermentors and other items that tend to get crusty. That item is a white powder substance called proxycarb. Poxycarb works great because I can put a couple tablespoons into the fermentor fill it up passed the fermentation line with hot water and let it sit while I do other things. When I get back to it I can just usually pick up the fermentor, put my hand over the top and give it a few good, vigorous shakes. This seems to clean it out really well with out the use of my scrub brush. Another good thing about proxycarb is it rinses out really easily with no soapy residue, where as BLC seems like dish soap to me so I find myself rinsing repeatedly. Unfortunately I have only found proxycarb at one store, The Beverage People I guess that’s not a big deal to me though since that is where I do most of my shopping anyway. I’m sure with some experimenting around you could find other similar products.


Second issue I kind just skimmed over is sanitizing of equipment. Once the wort is done boiling and cooled off everything that comes into contact with it must be sanitized. This includes fermentors, tubes, racking cane, spoon, bottles, stoppers, airlock valves, bottling bucket, bottle filler and bottle caps.

With the exception of the bottle caps, which I boil in water before bottling, all my equipment gets sanitized with B.T.F. Idophor sanitizer. B.T.F. is a dark brown iodine based chemical that leaves no odor or taste on the brewing equipment. B.T.F. is also a good chemical to use in all grain brewing to see if you achieved full starch conversion, but we’ll get to that another time.

On the bottle of sanitizer there is a parts per million (ppm) recommendation for sanitizing any food grad devices. What I do is put about 2 to 2.5 caps full into the fermentor and fill it all the way up which leaves the solution a transparent brown color and I was told by the local shop keep that is good enough. Let the solution sit for a few minutes and then you can begin to drain it out now the good thing about this solution is it can be used again to sterilize other devices. So what I do is using my racking can and tubing is siphon the solution to another fermentor or the bottling bucket to soak other smaller pieces. As long as you keep your equipment in a clean area the devices should remain sanitized for a good period of time. For example if you are going to rack your wort from the primary to the secondary fermentor you can also use the same solution to sanitize your bottles even though you will not be bottling for another week. After the solution is removed from the device being sanitized do not dry it with a towel let it air dry.

First batch/Tasting

After 10 days in the bottle I figured it is time to take a taste. Pulling a 22oz bottle out of the case I notice a small bit of sediment at the bottom of the bottle. This is due to the small amount of fermentation required to carbonate the beer. The sediment is just spent yeast floating around the bottom it is not bad for you in fact I believe yeast can be a source of vitamin B which may help to offset the affects of a hangover if you choose to imbibe enough. However I always chill a glass and pour the beer off the top leaving the sediment behind since the yeast will affect the color and cloudiness of your beer.

Taste was very nice, smooth and no after taste. Light malt flavor no harsh hop bitterness medium mouth feel. Exactly what I expected from an ale type beer, actually being my first batch I was quite impressed with the flavor and that I didn’t screw anything up. This brew I believe would compare with any average to above average ale beer bought in a store.

During the time the beer was carbonating I played around with some rough numbers about the cost of making this beer. Including the cost of the kit, water, caps, cleaner and sterilizer granted I left out a number of things including the bottles, the brew system itself, some other small things and items that were not easily determined like the energy required to heat the wort. I figured the system and bottles would get used over and over eventually paying for themselves. The rough number I came up with was a ballpark number between $1.25 and $1.50. I left some variance in the equation to gauge the cost compared to similar beers bought in stores. I can see even on the high end that this was quite a bargain; most beers of this quality were well over $2.00. I have heard said that all grain brewers were saving even more money can’t wait to gain the experience and funds to make the plunge into all grain brewing.

After pouring out the last little bit of beer I find it is a good idea to clean the bottle immediately by rinsing water through it several times, if the yeast is allowed to sit in the bottle it will crust over making it difficult to clean.

Pretty good stuff perhaps I am biased, but does it really matter? I made it for me so in the end that is all that counts. I did share with some friends and they seemed to like it, but maybe they are being nice to me…..again so what I like it. :)

First batch/bottling

After the wort has sat in the secondary fermentor for about 10 days I can tell that it has cleared up considerably and the valve in the air lock is resting on the stem no fermentation activity going on what so ever. Now it is time to bottle.

Before I go off to work for the day I take the carboy out of the cool dark room and set it on the counter in my kitchen at room temperature to get the yeast active again. It is important for the yeast to become active and to get yeast into the wort again because we are going to carbonate the beer through a process called bottle conditioning.

Bottle conditioning is a process that most home brewers and some micro brewers use to carbonate their beer. Basically what bottle conditioning is adding a small amount of sugar or sugar product like; honey, malt extract, syrup, ect to the wort stirring it completely and then putting it into the bottles and capping them. When the yeast in the wort eats the small amount of sugar it ferments giving off CO2 and sense there is a cap on the bottles the CO2 has no where to go except back into the beer therefore carbonating it.

Once home I get the appropriate amount of bottle caps out, in this case since I am using 22oz bottles I figured about 30 caps should do the trick and a few more just in case. I put the caps in a pot with tap water and begin to boil them to kill any germs or bacteria that may be on the caps. At the same time in another pot I put 4oz of corn sugar and about a cup of distilled water and begin to boil it.

At this time I get my 6.5gl bottling bucket out put it on the floor and begin to siphon the wort from the secondary fermentor to the bucket, once again keeping the cane off the bottom of the fermentor so I don’t pick up any of the trub. When all of the wort has been transferred to the bucket I can tell by the markings on the bucket if I have 5gls if not then I can add a little distilled water to bring it up to the appropriate mark.

By the time the wort has been transferred to the bottling bucket the caps have boiled long enough to kill any damaging germs so I can turn off the stove and remove and dry the caps. Also the sugar water has been boiling and is almost syrup just a few minutes more and it will be ready. The sugar water you want to be at a syrup texture to assure the sugar has been dissolved and that you are not adding any extra water to the wort.

Once the syrup has cooled you can add it to the wort, the sryup must be cool because in the wort there are living organisms ie the yeast and the heat would kill them. After adding the syrup you must stir the wort to assure equal distribution of sugar through out the wort. I find about fifteen minutes of constant stirring will do the trick.

Now its time to bottle. I pick up the bottling bucket and put it on the counter and put the bottles on the floor directly underneath the bucket. I put the cane in the wort connect the tubing to the cane and at the other end of the tubing I connect a bottle filler. A bottle filler is a hard clear plastic device with a pressure valve on the end. How it works is you start the siphon and then connect the bottle filler and when the wort flows to the end of the filler it pushes closed the valve and the wort cannot flow out unless you physically push open the valve. Now you put the filler into a bottle and push it down on the bottom of the bottle and the wort begins to flow into the bottle. When the wort reaches the very top of the bottle you remove the filler and the flow of wort stops. When you remove the filler and tubing the level of wort in the bottle drops to about 1” below the top, perfect amount of beer for 1 bottle. Repeat this process until you have run out of wort, I have found that 5gls of wort takes about 28 22oz bottles, now its time to cap.

I put a cap on every bottle of beer then go around with my capper and crimp the caps on tightly. After capping I put the bottles back into their boxes and put the boxes in a dark closet at room temperature and wait for 10 to 14 days before trying…..

My first batch/Secondary fermeter

As mentioned earlier my first batch was an ale so I allowed the primary fermenter to sit in a dark room at a temperature between 60F to 70F, which is the optimum temperature for ales, for a little over a week. When I checked the wort the head had gone down completely so I again could see the top of the wort and the air lock valve had slowed to about two bubbles a minute. All of this told me it was time to transfer the wort to the secondary fermenter.

The secondary fermenter is a 5gl glass carboy similar to the primary only smaller. The secondary fermenter is smaller because there will be little to no fermentation going on. The main reason for the secondary fermentation process is to age the beer and to have any sediment that may be floating around in the wort to settle out.

Transferring the wort form the primary fermenter to the secondary is similar to the transfer from kettle to primary. Now the reason you want to hold the racking cane off the bottom is to not allow any of the sediment from the primary (called trub) into the secondary. This trub is a combination of hop leaves, proteins and spent yeast. Some intro brewers skip the secondary fermentation process because after the initial fermentation the beer is pretty close to the final gravity of the beer. If for no other reason you should take advantage of the secondary fermentation to filter out some of the sediment.

After transferring the wort to the secondary use distilled water if necessary to fill the carboy just below the neck of the container. Filling the carboy to this level should yield you 5gl of wort and minimize the surface area of the wort to open air in the carboy. Place the carboy in a dark cool room try to get it in an area about 10F degrees below the primary fermentation area. At the cooler climate there will be little to no fermentation however the molecules in the wort will slow enough to allow previously buoyant particles to sink to the bottom.

Allow the wort to sit in the secondary fermenter for another 7 to 10 days before bottling……

My first batch/Primary fermenter

After turning off the burners I put the lid on the kettle covering most of the pot except where the connectors for the wort chiller were sticking out. I took the kettle to my patio; connected the garden hose to one side of the wort chiller and a spare hose connected to the other, the end of this hose went to a drainage area off the side of my patio. I turned on the water to my garden hose and the cool water flowed through the hose into the wort chiller and out the other. Putting my hand on the water going into the drainage area I could feel the large increase in temperature, the heat of the wort was being transferred through the copper tubing into the cool water coming from the garden hose.

This process took about 15 to 20 minutes to get the wort down to an acceptable temperature to pitch the yeast, about 75F. This process, while faster than a cool bath method, seemed a little inefficient and water consuming something I would have to pay the utility company for. However this or the cool bath with ice method is what I will have to do until I can come up with a better solution. A fellow brewer and I came up with a rather neat idea for this a couple years later and it is something I will probably share in later installments.

Now that the wort is chilled it is time to transfer it from the kettle to the first fermenter. This is done with a racking cane and tubing .You put the racking cane into the wort holding it off the bottom so you don't transfer any unwanted sludge, in this case spent hop leafs. Then you connect one end of the tubing to the end of the cane and the other end first goes in your mouth to begin the siphon then goes into the fermenter and the wort should flow freely. This is the same process as siphoning gas out of a car. Since I started out with a little more than 5 gallons of water, this being a 5 gallon batch of beer it seemed appropriate, I now have less than 5 gallons of wort due to the loss of water through evaporation during boiling and the sludge content at the bottom of the kettle. This is not a problem water can be added at the end of the process to bring you back up to 5 at the end of the fermentation process, just before bottling.

Save a small portion of the wort to put into a measurement test tube. Then float your hydrometer to measure the original gravity(OG). Measuring the OG is a way to tell how much sugar is in your wort, after fermentation you measure the gravity again and the difference will tell you how much alcohol is in the beer. Sample OG measurement would be something like 1.064, where as a meausrement of 1.000 is pure water. I cannot remember what the reading was of this particular beer seeing how this took place a number of years ago.

Time to pitch the yeast, but first you should give the fermentator full of wort a few good shakes to ensure that the wort is well aerated because yeast needs oxygen. Yeast can come either in liquid or dry form, this particular case I used dry and was able to just dump it in the fermentor and put on the rubber stopper and airlock valve that is filled with water. The valve is pretty simple design basically its a small tube sitting upside down freely on a stem surrounded by a cylinder and the stem protrudes from under the cylinder. How it works is you fill the cylinder about half way up with water so the tube just barely rests on the stem. Now air cannot get through the water and down the stem and into the beer possibly contaminating it and the CO2 given off by the yeast eating the sugar in the wort can go up the stem pushing up the tube and releasing it into the air through the water.

The reason for using the 7gl fermenter as your primary fermenter even though you are only making 5gl of beer is because the majority of the fermentation, if not all, is done in the primary and there is quite a bit of action during fermentation. What happens essentially is yeast eats the sugar and three things happen; the yeast gives off CO2, the yeast also gives off alcohol, and the yeast cell reproduces. So after several hours there a essentially billions of yeast cells eating sugar giving off CO2, alcohol, and reproducing and this process can cause a rather large foam head to appear on top of the wort. Now it sits for a week to 10 days……

At the bottom here is a picture of two primary fermenters in action from a recent 10 gallon batch of beer. Also included is a picture I took of a hydrometer reading after brewing my latest batch.

My first batch/The boil

So I finished reading Brewing Quality Beers and like I thought it was not hard reading at all. Also I found out what all the equipment is and how it is used.

The better half decided she was going to go out with some friends and do girly things like shopping or whatever so I thought today would be a good day to brew my first batch of beer.

Like I mentioned before I bought a pre-assymbled kit of beer which comes with all the indredienants in already measured amounts. For some reason the store does not give out the amounts of which grains or malt extracts they use, I guess it's some sort of trade secret sense they wrote the recipes themselves. Anyway its not really that hard to figure out how much of what extracts they use if you have a scale and know what your looking at, it's the grains (1lbs of mixed) that its too difficult to determine.

The directions that come with the kit are pretty straight forward and I can't see myself messing this up too much. I started out putting 5 gallons of water into my 32qt (8gl) stainless steel kettle and added the water treatment to that. I figured it would be a good idea to use distilled water because I did not know the hardness of my tap water and being my first batch I really didn't want to screw anything up.

Now here comes the silly part. I didn't purchase any way of heating the water/extract mix (wort), but I thought I would just heat it on the stove. Well I don't know if you have seen the diameter of a 32qt kettle before, but its about 15" or so in and the biggest burner on our electric stove was about 8" in diameter as you can imagine this would not be very effecient. So unless I wanted to be here all day waiting for the wort to boil I would have to figure out a solution. My bright idea was to turn on one of the little 6" burners on the side and slide part of the kettle onto the little burner and the majority of the kettle would still be on the bigger burner. Great improv right, well not so fast the burners are so close to the surface of the stove that the heat from the kettle discolored the white stove somewhat. Anyway I did not find out about that until I was finished brewing and it took some tough scrubbing to get the original color back.

Back to brewing so I added the treated water to the kettle and it is heating up, now I put in all the malt extract and stir it in making sure it doesn't clump up any. Let me tell you this malt extract is some sticky stuff all it is is sugar and it has a weird smell to it, kind of like those candys, malted milk balls, you can get at some movie theaters. Now while I am bringing this to a boil, which will take some time due to the size of my burners, I take the one pound of grain and put it in a small pot and put enough water to be about an inch off the top of the grains. I bring the water with the grains in it to a boil quickly and then turn off the heat and let the grains sit for about 30 minutes. Just about the time the thirty minutes is up the malt extract kettle is begining to boil, using a colander I pour the small pots contents of grain and liquid through the colander making sure no grains get into the wort.

Boiling the wort I add a certain amount of hops at the times called for in the directions, two things effect the bitterness of hops in beer. The hops alpha acid rating and the time they are allowed to boil. Most recipes or even on some bottles of beer you will see a number that is followed by IBU this stands for international bittering unit which is a measure of how much acid is in the hops and the time the oils from the hops were boiled into the wort. With about thirty minutes remaining in the boil I add the copper coil I talked about in the "A hobby is born" installment. This device is called a wort chiller and adding it to the boil sanitizes the device.


After the boil was over I noticed quite an intense funk of malted milk balls permeating the house. Uh oh this wasn't going to be good when the boss gets home! I also noticed on the range hood there was a layer of sticky goo on the inside. Looks like after the verbal thrashing I receive I will have to purchase a propane cooker and do this outside if I wish to continue with this hobby.

Extract boil and most all grain boils are generally over in 60 minutes now it is time to cool the wort as quickly as possible, put it into the 7gal primary fermenter and pitch the yeast.....

Malt Extract

Extract pre-packaged beer kits are packages filled with everything you would need to brew a batch of beer. Contents usually include: malt extract, hops, yeast, water conditioners (gypsum, chalk, salt, ect.), a small portion of grains (usually about a pound), corn sugar for bottle priming, and instructions.

Perhaps some explanation of what malt extract is needed here. Malt extract is either a powder or syrup type liquid that is the base for all beers. You simply add it to water and boil, easy right? This is what beginners start out using because of its ease of use, sometimes experienced brewers will use extract for other uses such as starters which I will get in to at another time. Extract is basically the fermentable sugars extracted from malted grain by a experienced brewer berfore hand then dehydrated down into either a poweder or syrup. While extract is easy to use it nearly takes the whole process out of the hands of the hobbyist, but it is usefull to begin with until you get a better idea of what is happening. When you get comfortable with you abilities, build enough courage and secure more funds to upgrade your system the logical step will be to go into all grain brewing. Another thing about extract brewing is that it is more expensive to by extract then it is to buy grains so that is another reason to take the plunge into all grain brewing, later I will explain more about all grain brewing, but for the time that the blog is at I was still a beginner and extract brewer.