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.....
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.....
posted by Boomer at 8:46 PM
2 Comments:
sometimes i get that fermented goat
stink in my scrote area... do you
think that this turns tony on???
nice post man. good reading. i'd
like to boil tony's wort tho...
beer-boi
ummmmm
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