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How Do I Start Brewing? Part 2

Well, if you’re still reading my posts, it seems possible that you’ve spent some time reading a good brewing book, and may even have found a brewer or two to ask questions of. And now you’re back, thirsty. For knowledge, I mean. Therefore, as promised (if somewhat delayed), here a list of what you should expect out of a starter’s kit. First, there are some things you should already have:

A big pot with a lid

This can be stainless, aluminum, or enameled. Some people freak out about aluminum cookware, but the link between it and Alzheimer’s disease has been thoroughly debunked. If you have an enameled brew pot, the enamel should be free from chips. No matter what pot you use, heavier is better, particularly on the bottom. Heavy pots spread heat better, preventing scorching. The lid will help things come up to temperature more quickly, but you will be boiling with the lid off once it gets rolling. If you do choose aluminum, boil a couple of potsful of water before you use it for beer. This will build up an oxide layer on the inside of the pot, which will prevent a metallic taste in your beer.

I have heard of people brewing in pots as small as 12 quarts, but I strongly recommend a 20-quart pot if you can manage it. You will be boiling your wort for an hour or so, and it will boil over if you give it a chance. The more head space you have in your pot, the better off you will be, and the less likely you will end up having to scrub a sticky mess off your stove. Speaking of that, you will also need…

A stove

Any stove will be fine as long as you can depend on it to boil three gallons or so in a reasonable time frame. If you have a crab cooker or turkey fryer burner fueled by propane, think about brewing outdoors. That way, when and if you have a boilover, cleanup will be much easier. Even after fifteen years, it still happens to me on occasion.

A cool, dark place to store fermenting and bottled beer

The “cool” part is very important. If the weather gets warm, your beer will ferment very quickly, but it will also develop off flavors. For the types of ales most beginners start with, an ambient temperature of 60 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal. If you have a cellar or an interior closet that stays pretty cool reliably, think about using that space as a fermentation area.

Dark is also important, as light exposure can cause “skunking,” also called lightstrike. Hop compounds in beer are fairly fragile molecules, and when these compounds are exposed to certain wavelengths of light, they can break apart and become mercaptans, a class of chemical that smells bad.

The real Cadillac solution is to use a second refrigerator as a fermenting area, controlling it with an add-on thermostat. It’s pretty hard to recommend this approach to beginning brewers, though, given its cost in energy and hardware. The best bet for most new brewers is to find a room or closet that stays pretty cool. If you’re not sure how much the temperature varies in a particular area, get a cheap hi/lo thermometer from Radio Shack or some such and leave it in prospective areas for a few days.

If you already have a second fridge you’re able to not store food in (even in the freezer compartment) for a couple of weeks, you might think about spending the money for a thermostat to keep the inside at about 65 degrees. I would not recommend this unless you’re pretty certain you’re going to keep brewing, though.

A little space for storing brewing equipment when not in use

A closet, a corner of the garage, whatever. No special requirements here. A few out-of-the-way square feet are all you need.

A sink with running water and a drain

If your water tastes good to drink, it will also make good beer. Municipal water supplies in the US are very safe, so there’s really no worry about contamination, but some water has heavy mineral content that can make it taste odd. In this case, you may want to buy spring water to brew with, but you will still want to have a supply of water for cooling.

A big, nonporous spoon

Wooden spoons are full of microscopic holes which can harbor nasty bacteria which can spoil your beer. You want a big stainless-steel spoon with no crevices.

Then, there are the things that will come in the kit. Some of these can be found by a dedicated scrounger, but several of them are pretty uncommon outside a homebrew shop. Still, if you have facility to make or find these somewhere else, more power to you.

Fermenter

This can be a big glass carboy (bottle) similar to a water cooler bottle but bigger, or it can be a food-grade bucket. There are advantages to both, but I recommend buckets to beginning brewers because they are cheap, lightweight (important when paying for shipping) and durable. Glass carboys are of course fragile, and I just don’t think the additional expense is justified for beginning brewers. Whether you use a bucket or a carboy, you should use a fermenter that has a capacity of about six and a half gallons for five-gallon recipes. This will allow room for the yeasty foam that will develop on the surface of your beer as it ferments. If you are scavenging for a fermenter, be sure any plastic you find is food grade, free of scratches on the inside, and does not smell of anything that was previously in it. Scavenged buckets and carboys are almost always 5 gallons in size, so you will want to think about scaling down your batches to four gallons.

If you’re using a bucket for a fermenter, you should also have a tight-fitting lid. It will probably have a hole drilled in it for the airlock. If there’s a rubber grommet fitted in the hole, I suggest you remove it and replace it with a stopper – I have seen many grommets fall into the beer as the airlock is pushed in. You may find you have to cut a larger hole, but plastic lids are easy to drill.

Hydrometer and test jar

A hydrometer is a carefully-balanced device that floats in a sample of your beer to determine its specific gravity, or density. It’s pretty common for homebrew wort (unfermented beer) to have a specific gravity of about 1.040 to 1.060 before fermentation starts. This is called Original Gravity, commonly abbreviated as OG. Pure water has an SG of 1.000 – dissolved malt sugars and other materials account for the difference. The more sugars you have in your wort, the higher your OG and the higher the eventual alcohol content of your beer will be. By comparing your OG to your FG (Final Gravity, the significant gravity after fermentation is complete) and doing a little arithmetic, you can get a good approximation of how much alcohol your beer has in it.

You should also have a test jar, which is a tall, narrow (about one inch in diameter) container for floating your hydrometer.

Bottling bucket

This is another plastic bucket just like the first. It may have a spigot mounted low on one side, which will make it easier to fill your bottles. Once the main part of your fermentation is complete, you will transfer your uncarbonated beer into this bucket and mix in a measured amount of priming sugar, then fill and cap your bottles.

Airlock

This is a plastic device that allows gasses generated by the fermenting beer (mostly carbon dioxide) to bubble out of the fermenter, but keeps outside air from getting in. There are two types, and both work well. Use whatever your brew shop includes in the kit.

Drilled stopper

Choose an appropriate size to allow you to put your airlock firmly into the opening in your fermenter. If you’re using glass carboys, this is probably a number 7. If you’re using a plastic bucket, use whatever size best fits the hole int he lid without risking falling in.

Racking cane

This is just a piece of rigid tubing with a crook formed in one end, and usually with a plastic standoff fitted to the end. This is used to siphon beer from one container to another, and the standoff helps keep too much sediment from getting sucked up.

Vinyl tubing

This should fit securely onto the crooked end of your racking cane. Four or five feet is probably about right.

Bottling wand

This is another, shorter piece of rigid tubing with a valve on the end. You will use this when you are filling bottles – the valve opens when gently pressed to the bottom of a bottle, and closes when you lift the wand a quarter-inch or so. Most are spring-loaded, but I have also seen and used a type without a spring – the weight of the liquid in the tube itself keeps the valve closed.

Capper

Once your bottles are filled, you will need to put caps (also called crowns) on them. There are several types of cappers.

Wing cappers or two-handle cappers are the most common. To use this, a crown is placed on the mouth of the bottle and the die of the capper is placed on the cap. The two handles are rotated downward firmly, which will press the die down on the crown, clamping it around the lip of the bottle.

Bench cappers are the deluxe option, but cost more than wing cappers. To use a bench capper, a filled bottle is placed under the capper’s die and the handle is pulled firmly downward. The die clamps the crown around the bottle’s lip exactly as the wing capper does.

If you are offered a hammer capper – a cap die on a handle which you strike with a mallet – DO NOT accept it. You will hurt yourself and possibly others. I think the danger of swinging a hammer toward glass bottles is pretty clear, but this actually used to be a widely-used tool – thank goodness we have better choices today.

Caps

Most starter kits come with a baggie of crowns. You’ll need to make sure to keep these in stock, so make sure you pick some up whenever you buy ingredients. Lots of places will have a variety of colors available, making it easy to color-code your beer. Crowns are cheap and reliable; I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad seal

Sanitizer concentrate

For many years, the de facto standard sanitizer for homebrewers was unscented household bleach. While it has its advantages – it’s cheap and readily available everywhere – there are much better options available to the homebrewer today. Any sanitizer containing chlorine will require rinsing, which opens the possibility of recontamination, so I always recommend iodophor or Star-San. Your beginner’s kit may come with another sanitizer like One-Step or C-Brite. These are also fine, as long as you follow the directions on the packaging carefully. Eventually, you will need more sanitizer, so think about buying iodophor or Star-San when you need a refill.

Iodophor is similar to the tincture of iodine you may have dabbed on cuts years ago. It is widely used in the dairy industry to sanitize tanks and utensils. It has the advantages of being fairly cheap and needing a very small concentration to be effective (12.5 – 25 ppm), as well as not requiring a rinse. The film that is left on wet fermenters will have no effect on your beer.

Star-San is a proprietary sanitizer manufactured by Five-Star Chemicals. It’s based on food-grade phosphoric acid. This is also an effective no-rinse sanitizer, and will have no effect on your beer when fermenters and tools are used wet; in fact, the chemicals in Star-San become nutrient for the yeast. While it is also not terribly expensive, it is slightly more so that iodophor is when you consider that more is needed for each gallon of prepared sanitizing solution. I also find that it makes glass parts very slippery.

And finally, there are some things which you may not already have, and which are not included in most kits, but which you will need.

A clean jar or bottle to act as a blowoff capture basin

Some ferments are very vigorous, and can cause the foam on top of the fermenting beer – called “krauesen” – to reach the top of the fermenter and even through the airlock. In extreme situations, the airlock can even get plugged up, causing the stopper to blow out of your fermenter or the lid to fly off your bucket fermenter. This is a Bad Thing, as foam can get splattered all over walls, cielings, furniture, and wahtever else is around.

To avoid this, replace your airlock with a blowoff tube when you see signs of vigorous ferments. This is nothing more than a piece of tubing jammed in the stopper and leading down to a clean jar with a couple of inches of water in it. The ferment gasses with still bubble out just fine, and nothing will get into your beer, but any foam will end up in the jar instead of all over your kitchen wall. Change the water in the jar daily to avoid drawing fruit flies.

Bottles

If you drink bottled beer today, you already have a ready source of bottles to package your beer in – just start saving your bottles instead of reycling them. When you pour yourself a beer, rinse the bottle well and let it dry neck-down. It may take several rinses to get it clean – rinse it until it no longer smells like beer. What you want to avoid is any kind of opportunity for mold or bugs to grow on any dregs.

You should try to collect amber (brown) bottles with pry-off lips. Twist-off bottles tend not to seal well with the equipment homebrewers use. As I don’t know any brewer with a professional bottling line in his garage, it’s easiest to look for bottles that require an opener. You can also use clear or green bottles, but as they block less UV light than amber glass does, you’ll need to be more careful about storing them int he dark to avoid skunking.

You’ll need 55-60 12 oz. bottles to be sure you have enough to hold a five-gallon batch. If you feel like you’ll have trouble accumulating thiat many, ask a few friends to save their empties for you, or even ask a local barkeep if he will put aside a few cases for you. A promise of a few bottles of homebrew down the road will usually get you willing co-conspirators helpers.

You can also buy bottles from most homebrew shops if you want, but it’s way more expensive to do it this way. Most brewers I know end up scavengin most or all of their glass.

Ingredients

Most good homebrew shops will have a variety of kits available. I would avoid any kit which is a can of prehopped malt extract with a yeast packet taped to the top. Today’s quality kits are much more likely to contain a bag or jar of dry or syrup malt extract, some crushed specialty grain (depending on style), one or more packages of hops in whole flower or pelletized form, and a yeast culture in dry or liquid form. Choose a kit which reflects a style you’re interested in drinking, and you should have everything you need to make five gallons of delicious beer. Again depending on the style of beer you want to brew, the ingredients should cost you $30 to 60.

So where do I buy all this stuff?

There are a number of reputable online retailers – among them Northern Brewer (Minnesota) and Beer, Beer & More Beer (California) – which have a selection of starter kits available. I suggest you start with a basic kit; it keeps startup costs low, and you can always expand and replace things later on if you decide the hobby is for you.

If there is a good homebrew shop local to you, though, it’s probably worth visiting them to see if their offerings are competitive. Homebrew shops (good ones, anyway) tend to draw other brewers and provide a source of good information. Brewers are generally nice folks, and I am consistently surprised how many people have great information and help I would not get if I ordered all my supplies online.

This has turned into a giant wall of text, so I am going to stop now. I will defer the question of what you should brew for your first batch to Part 3 of this series. Suffice to say, though, that there is no shortage of good beer that can be made, even right from the start.

Beer from a Chef

The New York Times reports that Ferran Adrià has created a new beer “that behaves like wine.” A couple of thoughts came to my mind as I read the article:

First, I think it’s great that a famous chef is interested in elevating beer to the level that wine has held alone for so long. It’s my opinion that beer deserves a seat at the best tables in the world. Lots of beers pair wonderfully with food, from pale crisp lagers to deepest darkest stouts, and I think its fraternity reputation does not reflect the amazing range of beer
available in the world. In this regard, Ferran Adrià does the world of beer a service by his interest.

Second, though, I have to admit I was a little irritated by his choices (at least as they are described in the article). I was expecting something that really does behave like the best wine – something that, like the best Belgian Trappist beers, can be laid down for keeping over the years; something that has the complexity and depth of the best English Imperial Stouts; something that has the regional character of the amazing American IPAs. Instead, we get a blend of a Wit and a Pilsner.

Both Witbier and Pilsner are very fine beers in their best examples and both have long histories, but they are not the type of thing most diners in fine restaurants would expect to find on the menu. Pilsner (as interpreted by American megabreweries) is the basis of the myth that American beer is all weak and bad, and pale wheat beers are regarded by some as not much better than training-wheels beers one step removed from “Lite” beer.

On the whole, this smells more like an exercise of a chef’s ego or even a naked marketing exercise than a genuine attempt to create a beer that has the refinement of wine. The tasting notes in the article read to me like they were written by a wine person who has not had much experience with beer, but who is aware of the reputation of the chef responsible. This is not to say, though, that I won’t try it if I see it on the shelf at Whole Foods.

How Do I Start Brewing? Part 1

Being a brewer is always good for a few interesting questions at a barbecue or cocktail party. First, a lot of people are really amazed that it’s possible to brew one’s own beer at home. Second, there’s a vague feeling that homebrewing must be illegal or otherwise dicey. Then there are usually one or two people who are really lit up by the idea and want to learn more about how it’s done, whether it’s difficult, expensive, &c.

I don’t imagine there are many readers of a blog like this who fall into the ‘homebrewing must be impossible’ camp – if you’re reading about Ink, Yarn & Beer, it’s a good bet that you have at least some interest in making things yourself, and have already learned that practically anything is doable by a determined and resourceful home practitioner.

As to the second question, there are places in the US where homebrewing is illegal, and some smaller jurisdictions (dry counties) may prohibit it, but the majority of states have legalized homebrewing. Even Utah just recently passed a law allowing people to make their own beer at home. Apparently, there were already lots of people doing so (possibly encouraged by some of Utah’s other pecuiliar blue laws); now they can just do so legally. Even Alabama, where homebrewing is illegal, has homebrew shops, so it may be that, even if it’s illegal to brew in your area, the law is ignored or unenforced.

Of course, I can’t encourage you to break the law, but I can help you to find information about the law in your area. This site has some information about what states outlaw brewing. You should be aware, though, that web pages are frequently out of date, so it’s well worth doing a little research of your own to find out what the laws are in your area before possibly breaking them.

So, assuming you enjoy a nice craft beer and are interested in making your own, how should you start? I generally recommend to people that they read a good homebrewing book before they run out and buy equipment and ingredients. The reason for this is that homebrewing is not for everyone, and it’s better to find out you don’t like it after having spent $12.95 (or whatever) on a book than after spending a hundred bucks (or a few hundred) on gear. I have to admit a particular soft spot for Charlie Papazian’s classic homebrewing text, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, but these days I am hearing people say they don’t like his writing style. And really, there are lots of good resources on the Internet, one of the best being John Palmer’s How To Brew, which is a free online version of his book of the same title. It’s really, really hard to beat the cost:benefit ratio of free information.

Another great way to get a feeling for the hobby is to sit in on a batch or two. If you’ve met a homebrewer at a barbecue, ask them if they would mind inviting you to their next brew day. If there’s a homebrew shop in your town, ask if they have a club with an open meeting or club brew you can come to. The overwhelming majority of homebrewers like sharing their hobby, so it’s pretty likely you’ll find someone to help you get started.

Part 2 will include information about what to look for in a starter’s kit and what you should make for your first batch. Watch this space.

The Great American Yeast Starter vs. Smack Pack Experiment – Update on Kegging

I kegged this beer a couple of days ago and thought I should report back on it progress. You may recall the aim of them experiment is to test the assertion that yeast starters are needed for all beers, or whether a single smack pack can be used for “normal” beers with original gravities (OG) of 1.060 without affecting the final beer.

Do yeast starters decrease lag times? I did not notice any difference in lag times between the two fermenters, probably because they started overnight while I was asleep. By the time I checked the fermenters the next morning (maybe 16 hours after pitching), both had a good inch of kraeusen and were churning away merrily. While it’s possible the fermenter with the starter started more quickly, the fermenter that got the smack pack certinly had an acceptably short lag time.

Do yeast starters decrease the time to completion? Both fermenters had very similar times to completion. I checked them morning and evening every day while they were actively fermenting, and they both seemed to ramp up and taper off at about the same time. One interesting thing is that the fermenter with the starter had a thicker, heavier kraeusen which took longer to fall into the beer after the active ferment stopped. The fermenter with only the smack pack may actually have been ready to rack a day or so ahead of the other because of this.

Do yeast starters give more complete ferments? The OG on both fermenters was the same, of course, since they came from the same kettle. Their final gravities (FG) were also the same, at 1.008. This is an apparent attenuation of 86% which is fairly high for the yeast I used (Wyeast American Ale II).

The only remaining questions seem to be related to the flavor of the final beer, which we won’t know for another week and a half or so. The beer is currently resting in its kegs on dry hops and under pressure. Once it’s carbonated and has had a chance to soak up some aroma, I plan on doing a semi-blind test to see if I or my testers can find any difference.

So far, the results seem to indicate that there is little advantage, if any, to making yeast starters when there are healthy smack packs available and when the beer is not above 1.060. The advantages might be more obvious if the yeast in question were older, or if the beer were very strong. As starters cause extra work and therefore increase my overall level of worry (which Charlie tells us is to be avoided in pursuit of homebrew), my inclination is to skip them unless I am doing something extraordinary.

The Great American Yeast Starter vs. Smack Pack Experiment

Yeast starters are widely advocated by homebrewers for all batches. The purported benefits include faster starts, quicker finishes, and more complete fermentations. This is a test to see if these benefits can be counted on for beers of normal strength and if the results are worth the additional work.

Yesterday, as planned, I made ten gallons of beer, which went into two separate fermenters. Both fermenters got exactly the same wort out of the same boiler, and both got the same yeast strain using two smack packs that were manufactured on the same day. OG was 1.056, which is toward the upper end of the range recommended by Wyeast for straight pitching of a smack pack. The date on the smack packs was March 3, several weeks prior to brew day. While I have occasionally found smack packs at my FLHBS that were only manufactured several days prior to purchase, several weeks seems pretty normal. Jamil’s starter calculator tells me that a smack pack of this age should have about 81% viability.

One fermenter got a smack pack that had been smacked at the start of the brew day. By pitching time about six hours later, it was good and puffy. I poured this directly into the fermenter and attached an airlock.

The other smack pack, though, I had smacked the night before and used to make a starter. I used 150g of light DME in 1500mL of water, boiled in a 2000mL flask and then cooled. I pitched the smack pack into this and placed the flask on my home made stir plate, where it spun until brew day was complete – about 20 hours. The entire contents of the flask were added to the fermenter, and an airlock attached.

This morning, about 16 hours after pitching, I checked the fermenters, which have been resting in my ferment fridge at 65 degrees. Both fermenters have a good solid inch of kraeusen, and both airlocks are bubbling actively. It seems like the airlock on the fermenter that got the starter may be bubbling a little more frequently than the other.

So, did one fermenter start more quickly than the other? Without having checked the fermenters hourly all night, I can’t say definitively that one started before the other. However, the lag time on both was short enough that they are well into high kraeusen the next morning. I would feel comfortable with the start time in either case.

I will continue to check the fermenters daily, and will report back on the questions of quicker completion and lower FG.