Wild Brewing

I am very excited to announce a new project! Along with two of my good friends I plan to brew a set of four sour beers. The plan is to brew 55 gallon batches that will be aged in used wine barrels. The resulting beers will be released to the public at tasting events in Colorado. The events will be held free of charge and are meant to raise awareness of this style of beer. In order for this to work my friends and I need to raise money to buy the barrels, grain, bottles, and a few pieces of larger brewing equipment. If you are at all interested please check out our KickStarter site and consider helping us fund this project!

Yeast Basics

Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewers and bakers yeast) has long played a part in human society. It has allowed humanity to create alcoholic beverages and baked goods. The Latin name Saccharomyces means "sugar fungus", crediting this yeast with its ability to chew through large amounts of glucose and maltose. The second part of the name, Cerevisiae (think cerveza in Spanish) is Latin for beer. Another name for this same yeast is "budding yeast" commenting on the way in which it reproduces.

In order to understand how yeast is working in your beer you need to understand their life cycle. Yeast are a single celled fungus that reproduces asexually (most of the time). When yeast are reproducing asexually they are not sharing any genetic material with other yeast. This makes all yeast in a given culture identical to each other (essentially clones). Yeast reproduce through a process known as budding (hence the name budding yeast). In order to do this a yeast cell, known as the mother yeast, grows a bud that enlarges until DNA can be moved into it and it matures enough to split off from the mother cell. The newly created cell is known as the daughter cell.

This is a light microscope photo of budding yeast. The nucleus of each cell is highlighted in blue. Cells boxed in green are not currently budding. Cells boxed in red have a daughter cell beginning to bud off of them.

Yeast are able to grow in both the presence and absence of oxygen. However, oxygen is needed for yeast to create sterols which are used in the creation of the yeast cell wall (basically). Without enough oxygen present yeast will soon stop reproducing but will continue to eat available sugars. For this reasons yeast are cultured in the presence of oxygen.

Although maltose is the predominant sugar in wort it is not the only sugar available to yeast or the only sugar that yeast are able to metabolize. Budding yeast are also able to consume glucose, trehalose, fructose, and galactose.As yeast are breaking down sugars for energy they produce alcohol, carbon dioxide, and a myriad of other compounds such as esters and phenols (flavor and aroma compounds).

It is the job of any good brewer to create and maintain a happy yeast culture so that the yeast can go about their business in the wort. In order to accomplish this task the brewer needs to provide yeast with not only sugars and oxygen, but also a nitrogen source, vitamins, phosphorus, and some trace metals. Fortunately almost all of these compounds are present in wort if it is made from barley. All that the brewer needs to do is add oxygen and zinc (which is not present in high enough amounts in barley). A brewer could go their whole carrier without adding zinc and everything would be fine. However, if the same yeast is used again and again they will eventually begin to suffer from a lack of zinc. For this reason I add a small amount of yeast nutrients to my wort (I have also had success with adding a 1/4 cup of old yeast slurry to my wort at the beginning of the boil. These old dead yeast have the trace metals and vitamins that I am interested in and by boiling them I break them open allowing those compounds to be added to the wort).

What the basic brewer needs to known about adding yeast to a beer is...

1. How much yeast to add
2. When to add the yeast
3. How to control fermentation
4. At what point fermentation has ended

Anything beyond this can be saved for another day.

1) How much yeast to add: An ale needs fewer yeast cells than a lager, about 0.75 million cells per milliter of wort per degree Plato. A lager is going to need more like 1.25 million cells. Although this may sound very complicated most of the yeast cultures that you buy are going to have an appropriate amount of cells for a 5 gallon batch. If you are brewing something that is really high in gravity or larger than 5 gallons you are going to need to grow up additional yeast.

2) When to add the yeast: This is simple, add the yeast at a temperature lower than 80 (ale) or lower than 65 (lager). Although yeast can survive at 100 F very easily you do not want to stress them out before they begin their big job. You can also choose to add your yeast when the wort has reached the temperature at which you want to ferment it (say 72 F for an ale).

3) How to control fermentation: There is a lot of activity going on during fermentation, and the yeast are producing a large amount of heat. It is important to make sure that they are fermenting at an appropriate temperature, which  often means cooling them down. Otherwise you may get some unintended by-products of fermentation (aroma and flavor compounds that you did not want).

4) At what point fermentation has ended: This may seem very easy, when it stops bubbling right? Wrong. When yeast have finished eating the sugars they go back and clean up some of the other compounds left in the wort. If you bottle the beer before the yeast clean it up off flavors will be present. Make sure the yeast have had time to do their job (~10 days for ale ~21 days for a lager).

This is about all 1 post can handle. I will address how to culture yeast and some other details on yeast in following posts.

Getting Started: Moving Past the Basics

Now that you have a couple of beers under your belt you are ready to move onto something a little more complicated. The first things that I would suggest is going and picking up a secondary fermentor. This time you want to go big and not just buy another bucket. Pick up either a 5 gallon glass carboy or a plastic one. You are going to be using it for the next brew you make. I think it is also time to introduce a couple of new concepts and allow you to do some recipe manipulation. I want to cover with you the following...

Gravity Calculations
IBU Calculations
Hop Scheduling
BU:GU

Once again, you can take any recipe you want to use for your next beer but I am going to give directions for making an American Ale. I am going to allow you to manipulate the hop schedule and the gravity of the beer to make anything from an American Pale Ale to a Double IPA. First we need to cover those previously mentioned items.

When I start out designing a recipe (a topic for latter discussion) I first ask myself what style I want to brew. Once I have picked that out I look at the style guidelines to get a good idea of what a normal beer in that style would be like. Anything fancy needs to be saved for a latter date.

Since we are going to be using an American Pale Ale as our base I would scroll down to page 12 and look at the vital statistics that are listed.

Vital Statistics:           OG: 1.045 – 1.060
IBUs: 30 – 45              FG: 1.010 – 1.015
SRM: 5 – 14               ABV: 4.5 – 6.2%

This table gives me all the information that I need to get started. The IBUs are the amount of International Bittering Units in the Beer. SRM gives me an indication of the color of the beer. OG is the Original Gravity of the beer, basically how much sugar was in the beer to start. FG is the final gravity, how much sugar was left after the beer was done fermenting. ABV is, as we all know, the Alcohol By Volume of the beer.

Next I decide what I want my OG to be, I am shooting for something that will make a nice summer beer so I am going to stay on the low side at 1.050. I use that number to calculate how much sugar I am going to need to add. For that I figure out how many units of gravity are added from each pound of Liquid Malt Extract (0.038 G/pound/gallon). I want a starting Gravity of 1.050 for my 5 gallons of beer. In order to make the math easier I am going to use just the Gravity units, which is just the number after the 1, in this case 50 Gravity units (1.112 would be 112 Gravity units). However, I need 50 gravity units per gallon of beer, since I am making 5 gallons I really need (50 G x 5) 250 Gravity units. The math for how many pounds of Liquid Malt Extract I need looks like this....

250=(Gravity units provided by 1 pound of Liquid Malt Extract) x (Pounds of Liquid Malt Extract needed)
250= 38 x X
solve for X
X=250/38
X=  6.57 pounds of Liquid Malt Extract

Now that I know how much extract I need, I want to figure out how much hops I am going to need. But first I have to figure out what type of hops that I want in the beer and when to add them. It turns out that boiling hops for different amounts of time changes what they do to the beer (Also a topic for another day). Basically hops boiled for 60 minutes add bitterness, boiling hops for 30 minutes adds more of a bitter flavor, and boiling hops for 0-15 minutes adds aroma (this is a huge oversimplification but be patient). There is also a fourth time slot option, dry hopping, in which the hops are soaked in the beer post fermentation to impart aroma.

Using this information and the style guidelines I can create a hopping schedule for my beer. From the vital statistics, "Usually a moderate to high hop flavor, often showing a citrusy American hop character". Right of the bat I know what type of hops to stick with, American, you can read through a hop variety guide to figure out what you would like to add to get that citrus flavor or look on a breweries website and see what type of hops are used in your favorite America Pale Ale. I am going to use Magnum, Perle, and Cascade. Based on what these hops are most often used for and the information provided on them I am going to use Magnum to bitter the beer, Perle for taste, and Cascade for Aroma.

Now comes the hard part, I need to figure out how much of the hops to add and when. I like to get about 70% of the bitterness from my first "charge" of hops, that would be the 60 minute boil. I first decide how much bitterness I want, I like bitter beer so I am going to shoot for 40 IBUs. If I want to get 70% of the bitterness from my first charge I calculate that I need 28 IBUs from that charge (40 IBUs x 0.7). On every bag of hops in the AA% (Alpha Acid % (Alpha Acids are the bittering compound)), this tells me how much bitterness this packet of hops offers in every ounce. To calculate how many ounces I use the following equation...

IBU = (weight oz x % Alpha Acids) x U x 75 / Vrecipe

Where U is the utilization factor (This changes based on the Gravity of the boiling beer and the time in the boiling beer, a chart can be found here)

and Vreipe is the total volume when the beer is finished (include water you will be adding latter, so 5 gallons for us)

Or I could just use this calculator for IBUs

I am going to repeat the same procedure for the Perle hops and Cascade, which I will be using for flavor and aroma. I want to get 25% of the IBUs from the second charge at 30 minutes (flavor) and the remaining 5% from the final charge at 10 minutes (aroma).

The final thing you need is something to up the color of the beer a little bit, for this you can use about 0.5 pounds of a lighter colored grain for steeping, say 60 L caramel.

Now that I have figure out my hop schedule and how much sugar to add I am ready to brew my beer. All that I need to do is pick up the ingredients and some yeast. If I want to adjust this recipe here is how I would do it. Say I want my beer to be more or less bitter, adjust the IBUs. Say I want more alcohol, adjust the Original Gravity (However, yeast can only eat about 75% of the sugars so if I up the ABV it is going to translate into a sweeter beer due to a higher FG). If I want to make an IPA I would up both amounts. You can also play around with color by adjusting the steeping grain. The key here is a concept created by Ray Daniels in his book Designing Great Beers. He talks about the BU:GU ratio, which is the Bitterness:Gravity ratio. By changing this ratio I can control if I am making a Pale Ale or an India Pale Ale.

That is a ton of information for one post. I started a number of topics here that need to be talked about in more depth but I will do that latter, if all you wanted was a recipe for an American Pale Ale, here you go.

American Pale Ale (Extract)

American Pale Ale (Extract)

This recipe was designed for one of my "Brewing 101" pages.

OG: 1.050
IBUs: 40
Size: 5 gallons

What you need:

6.5 Pounds Liquid Malt Extract

0.5 pounds crushed caramel 60 malt

1 oz Magnum Hops (14% AA)
0.75 oz Perle Hops (8% AA)
1 oz Cascade (5.5% AA)

1 Packet Safale US-05

1. Bring 2.5 gallons of water to 150 F and add the steeping grains inside of a muslin bag for 30 minutes.
2. Bring the water to a boil and add all of the Liquid Malt Extract, make sure you stir to prevent it from cooking to the bottom (adding it slowly would be wise).
3. Set the timer for 60 minutes and add the 1 oz of Magnum Hops
4. At 30 minutes remaining add 0.75 oz of Perle Hops
5. At 10 minutes remaining add 0.5 oz of Cascade
6. At 0 minutes turn off the flame and cool the beer to 80 F, this can be done by placing the pot in a sink/ bath tub of cold water or by adding cold, sterile, water to bring the volume to 5 gallons.
7. Bring the volume to 5 gallons.
8. Add the yeast and allow fermentation to occur, after 10 days siphon the beer into your secondary container and add the remaining 0.5 oz of Cascade hops. 
9. Allow the beer to dry hop in the secondary 1 week before bottling.

Getting Started: Steeping Grains

Now that you have brewed your first beer. It is time to introduce a few new concepts. The first of these is going to be using real grains and not just malt extract in your beer. Before I go through what you are going to do today I want to talk a little bit about grains, and barley in particular.

Barley has been used for brewing beer for time untold. It lends itself to use in brewing because it contains a high amount of starch and enzymes with an appropriate level of proteins. Other grains, like wheat, contain a larger amount of protein which will become sticky in the mash. The high level of protein in wheat makes it more suited for use in baking bread where the sticky proteins help hold it together. Items like corn contain a high level off starch (think high fructose corn syrup) but lack the enzymes that are needed during mashing.

Now that I have mentioned enzymes a couple of times I better explain what I am talking about. Enzymes work as organic catalysts. They take a reaction that would not be energetically favorable and help it to occur more readily. In this case the reaction we are interested in is the breakdown of starch. Starch is a compound made up of sugars. Plants (like barley, wheat, and corn) store energy in the form of starch. When we eat a plant our bodies take that starch, break it down into sugars, and use those sugar for energy. In brewing we want to take starch and break it down into sugar which we can then turn into alcohol. In order to break down the starch we need to activate a specific enzyme called alpha amylase. This enzyme will break down the starches in the barley into sugars for brewing. Here comes the complicated part, alpha amylase is not normally active in the barley, otherwise barley would never be able to store up energy as starch. As a brewer it is your job to active the alpha amylase allowing it to go to work. Brewers activate this enzyme by placing the barley in hot water (150 F). This creates a sort of barley tea in which the enzyme converts the starches in the grain into sugar. Creating this barley tea is known as "mashing", and is a topic for another day.

Now that I have thoroughly bored you, lets get to the heart of what you will be doing today. You will be using crushed barley grains to add additional body and color to your beer. I will be providing a recipe for you to brew an amber ale, (but you could follow the directions for a brewing kit that includes steeping grains). The idea is that you can use some grain to steep like tea in your brew, this will activate some of the enzymes to covert some of the starch in these grains to sugar. It will also extract color from the grains to give you a nice looking beer.

Here is what you will need for today....

1. Your brewing equipment
2. 7 pounds of pale liquid malt extract
3. 1/2 pound of crystal 90 malt (crush it before you leave the LHS unless you bought it pre-crushed)
4. 1/3 pound of Special "B" malt (also crushed)
5. A muslin bag for your grains
6. 1 oz of Pearle hops
7. 1 oz of Nugget hops
8. 1 oz of Saaz Hops
9. 1 package of Safale US-05 yeast (or another form of dry yeast)

Crushed Special "B"

Once again, before you start brewing make sure that you have at least 5 hours set aside. The brew day will be very similar to the last time except we will be adding hops at several times points today and steeping grains to start. If you are wondering why we are adding hops at multiple steps today just wait, that is what I will be talking about next.

1. Add 2.5 gallons of water to your brewing pot, warm to water to 150-160 F and place your crushed grains into the muslin bag. Place the muslin bag into the pot and set the timer for 30 minutes. (this is steeping the grains)
2. After a half hour has passed remove the muslin bag and bring the wort to a boil
3. Add 1/3 oz Pearle Hops, 1/2 oz Nugget Hops and set timer for 60 minutes
4. Add 1 oz Saaz with 15 minutes remaining on the timer
5. Clean your fermentation equipment
6. Now all you need to do is cool the beer and place it in the fermentation vessel just like last time. Make sure that you wait to add the yeast until it is cool and that you aerate the beer so that your yeast will grow. From here on out everything is exactly the same as it was last time as far a bottling and carbonating the beer.

St. Patrick's Day Heather Ale: Tasting

Heather Ale

4/18/2012

    Tasted a bottle of my Heather Ale that I brewed on St. Patrick's Day.

Appearance: As you can see from the pic there is quite a bit of head on this beer, which soon turned into a nice sticky lace on the glass. The beer was darker in color than I expected. It is hard to tell here but it is very red brown in color.
Aroma: The beer smells of caramel, toffee, bread, and roasted malt. I wanted there to be a little more heather present but it just kind of lingers on the edges.
Taste: The first sip of the beer is sweet and smooth. The caramel and toffee play on the tongue and roasted grain flavors are present.
Mouthfeel:The body on this beer is solid, it is a little sticky on the pallet but finishes surprisingly dry for how much caramel and toffee flavor there is in this beer.
Overall: For an Irish Red, this beer is awesome. However, I was going for an Irish Red that accented the Heather flowers. Their is some Heather present in the aroma but that is about the extent. I would at least double the amount of Heather I added and maybe dry hop with some Heather.

Getting Started: Equipment

You have already decided to brew a batch of beer, now you need to know what to buy in order to do so.

I would recommend that you buy a kit from a site like Northern Brewer, Midwest, Williams Brewing, or even better your Local Homebrewing Store (LHS). All of these places should offer a basic brewing kit that will come with something to ferment the beer in, stir the beer with, measure the sugar in the beer, and bottle the beer. Most likely you will also need to pick up a large pot to boil the beer in.

If you would rather piece together the equipment yourself here is a list of what you will need...

1. 6.5 gallon fermentation vessel such as a carboy (glass or plastic) or a food grade bucket
2. 5 gallon bottling bucket with a valve on the bottom
3. 3.5 gallon or larger boiling pot (the bigger the better, especially if you ever want to brew more than 5 gallons or want to move onto all grain brewing)
4. Spoon for stirring the beer
5. Thermometer 
6. Hydrometer (measures gravity of the wort)
7. Air Lock (keeps bugs out of beer) 
8. Stopper to attach the Air Lock to the carboy (if using carboy)
9. Lid for bucket (if using bucket)
10. Siphon (used to move beer around)
11. 50 empty beer bottles (screw off tops are no good)
12. 50 bottle caps
13. Bottle caper
14. Sanitizer (Star San, Bleach, Iodophor)
15. Ingredients for brewing (Malt Extract, Hops, Yeast)

I would suggest brewing from a starter kit (which can be found at your LHS or on one of the listed websites). If you would rather you can pick up your own ingredients, I will be using creating a wheat beer for this example. If you are following my recipe then you should go pick up 3.5 pounds of pale liquid malt extract, 3.5 pounds of liquid wheat extract, 1 oz of Hallertau hops, and 1 packet of dry yeast (such as Safale US-05).

The Basics

Getting Started: Brew Day

By now you should have purchased everything that you need and are ready to brew some beer! Make sure before you start that you are going to have enough time (5 hours) and I would recommend that you read everything through once to make sure that you have all the equipment ready to go.

I was once told by a professional brewer on a tour of a brewery that  70% of a brewers time is spent cleaning. I have found that to be a little bit of an over exaggeration. That being said brewing is messy and having clean equipment is very very important. If even 1 bacteria cell gets into your beer and it then multiplies every 30 minutes you can imagine that a week latter you are going to have millions of bacteria in your beer. For that reason it is important to keep your equipment and work area clean.

I will be assuming you are following my wheat beer recipe, if you are not the basics will be the same but the ingredients will be different.

1. To start off measure 2.5 gallons of water into your 3.5 gallon pot
2. Bring the water to a boil and added 3.5 pounds of wheat and 3.5 pounds of pale liquid malt extract (add it slowly and stir as you do so. The last thing you want is for it all to fall to the bottom and burn to the bottom of your nice new pot)
3. Once the solution has returned to a boil add 1 oz of Hallertau (or similar) hops to the beer and set the timer for 60 minutes
4. Rehydrate the yeast according to the directions on the package
5. Watch the beer, do not leave the room. It may start to boil over and if you boil over all of your beer you will have a terrible mess. Keep the stove temperature hot enough to boil the beer but not so hot you are going to boil it over.
6. After an hour has passed you will have wort. At this point it has been sanitized by the boil and is free of any living organism. You just have to make sure it stays that way. Before you can add the yeast you need to cool the beer down. You can place a lid on it and put it in the fridge, place it in a sink full of cold water, or just wait for it to cool down. You need it to be at less than 80 F before you can add the yeast. 
7. While the beer is cooling you can sanitize for fermentation vessel with whatever sanitizer you choose. If you are using bleach make sure you rinse it 3 times so that you do not get bleach flavored beer.
8. Pour the cooled beer into the fermentation vessel and bring the volume to 5 gallons with water.
9. Take and record a hydrometer reading of the beer, if everything went well it should be around 1.050.
10. Add the yeast to he beer.
11. Yeast need oxygen to grow, so you will either need to pour the beer back and forth between the boil pot and the fermentation vessel or shake it in the fermentation vessel very well. (Boiling drives off all the oxygen, you need to add it back in after the boil).
12. Place the lid/stopper on the fermentation vessel and add the air lock filled with Vodka or sanitizer.
13. Set the beer in a warm room (~65 F) and let it ferment for the next 7 to 10 days.
14. Within 48 hours you should see the air lock moving to release carbon dioxide being produced by the yeast as they metabolize the sugar present in the wort.
15. After 7-10 days it should be time to bottle the beer, this means feeding the yeast one last time with sugar and adding the beer to a bottle. The sugar will provide a last meal for the yeast which they will once again turn into carbon dioxide and alcohol. This time the cap on the top of the beer bottle will seal in the carbon dioxide and carbonate your beer.
16. Take a hydrometer reading of the beer and record it. It should be around 1.015. If it is not stop and check out this link.
17. To bottle the beer first sanitize your siphon, 50 bottles, and your bottling bucket. Now add the beer to the bottling bucket using your siphon, the goal is to do this slowly without letting too much oxygen have access to the beer. 
18. Add priming sugar to the bottling bucket and gently stir it, this is for the yeasts last meal. To calculate how much priming sugar to use follow this link.
19. Now add the beer to the bottle, about a half inch from the top. Place a crown cap on the bottle and crimp it in place with the caper.
20. Place the closed bottles in a warm place, you need the yeast to stay active to eat their last meal, which might take some time. If you place a bottle in the fridge too soon the yeast will become dormant and will not carbonate your beer.
21. After a good 2-3 weeks place 1 beer in the fridge, let it cool, and sample it. If it is nice and carbonated you can cool the rest.
22. Celebrate the awesome accomplishment of brewing your own beer! I would recommend using a kit at least one more time before you start trying to experiment or move on to the next stage, which is using steeping grains.

Getting Ready to Bottle

Getting Started: Intro

Man has been brewing beer for centuries, isn't it time you tried your hand at it? Afterall, if a guy who lived in a cave could make beer, why can't you?

While brewing might seem like an intimidating process at first it is actually quite simple. Lets start at the beginning.

All beer is made of four ingredients, malted grains, hops, yeast, and water. These four simple ingredients are varied in type, style, and amount to make beer. As a potential brewer it is your job to combine malted grains, water, and hops to make wort. Yeast is then added and creates beer from wort by breaking down sugar into alcohol, carbon dioxide (CO2) and compounds such as esters that will create flavor and aroma in the beer.

In a traditional brewery the first step is to activate enzymes in malted grain to break starch into usable sugar, but this is not where we will be starting. Most home brewers start by using malt extract that has already been prepared for them. The extract is from barley or wheat and all the starch has been broken down into sugar and concentrated for ease of use.

When you are just starting out I would recommend you first decide on what type of beer you would like to brew, pick something that is easy like a wheat beer or an amber ale. These are two styles that have some room for off flavors and are quick and easy to make. For this run through I am going to assume you are making a wheat beer.

However, before you try brewing beer you are going to need to get all of the equipment, which I am going to go over in my next post.

IPA

I have brewed a couple of IPAs before. It is a beer that I like to have around for when I want something crisp and refreshing after a long day. I have played around with multiple recipes and hopping schedules and this is my latest attempt, which I must say turned out pretty good.

Brewed 1/21/12

5 gallons, brewed with Andrew

Grain:

13 pounds of Pale 2-Row Malt
1 pound of Caramel 40

Mashed at 152 F for 1 hour

Hops:

Chinook 1 oz 11.9% 60 minutes
Centennial 1 oz 10.5% 30 minutes
Simcoe 1 oz 14.1% 15 minutes
Cascade 1 oz 6.4% 10 minutes

Initial Gravity 1.072

Final Gravity 1.016

Beer moved to Keg once final gravity reached and dry hopped with

1 oz Cascade 6.4%
1/2 oz Hallertau 4.6%
1/2 oz Saaz 4.4%

Bottled using Beer Gun at 2.5 volumes of carbonation

2/11 Tasting

The beer is surprisingly red brown for the small amount of caramel malt that I added. The head retention is poor which is not surprising from how much hops I added and how long it was dry hopped, probably also the reason that it is hazy.

The aroma is very well balanced. You can tell right away that the beer is full of grassy hops with just a hint of citrus and some grapefruit. Also present is a hint of caramel that rounds out the aroma.

The beer starts off sweet with a hint of caramel and finishes easy with a hit of hops right at the finish that cleans the palate from all the sugar leaving you ready for another sip.

Overall I am pretty impressed with how this beer turned out. You would never guess that it is 8%+. I would like a little more bitterness in the taste and a little more citrus in the aroma. That being said I am pretty awed by how drinkable this is and worried that I will put all 5 gallons down before I can share it with anyone.