September 19, 2011 by naslacker
I’ve been casually brewing beer now for close to five years, and have been meaning to write about it in detail for quite a long time. The hobby started back shortly after my divorce and move to the Detroit burbs out of the Michigan sticks. Some friends of mine gave me a Mr. Beer kit as a Christmas present. Shortly afterwards I upgraded to full five gallon paint buckets because lets face it, two gallons really is just a decent Friday night.
Yesterday though I brewed up an Irish Red from Austin Homebrew and I figured I’d share some photos and the process.
Any good brew day starts off with getting the stuff you need laid out so you know exactly where it is. This will make finding it a lot easer as the day progresses. I tend to enjoy a few cold ones while I am brewing, so it is vitally important that you get everything you need in the proper place before you start.
Also, no brewday should begin without a big ass spoon.
For this recipe we’ll be using six, that’s right SIX, pounds of malt extract. For those of you who don’t brew, that’s a shit load of malt extract. We’ve also got a pound and a half of specialty grains in a muslin bag. It is these specialty grains that we’re going to start with.
Start by bringing two gallons of water in a nice big stock pot up to 155 degrees. Pull it off the burner and stick the muslin bag in the water and let it soak there for about 25 min. When done you’ll want to pull the bag out of the pot and let all the water drain out.
Toss the grains out, you won’t need them any more. Add another gallon of water to the pot and bring it to a rolling boil. At this point it is a good time to send your assistant brewer out on a lunch run. But since this is my assistant brewer:
I conned my wife in to doing a Jimmy John’s run. (No I was not paid to do that plug.)
Once your pot has reached that rolling boil, I recommend turning off the burner and moving the pot off to a cool spot on the stove (my lovely Jimmy John’s running wife will tell you that I know this from experience). It is time to cut in to the previously mentioned six pounds of malt and stir it, dissolving it all. When you’ve done all that it is time to move the pot back to burner and fire it up again back to a rolling boil.
With your pot now filled with a shit load of malt the potential for boil over is at the peak. Using the big ass spoon stir that sucker till you’ve achieved the boil. Also it is around this point that you throw in the first batch of hops, known as the bittering hops. For the Irish Red it was a bag and a half. We’re going to let this baby boil for an hour.
For the next forty-five minuets you basically have to sit there and watch this thing boil and occasionally stir it with your big ass spoon. This is the part of the day that is by far the most boring and pain staking long. It is also a good point to crack open a few beers because the kitchen will be getting hot and you need to stay at your peak hydration levels.
I was unfortunately out of beer yesterday, so I had to make due with Coke.
At about the 15 min mark it is time to throw in some more hops. Austin Homebrew also included a small capsule called “Yeast Fuel” that I threw in at this time as well. I am not exactly sure what it does, but according to a lot of the guys on various homebrew forums it is supposed to do exactly what it says. This was also my first time using a whilfloc tablet which is supposed to help improve overall beer clarity. I’m aiming for a nice dark red beer that when you hold it up to the light you can see the neighbor’s house.
I also have a wort chiller that I throw in to the boil at this point to get it good and sanitized.
With 5 min left on the boil we need to throw the remaining hops in and make sure that the tablet and capsule have fully dissolved. When we reach the hour mark it is time turn the stove off and hook the wort chiller up to the sink.
It is important that we get our wort (for you non home brewers out there, that’s the technical term for that shit we’ve been watching for the last hour and praying won’t spill all over the stove top) from a boiling temp of 212 degrees down to a good 80 degrees in as short a time as possible. The wort chiller is coiled copper tubing that you hook one end up to the sink and run cold water through. Usually while I’m using the wort chiller I start grumbling around the house wishing that I had paid more attention during my fluid dynamics classes in college because it takes a lot of fucking energy to do a 132 degree shift in temperature. Truthfully it takes about twenty min but it seems like forever.
Once the wort is properly chilled it is time to pour it in to our 5 gallon bucket and then add another 2 gallons to make up our five gallons. Since you’ve had some water boil off in the form of steam (see this is becoming quite educational) you’ll probably be adding closer to two and a half gallons, but at this point who is really counting.
Finally the last and most important item needs to be added to bucket, our yeast. For this batch I decided to go with the WYEAST smack pack. I am a little worried about this yeast though because it did travel across the country from Texas via UPS and as of this evening there hasn’t been any activity in the bucket. But I’m going to hold off on a total freak out till tomorrow night. Anyway, rip open that pack and pour that sucker in. Close off the bucket and cap it off with an airlock.
If everything has gone according to plan we’ll have something to transfer in to a secondary fermenter in a week.
At this point all that is left to do is clean up the mess you’ve made in the kitchen. I tried to get my assistant brewer to do it but this was his reaction to my proposal.
It was a lazy Saturday back in July of 2010. My wife had just earlier that week gotten the infamous second pink line on the piss stick which confirmed that in nine months our sleep schedules were going to be seriously fucked. Living in Austin, TX at the time, I had a daily 60 mile commute that was an hour of open country. Still blissfully unaware that we would be moving back to the Great White North, we decided to drive down to San Marcos, TX and look around. I figured that at least San Marcos would cut half an hour each way off of my drive but still keep us near enough to Austin that we could partake in the debauchery of South by South West if we wanted. As we neared the center of town near the university I crossed an intersection only to have some mid 80′s land yacht of UAW iron slam directly in to the driver’s side door.