Beer School

Beer starts out as a tea. You need to make this tea by using a plant called barley, which has been malted and roasted.

Malting is a process by which the barley is wetted, allowed to germinate, and then is killed.

After that, it is roasted a little, or a lot depending on the flavor and color required. Most beer recipes will use 2-7 different varieties of barley in varying ratios, as well as some adjuncts that are not important right now.

After thee recipe is formulated and the grain is weighed out, you have to crush the grain up to just less than smithereens...

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After a few moments with the drill, the grain is rendered a flour and husk mixture for the next step...

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To be continued in next post....

The beer I'm making here is a simple pale ale. It uses 19 pounds of grain for a 10 gallon batch.

So, the inside of the grain starts out as a starch. We need it to be a sugar, We get from here to there by a process called mashing.

There are enzymes in the grains called alpha and beta amylase. These enzymes convert starches into simpler compounds. Humans use the same enzymes in their digestive systems. The sugars we're after in the mash are maltose, glucose, dextrose, etc.

These enzymes work when they're wet, and they work even better when they're wet and at a nice warm temperature.

As a rule of thumb, 140 degree mash temperatures will produce a more highly fermentable (dry) wort, wheras a 170 degree mash temp will produce a less fermentable but more sweet wort. BTW, wort is what beer is called before it is fermented....

A pale ale wants to be somewhere in th middle, so I used a target mash temp of 154.

So, you do some Maths to figure out how much of what temperature water you need to add to 19 pounds of 65.5 degree grain to end up at 154 degrees, and you get to 6.3 gallons at 164 degrees.

You then "strike" the ground up grains with the water, and mix it up.

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We do this in an insulated cooler, because it takes a while (45 min to an hour) for the enzymes to do their work, and you want it to remain as close to your target temp as possible for the duration.

Here is a much thicker mash, one hour later....

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To be continued......

Ok, so now there is this big pile of mess we call the mash in the cooler, and we somehow have to separate the liquid from the soggy grain. Well, there is a filter in the bottom of the cooler that does some of the work, and the grain husks do the rest.

A hose is hooked up to the outlet on the bottom of the cooler (the cooler is called a mash tun), and the clear sweet wort is drained into the boil kettle...

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Boiling the wort is required, because it is teeming with all kinds of nasty bacteria that needs to die in order for the beer not to suck.

The other reason we boil the wort is to add hop bittering and flavoring to balance out the sweet and the bitter of the beer...

I'll cover that in pat II of beer school......

i have a question about beer and i thought school was the best place to ask.

why when watching college party's on youporn do they always use those orange plastic cups, and why are they orange?

over here we settle for plain white.

Use to brew my own, though never went through the whole mashing from scratch, just used coopers extract kits and a few extra ingredients. I did have over 2000 bottles on the shelves once.

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My recipes...


Simmer hops in small saucepan in 750ml to 1L of water for 5 to 10 minutes.


Mix dry ingredients together in sealed container (eg a lettuce crisper).


Mix Kit, hot water, dry ingredients and strain hop water into fermenter, top up with cold water to 22.5L. Add yeast and stir then seal lid with airlock in place.



Notes :

The 1tsp of corn flour provides head retention, if using a 25L fermenter fill to 18L mark, then after 1 to 2 days top up to 22.5L mark to aviod frothing through airlock.

These recipes will produce a tasty powerful brew (5.5% alc/vol).

Following the above methods, the ingredients are substitutable. For example -

Superior Old Dark Ale -

1 can of Coopers Old
750g dextrose
500g dried light malt
15g Fuggles hop pellets
1 tsp corn flour

Final specific gravity - 1010

Awesome Amber Ale -

1 can of Coopers Draught
1Kg Dextrose
250g dried corn syrup
15g Cascade hop pellets
1 tsp corn flour

Final specific gravity - 1008

Coffee Stout -

1 can of Coooper Stout
1kg dried dark malt
500g dried corn syrup
100g Lyons Freeze dried Columbian Coffee (instant)
20g Fuggles hops
15ml liquorice extract
1tsp corn flour

Final specific gravity - 1016

Notes :

Brew as with other recipes but only top up to 18L
15L if using 25L fermenter, then top up to 18L after 1 to 2 days.

Alc/vol - 7.2%, this is a great rich winter brew, but be warned as this is 'morish' and the more you drink the less you sleep.

Incredible India Pale Ale -

1 can of Coopers IPA
1kg dextrose
250g dried corn syrup
10g Fuggles hops
10g Cascade hops
1tsp corn flour

Final specific gravity - 1008

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oooplayer1ooo wrote:i have a question about beer and i thought school was the best place to ask.

why when watching college party's on youporn do they always use those orange plastic cups, and why are they orange?

over here we settle for plain white.

Always a red solo cup. No other colors are acceptable......

This is a beer recepie for real men, We call it Bolt and it's usually made and consumed by kids who are too young to get real beer.

"Bultöl, or just bolt, is a primitive form of mash used to get drunk on, it's usually made ​​from only refined sugar, baker's yeast and water that is allowed to ferment in places with slightly raised room temperature, such as boiler or hot attics. In earlier times vessels was buried in a dunghill to accelerate the fermenting process while hiding the illegal handling.

Today it is common to use the so-called "turbo yeast" instead of regular yeast to get a higher alcohol content in less time.

The intention is usually for the product to be distilled into Moonshine spirits but since quite a high alcohol content is reached with the ingredients mentioned it happens that it's consumed in the raw state. Often with a strong laxative effect."

Mmmmmm, brings me back to my youth

rosve wrote:This is a beer recepie for real men, We call it Bolt and it's usually made and consumed by kids who are too young to get real beer.

"Bultöl, or just bolt, is a primitive form of mash used to get drunk on, it's usually made ​​from only refined sugar, baker's yeast and water that is allowed to ferment in places with slightly raised room temperature, such as boiler or hot attics. In earlier times vessels was buried in a dunghill to accelerate the fermenting process while hiding the illegal handling.

Today it is common to use the so-called "turbo yeast" instead of regular yeast to get a higher alcohol content in less time.

The intention is usually for the product to be distilled into Moonshine spirits but since quite a high alcohol content is reached with the ingredients mentioned it happens that it's consumed in the raw state. Often with a strong laxative effect."

Mmmmmm, brings me back to my youth

Oh, that should taste just lovely....
I heard a story that, in parts of Alaska where drinking any alcohol is illegal, this is how 'beer' is made and consumed, with really horrible effects on the locals.

tamoore wrote:
I heard a story that, in parts of Alaska where drinking any alcohol is illegal, this is how 'beer' is made and consumed, with really horrible effects on the locals.

Alcohol is illegal in some parts! Tell me more before I go there

The member 'Elton' has done the following action : Dices roll

'standard dice' : 5

have you progressed at all to spirits or just beer tam? my uncle makes the best vodka

and also an alcoholic ginger beer

oooplayer1ooo wrote:have you progressed at all to spirits or just beer tam? my uncle makes the best vodka

and also an alcoholic ginger beer

Illegal in the states to make your own spirits.

I mean, I could, and wouldn't worry about getting caught, but I don't really like drinking liquor and much prefer beer anyway....

tamoore wrote:

Illegal in the states to make your own spirits.

I figure nobody told TN, KY or the Carolina's

Elton wrote:

tamoore wrote:
I heard a story that, in parts of Alaska where drinking any alcohol is illegal, this is how 'beer' is made and consumed, with really horrible effects on the locals.

Alcohol is illegal in some parts! Tell me more before I go there

Some parts of Alaska, home to a large native population. I had no idea until I saw it on the TV. Alcoholism is super common up there, I guess.

Nothing up there but cold, snow and ice. Might as well drink. Rubbing alcohol.

I'll stay clear of those parts then!

tamoore wrote:

oooplayer1ooo wrote:have you progressed at all to spirits or just beer tam? my uncle makes the best vodka

and also an alcoholic ginger beer

Illegal in the states to make your own spirits.

I mean, I could, and wouldn't worry about getting caught, but I don't really like drinking liquor and much prefer beer anyway....

land of the free and home of the brave, except NO SPIRIT DISTILLING !

oooplayer1ooo wrote:

tamoore wrote:

oooplayer1ooo wrote:have you progressed at all to spirits or just beer tam? my uncle makes the best vodka

and also an alcoholic ginger beer

Illegal in the states to make your own spirits.

I mean, I could, and wouldn't worry about getting caught, but I don't really like drinking liquor and much prefer beer anyway....

land of the free and home of the brave, except NO SPIRIT DISTILLING !

Was illegal to brew beer until Jimmy Carter made it legal in 1976.

Beer School: CONTINUED.

So, now we have a tub full of sweet wort, and we need to turn it into a condensed sweet substance without anything living in it, and with some hop flavor and aroma isomerized into it.

We do this with by boiling it. Most of the time, wort is boiled for 1 hour. On some special occasions, it's boiled for 90 minutes, but the pale ale I made here was a typical 1 hour boil.

Boiling does the following thing:

1) Boils off extra water, raising the specific gravity of the wort.
2) Kills the nasty stuff that would otherwise make the beer taste like vinegar.
3) Gives us an opportunity to introduce hops at different times during the boil to enhance and balance the flavor.


1 and 2 are pretty straight forward, but 3 is kind of interesting.

So, Hops are a flower that have wonderful biter and aromatic properties. When formulating a beer recipe, the goal is to 'balance' the beer between the residual sweetness of the wort, and the perceived bitterness of the hops. A beer that is too sweet will be 'cloying', and hard to drink, and a beer that is overly bitter won't be pleasing to the palate.

There are several varieties of hops that generate different flavors and aromas. English hops tend to be more earthy with overtones of green grass, straw, dirt, must, etc., while American varieties are known for bright flavors and aromas of citrus, flowering plants, mint, etc.

Generally, every hop can be used in three ways. As a bittering hop, as a flavoring hop, and as an aroma hop. The rule of thumb is: The longer the hop has been in the boil, the more bittering it will leave behind, and the less time the hop spends in the boil, the more aroma it will leave behind. This has to do with how the alpha acids (the stinky shit in the hop flowers) are isomerized. When you put the hops in the boil early, all of the flavor and aroma are boiled off by the end, but the bittering has had plenty of time to hold on. When you put them in late in the boil, the flavor and aroma don't have time to boil off and the bittering never takes hold. Hops added between 30 minutes and 50 minutes produce more flavor, as it's a combination of bittering and aroma, as a bit of each are left behind.

See?

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Here is the boil kettle after the first hop addition. It smells fantastic. I'm not even kidding.

My recipe has 4.5 oz. of hops.

1oz at boil start. (Columbus)
.5oz at 30 minutes. (Columbus)
1oz at 45 minutes. (Cascade)
2oz at 0 minutes. (Cascade). These are called 'flameout' hops, and are all about the aroma.

After this boil, we need to get the wort down from boiling to under 140 degrees as fast as we can. This is done in my system by putting a 50 foot coil of copper into the kettle, and running cold water through it.

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Eventually, we'll get this down to 65 degrees, and then it's on to the yeast, and fermentation process.

To Be Continued.

Beer School Part III: Fermentation I - yeast.

Up until now, nothing that has been done means much of anything. Beer is ultimately made or wrecked in the fermentation process.

Yeast is quite an organism. The yeasts we use for brewing are very specialized strains, developed over thousands of years by human selection. The yeasts are so pure, that most of what we pitch have very little genetic drift from the versions pitched 60 or even in some cases, several hundred years ago.

Brewers yeasts differ from bread and other wild yeasts, in that they've been selected to only eat simple sugars, and leave the complex ones behind. What is 'left behind' becomes much of the flavor and mouth-feel you experience. Brewers yeast also will clean up several flavors in the wort that we don't really want there, and leave behind very little of their own byproducts, other than the ones we enjoy (Alcohol and C02).

There are dozens of styles of yeasts for doing different styles of beer. For my purposes here, I'll explain two. Ale yeast, and Lager yeast.

Ale yeast is a top fermenting yeast, and it has been coached to ferment at warmer temperatures (65-72 degrees). Ale yeast will generally impart some flavoring to the beer, though there are strains of ale yeast that are flavor neutral. Ale's are known for their complex flavors. A correct pitch of ale yeast into a batch of wort should fully ferment in about four days. After that, a couple of weeks of conditioning is required before the beer is ready to be bottled or kegged.

Lager yeast is a bottom fermenting strain, and it works best at cold temperatures, and requires a much longer fermenting process of six weeks or more. Lager yeasts are very flavor neutral, and will impart no yeast flavors in the beer at all if properly fermented and conditioned. Most American beers (Budweiser, Miller, Coors, Etc.) are Lagers. They are known for their clean, light, and crisp taste - although with certain recipes, can also be complex. Oktoberfest is a lager, for example

So, I don't mess with lagers. I don't like 'em much, and they take too long to make and require special equipment or conditions to maintain the lower temperatures for a month and a half at a time.

Beer School IV: Fermentation II.

So, my beer is a pale ale, which is generally a style where yeast flavorings are not appropriate. I'm using a strain called 001, Cal Ale, 1056, etc. It's the Sierra Nevada strain of liquid yeast.

In order to get the yeast ready to ferment a large batch of beer, you often make what is called a yeast starter. I make mine 24 to 36 hours before I brew. It's essentially a tiny beer that you introduce the dormant yeast to in order to get their numbers up, get them healthy, and make an army ready to attack the wort and make quick work of it.

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The starter is made with some water, some dry malt extract, and some yeast nutrient. Boil for 15 minutes, chill to 70 degrees, and then put the yeast in and place it on a stir plate (to keep the yeast in suspension).

The white stuff settled on the bottom of this container is the yeast, and that is enough to ferment 5 gallons very nicely.

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Now that we have the yeast we want, we're ready to let them have the honor of crafting our delicious beer!

This is a really cool thread and I never realized how much work is involved in making beer. I think Lipton needs to invent the Instant Mug-A-Beer.

EDIT: I spoke too soon - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

But you have to click on the Get Yours buttons to get the full details of how to get it.

EDIT 2:
How about that!
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Somebody thinks like I do... I wonder if people point and laugh at him too.