The Sheer Joy of Brewing

[Cheesey]

Really good. Thanks for sharing. Now will be researching hangover potential and stir plates!

Again thanks from me to all JBK contributors , tomorrow I am on my 6th AG brew , GW' s Boltmaker and would not have got any where near with out everyone's help

Cheers C

[Cully]

Great read, reinforces my feelings about wanting to get back in to Brewing and taking it further.

[Dave S]

Yeah, good post that. I'm interested in experimenting with hop tea too. Think I'll give it a go in a month or so when I start brewing some summer ales.

[6470zzy]

A truly felt thank you to you for such a good post.

Cheers

[micmacmoc]

Wonderfully eloquent post! Its the hangover reduction bit I am looking at...oh and the fermentation temperatures.... Oh and the...here we go again. Obsession for sure and andyco, really relate to your looking around the shop for brewing related ideas!

[faeyd]

I've just started reading my book on water. Do the open university offer brewing degrees yet because I have never studied so hard for so long since I started this hobby

[MarkA]

Brilliant post!! I am just 13 AG brews in and have found the expertise shared on JBK very helpful and insightful

[Kinley]

Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad everyone enjoyed reading it post. Charles1968 asked for a recipe and I had prepared the following for a friend in Switzerland getting into brewing. It is a rather lengthy post! This is what works in my set up and to my taste but I've not written it to say that it is the correct way or that it can't be improved. I would love some of the more experience brewers to do the same so I could learn from their tricks and tips.

Beer is far more than the ingredient list. Think of all the different styles of bread that all start with flour, water, salt and yeast. When writing the recipe I was sure that what went into the beer was less important than what you did with it. While I design my beers on the computer, they are made in the brewery. It is a biological process and the way to keep things constant is to keep as many things constant as possible. Thus biological variation, which will always occur (particularly in my set up), is minimised thus design changes in the beer can be allowed to express themselves. The joy with hop teas is that beers can be adjusted to taste if the ingredients or process haven't delivered.


Stag Ale

26 litres

4.3Kg Pale Malt
400g Pale Crystal
250g Wheat Malt

First Wort Hops (FWH): 12g Challenger, 20g Fuggles, 10g Golding

15 Minute to to: 10g Styrian golding, 10g Cascade, Protofloc

Flame out: 20g Cascade, 30g Styrian

Hop tea: 50% Styrian G, 30% Cascade, 20% Challenger (vary absolute quantities as required)

Note on grains. I usually use Crisp Maris Otter finding improved efficiency over Fawcett with little difference in taste. Using Golden Promise gives a deeper malt flavour with increased biscuit notes but lower efficiency. I like GP and use it for 80/- as a preference. Changing from pale to normal crystal has surprisingly little effect on taste but most people prefer the lighter colour (I prefer the darker). To my surprise I find wheat malt better than torrified wheat for head retention. This was Rob's suggestion at The Malt Miller (he had run out of TW). I aim for 4.4%. I found a significant improvement in shelf life compared to 4.2%, my preferred strength, when kept in plastic barrels.

Note on hops. Precise quantities vary depending on the alpha content. I build the recipe on Beer Engine adding the flame out hops as 5 minute additions. I aim for 30-33 IBU depending on how long I expect to cask it. Longer needs higher IBU. For Styrian I prefer Bobek; Celeia tastes a bit soapy to me. Using 150g+ hops for 26l does not make this a budget beer.

Hop tea. This is a really important step subject to much variation. Think of how many ways there are to brew a cup of tea and how different the ways taste. I'm no expert here and am still experimenting but here are some observations. Cooler teas (60C) extract more 'hop leafiness' aromas. Warmer teas (80C) extract more fruit and bitterness. Longer soaks (7days) extract more flavour of both leafiness and fruit. A tea of 50g hops infused at 80C for 1 week adds about 5 IBU to a 26l batch. A tea of 50g hops at 60C for 4 days adds almost no IBU. I prefer warmer teas at the moment. Sterilise the container, boil then cool the water, store at room temperature in a dark place. Mould starts to grow at about 2 weeks.

Water treatment. I've been lucky to always live in places with nice water – Glasgow and Derbyshire. I brewed for a few years just treating water as per Graham's water treatment calculator for bitter. However I started Burtonising the water and what a revelation! Much smoother beers.

Doughing in: Important to get the temperature down to mash temperature quickly so 2/3 goes straight in stirring furiously followed by the last 1/3 over 30 seconds. Rake the mash with the paddle for a few minutes to remove those dry clumps which kill the mash efficiency.

Mashing. I use a straight (i.e. unconverted) coolbox. Aiming for 68C I lose about a degree in summer and 1.5-2 in winter, even with it stood on polystyrene and wrapped in my old sleeping bag. I have always done 90 minutes but the last one (in a massive hurry) I did for 60 mins and had no reduction in efficiency and curiously no change in the body of the beer.

Sparging. I no longer mash out. Two reasons. Firstly adding boiling water to the mash tun (required to get the temperature up to 80C) extracted tannin from the grain. Secondly I had to add quite a bit of water to get it up to temperature which, somehow, decreased the overall brewhouse efficiency. I think this was because the sparging became less effective due to lower volumes used. I have a fly sparger and water is at 80C. Getting a steady throughput is essential with with plastic taps is a bit fiddly: letting it fill then drain drops the efficiency. I used to measure the wort, stopping at 1.010 but now know that using 13l for the mash, 23l for the sparge and stopping with the boiler nearly full achieves this with my kit. Using the dregs from the sparge improves efficiency but adds a bready-biscuity taste to the beer: most wouldn't notice but I do so I have stopped this.

The run off goes straight into the boiler containing the FWH. This was a great JBK suggestion and really does provide smoother bittering. The element goes on as soon as it is covered. Boil is 90 minutes. I have tried 60 minutes a few times and I prefer the longer boiled beers. I don't know why but it is not to do with smoother bittering. It might be due to stronger malty flavours. I would take these observations with a pinch of salt though.

I cool with an immersion coil gently agitated and it takes 15 mins to get down to 17C in the winter (20 mins in summer). Run off is no longer aerated as I'm not convinced I make any difference to the finished beer. How much aeration is really achieved with a paddle anyway? And is it important with large pitches? Yeast is added during run off.

I use Mr Malty for most calculations. I re-pitch yeast with a few caveats. If it is older than 6 weeks it does not get reused. Any off smells or tastes, ditto. I reuse max 5 times. There's no science to this at all just a feeling. However in practice a tend to brew 5 batches in a month then not need to brew for a bit. Thus I chuck the yeast and start again with a new phial. I always start new batches on the magnetic stirrer. I will allow a 5l batch to ferment out, pour off the supernatant and pitch. Apparently this is wrong and I should be pitching after 36h. However with small batches in my brewery I don't want to add such a volume of broth have yet to find a way around this. Perhaps I could repitch into 1l then add after 36h? If the yeast has been stored longer and I want to use it, I have the option of counting cells but this is rare. I usually pitch cool (17-18C) then warm up (20C). Again with caveats. If I want to use temperature over 20C, I find increased risk of chlorophenols with a cool initial pitch so pitch at 19-20C. However I'm no expert here and there is a vast wealth of information on yeast available to us now which I need to read more of.

Temperature control is the classic STC1000 in a freezer with a tube heater. I tape the probe the the barrel two thirds of the way up then wrap a bandage around the barrel to keep it on. Having checked with a thermometer this was the most accurate position. If the probe becomes detached the temperature of the beer can be 2-3C above what you want. Additionally putting the probe at the top of the barrel leads, counter-intuitively the the beer being too warm. Two chlorophenol-ruined batches happened before I figured this out.

Every brew ferments out in 5 days and I no longer get sticking at 1.020 with the above temperature and pitching protocols. I allow to cool over 24 hours to 10C (or ambient temperature if it is cold) and it sits for 5 days before racking to barrel. I flush with CO2 before transferring to cask and add the hop tea to taste at this stage. Adding it earlier means some of the flavour is stripped by the yeast. Furthermore it is difficult to judge the bitterness with yeast in suspension as they increase perceived bitterness. I also add 50g dextrose and allow the beer a week indoors to condition. I am happy allowing a pressure of 2-3PSI to build up in the plastic barrels I use. Cornies are reserved for other styles of beer. The 'carbonation' (imperceptible in the poured pint) dries the beer a little and adds a really nice head when pulled through a sparkler. I know its not the done thing but I like it and this beer was designed for it! I leave the beer for a minimum of 6 weeks in every case, often longer and I don't fine because I'm convinced this strips flavour and body. It's also because I've never found gelatine or Kwik-Clear to work that well but then I rarely move the casks after clearing. Bottling requires a redesign of the beer and I hate it so mainly casks for me. I use a Maxi 310 recirc via water jacket to serve the beer at cellar temperature.

Everything that touches the beer is sterilised. I still use chlorine based sterilisers but will be converting soon to Starsan. I clean with a detergent first then the steriliser, particularly important when using chlorine-based cleaners as these are rapidly inactivated by organic material.

So there you are: my (almost certainly) imperfect brewing way. I always appreciate feedback and maybe someone will take something away from this and make better beer. And as I said it would be nice if some of the better brewers on JBK could do something similar.

[andyCo]

A tea of 50g hops infused at 80C for 1 week adds about 5 IBU

Sorry if this sounds dumb but are you saying you keep the hops soaking at 80c for one week ......

Andy

[Kinley]

Sorry. Infuse at 80C then leave at room temp for 7d.

[Charles1968]

Thanks for the Stag Ale recipe, looks like a classic English bitter. Do you use Burton yeast for that one?

[Kinley]

Burton works beautifully and is my yeast of choice for this. However Fuller's (which is what is bubbling away at the moment) is another good choice.

[IPA]

Temperature control is STC1000 and have allowed a lot of playing with yeast as well as some lovely Octoberfest Marzen and Vienna beers. Indeed insights into equipment use have allowed my very basic plastic bucket set up to be optimised giving 80% brewhouse efficiency. JBK stopped me thinking of brewing as a money saving exercise (which it still most certainly turns out to be) and more as a hobby. Nay, passion I will eventually increase capacity to 50l if only to allow me to fill two cornies with one brew. I will also (eventually) use pumps to save the lifting but ultimately I have no problem with my small plastic kit. Lots of experimentation that I couldn't do so readily with longer brews and any damage is cheaply rectified. It's reassuring to see others brew with similar kit.

Make the jump to 57 litres as I did recently and you can fill 3 cornies with nothing left over.

[Monkeybrew]

Sorry. Infuse at 80C then leave at room temp for 7d.

Can I start by saying what a great read this post has been

More questions on the hop tea thing - When you say leave at room temperature for 7 days, I take it that's after you've added it to the brew?

I was thinking about making a hop tea before bottling, and then using it to dissolve my batch priming sugar in before adding it to my bottling FV.

Cheers

MB

[WalesAles]

Great Post!
Hobby, Obsession, Religion, Whatever, it can take over your life!
Someone posted on here about Polaris Hops, I`ve never heard of them or used them, so I immediately bought some! Why, I don`t know!

WA