How Clear Is Your Beer?

Beer is more than just a great tasting beverage.  While many choose not to partake, beer is a large part of the American--indeed, even the human--experience.  Benjamin Franklin famously said "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."  The fact that a culture has grown up around the joy of making and enjoying fine beer testifies to how much beer has become part of our culture.  Enjoying beer is about far more than just the taste of the brew itself.  Beer is an experience, very much about where you have your beer, the company with whom you drink it, what you drink it out of, and how the beer looks in the glass.  And while you as a home brewer cannot control many of those factors, you can control the quality of the beer you make so it not only tastes great but is visually appealing as well.

If you pour a commercial beer from a bottle or a can, you may not be aware of how much those beer makers put into not just the taste but the affect your other senses have on the beer drinking experience.  The way the beer pours.  The aroma as you pour it.  The head of foam that wells up in your mug. How the beer looks in the glass.  These are all just as important as the beer's flavor.  The emphasis the big beer producers put on ascetics is so extreme that they even make the sound the can makes when you "pop a cold one" to be unique because they know that sound alone can prepare you to receive the taste of a great beer drinking experience.

The truth is none of that will change whether the beer itself is of high quality or is good to drink, but visual appeal matters.  One area of visual appeal that you have some control over when making your own beer at home is clarity.  Clarity simply refers to how the beer looks in the glass.  If you can see through the beer and it is a consistent beige or amber color, that is visually appealing.  But if things are floating around in the beer, even if they are perfectly harmless byproducts of the brewing process, that can diminish how inviting your beer is to enjoy and even diminish how enjoyable the beer is to drink even if the beer itself is of high quality.

A lot of the "stuff" that floats around in beer comes from the yeast that is crucial to the fermentation process, which makes beer beer.  Some yeasts are better than others about settling out of the beer during fermentation.  Another source of visible material in the beer comes from what is referred to as non-microbiological particles or NMPs which are a byproduct of the brewing process.  Again, none of these visible materials are harmful to consume nor do they reduce the value of the beer.  They just look bad and hurt the clarity of the beer which is one way beer is measured for quality.
Many of the NMPs are introduced during the initial creation of the wort which is phase one of any brewing operation.  The wort is boiled at a high temperature for a significant enough period of time to cause the proteins in the ingredients to break down and become part of the fluidity of the wort rather than remain in a substance state or a "floc" which remains visible in the finished product.  To avoid this make sure your boil sustains a temperature of 215F for 60-90 minutes to assure complete processing of the proteins.

Another important brewing step that you can do to reduce visible agents in your beer is to cool the wort very quickly.  It is, of course, advisable to cool your wort quickly anyway in order to get the yeast working as soon as possible and avoid hang time that allows bacteria and wild yeasts to contaminate your brew.  But by bringing the temperature down rapidly, the clarity is vastly enhanced as well.  When you transfer the cooled wort into your fermentation vessel, be sure to leave behind the debris that is in the bottom of the brewing kettle--in addition to spent hops, there is what is called "cold break," which has a lot of solidified proteins that lead to cloudy beer.  As a beginning home brewer, I used several methods to cool my wort--ice baths in the kitchen sink, leaving the wort in a sealed fermenter outside overnight, and even sinking the hot kettle in a snowbank for an hour or so, but by far the best method, for a minimal investment of money, is an immersion chiller.  This is a simple apparatus made of metal (usually copper) tubing coiled up so it fits into your brewing pot, and some rubber hose or tubing.  Cold water flows in one end, takes on heat transferred from the hot wort liquid, and comes out hot on the other end.  A simple wort chiller can bring five gallons of boiling wort down to yeast pitching temperature in ten to fifteen minutes.  A scaled-up version of the wort chiller is the counter flow chiller, but while highly recommended for being faster and more efficient at chilling your wort, a regular single-direction immersion chiller is certainly sufficient and gives you plenty of bang for your buck.

Finings, or additives, are another option for keeping your beer clear.  Irish moss, isinglass, gelatin, and bentonite are all products added either during the boil or after fermentation that clear your beer (or wine, in some cases!) at the microscopic level.

If you want to get really involved in clearing your brew, there's always filtration, which we'll talk about in more depth another time.

Seeking beer clarity can become a major passion of yours as a home brewer and there is a whole science to using clarifying agents such as Irish Moss to enhance beer clarity without diminishing beer quality or taste.  Learning good techniques for making your beer clear and appealing is just another step in your ongoing quest to become the best amateur beer maker possible.  And that is a quest worth pursuing!

Brewing on a Budget--The Poor Man's Guide Learning to Brew Beer at Home

For a true beer lover, one of the most rewarding hobbies is brewing your own signature beer.  Once you get set up with the equipment and basic supplies, it’s a fairly affordable hobby and you will get a lot of entertainment value out of going through the brewing and fermentation process.  The real enjoyment, however, comes from the sense of pride you get from watching the enjoyment on friends' faces when they taste a beer that you made.

One of the hold ups that keep many people from getting into home brewing is the startup cost.  Let's face it--if you've ever taken a tour of a brewery seen the huge machines and storage tanks, it can be hard to see how you can make beer in your kitchen with just a few simple devices.  Fortunately, there is an entire home brewing subculture that has risen up based entirely on being able to make beer in small batches and at relatively low costs.  It's legal, it's fun, and brewing beer can become a major hobby as well.

All that said, it's true that the initial costs can be a bit intimidating.  The cost of the pots, fermenters and other specialized equipment can run into several hundred dollars.  It's risky to sink that kind of money into a new hobby before you even know if you will enjoy making beer, whether the beer you make will be drinkable, or if you will stick with it.  And during a time when we need most of what we earn just to get by, that is a risk that may be holding you back from getting into the hobby.

Of course one natural solution is to get your first exposure and training in making beer with someone else's equipment.  Once you start poking around on home brewing websites and places where the equipment and supplies to make beer are sold in your town, you can find out about clubs and societies that are full of people who have taken the plunge and are making beer all the time right in their own homes. 

These people love home brewing, and they can become real boosters for their hobby.  Ask if you can sit in on their next brewing session.  With very little encouragement, you can enjoy some Saturdays in their shop or kitchen learning how to brew beer with someone who already knows the process.  This kind of experience is priceless because you learn what to look for in equipment, as well as what is essential and what is merely optional.  You can go through the brewing process and learn a lot about how to make actual beer that is drinkable, and what pitfalls to avoid.  Meanwhile, you may not have spent any more than the cost of lunch for your friend, and maybe a bag or two of pretzels for the tasting party when the beer is done.

When you are ready to get started brewing on your own, your knowledge of what you really need will pay off in a big way.  You still don't have to pay top dollar for the equipment to get up and running.  Lots of people get started with making beer, and then for a variety of reasons, their hobby stops suddenly.  The outcome is that there is a pretty brisk market out there for used basic home brewing equipment.  You can find discounted equipment in new or like new condition for sale on eBay or
Craigslist all the time.  Don't overlook the local sources like home brewing clubs and associations--they may have bulletin boards with listings from people who want to sell or upgrade their own equipment.  Pawn shops in the area are another great resource.

Another great way to save money is to go in with a friend or family member and split the costs all the way down the line.  This makes brewing beer more fun and social, and each of you can have the equipment and supplies home at different times.   If you each learn to make good beer separately, you can also make great beer together!  And who knows--you may get so good at it that you start selling your beer to local pubs.  When the big bucks come rolling in from that, your investment in learning to
brew beer will have been well worth it!

Upgrading to a 5-gallon System

Greetings Alehounds! Alemonger here.

So, I promised you last time that I'd tell you about upgrading to a 5-gallon homebrewing system. Upgrading your equipment and your batch size can have a huge effect on the overall quality of your beer. After about nine or ten batches with the Mr. Beer kit for homebrewing beer, I realized that I was in this hobby to stay, and that it was time for bigger and better equipment. I did some research and some talking to my local homebrew guy (yeah, we became pretty good friends!), and I learned that five gallons is sort of the standard homebrew batch size.

I searched around and settled on a homebrew equipment kit very much like this one, which includes most of what you need to make some excellent beers from ingredient kits. This kit includes the Fermtech Auto Siphon, which makes transfers from the fermenter to the bottling bucket a simple task. It's also got a brewing book, 6.5 gallon primary fermenting bucket with lid, bottling bucket with a spigot, fermentation thermometer, bottle filler, 5ft of 5/16in flex vinyl tubing, hydrometer, bottle capper, bottle Brush, 3 piece airlock, and sanitizer.  You may want to pick up some Beer Bottle Caps as well.  The great thing about a kit like this is that you can further upgrade your equipment and improve your beer later on without replacing any of what you already have.

The first few beers I made with this kit were just as easy to make as the ones I did with Mr. Beer (See my Homebrew Beer Recipes page), but were of far better quality because of the larger batches.

Now, I tend to prefer hoppy beers over malty ones, so I picked up a Muntons Gold India Pale Ale Home Brew Beer Ingredient Kit from my local brew shop. Like the Mr. Beer kits, this is a pre-hopped malt extract kit in two cans and a packet of dry yeast. The process goes like this:

-"Wake up" the yeast by pouring it into a small sanitized container (a coffee mug will do) with some lukewarm water and a teaspoon of sugar. Set this aside for later;
-Sanitize your primary fermentation bucket (VERY IMPORTANT!);
-Pour the contents of the two cans into the bucket. I recommend soaking the cans in some hot water first to soften the malt syrup and make it pour a little easier;
-Pour boiling water--about two gallons or a little more--into the bucket on top of the extract;
-Top off the remaining volume of the bucket to the five gallon mark with cold water;
-Check the temperature of the wort to see if it is within the zone tolerated by the yeast (this can be found on the yeast packet or in the kit instructions). Set the bucket aside to cool if necessary;
-Measure the sugar content with the hydrometer (see the instructions included with it). This can take a little practice!
-Record the measurement someplace you won't lose it. You're measuring Specific Gravity, but in this case, this measurement is called Original Gravity, or O.G. It will help you later to determine your beer's alcohol content. Now would be a good time to get a notebook and start a Beer Log if you haven't already done so!
-If your wort is cool enough, pour the yeast mixture from step one into it, and cap the bucket tightly. Place the airlock with a little bit of water in it into the hole on the top of the bucket. Set the bucket aside, preferably someplace cool and dark and out of the way.

Almost as easy as making jello, huh?

After a day or two, you may notice the airlock bubbling rather vigorously--this is completely normal!  When the airlock stops bubbling or slows to one bubble every minute or so, take a measurement with your hydrometer. When this measurement reads the same on two consecutive days, your beer is ready to bottle.

You may want to bribe a friend with beer to get him or her to help you out on bottling day. Wash and sanitize some bottles. About 50 12-oz. bottles will probably do, but you may want to do a few extra, just in case!  You can either use plastic PET bottles as I mentioned in another post, or buy/reuse amber glass beer bottles. If you're using glass, make sure not to use twist-off bottles (Coors, Bud Light, Bud, etc.), but only use the kind where you have to pry off the caps (Sam Adams, Bass, etc.). Transfer your beer to the sanitized bottling bucket using the Auto Siphon (this is called racking), and mix in the proper amount of priming sugar indicated in the kit instructions. Attach the bottle filler to the spigot on the bottling bucket (this step is easier if you place the bucket on a table with the spigot hanging over the edge. Use the bottle filler as the kit instructions state to fill your bottles, and then cap them tightly with the bottle capper if using glass bottles, or plastic caps if using PET plastic bottles.

Put the capped bottles in a cool dark place and leave them alone for a week or two, then chill and enjoy!

Start at the Beginning

Greetings Alehounds--Alemonger here.

There are no two brewers out there with exactly the same tastes or levels of brewing knowledge and experience.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I resisted for a long time becoming a brewer because I thought it was not only complex, but also expensive.  My simplest response to that is while it can be both, it needn't be either.  With that in mind, I'd like to take you back a few years to when I started homebrewing beer to prove that it can be a very simple and inexpensive yet rewarding hobby even at its most basic levels.  I'll also walk you through a few of my earliest adventures in homebrewing, and share a trick or two I discovered along the way.

It all started in 2002.  I had a new job in a new city, and new points of view on a lot of things.  Once I got set up in my new place, I started exploring the area and found out there was a homebrewing supply store just a few blocks from my apartment.  I stopped by one day, and when I walked through the door the first thing I noticed was the aroma.  No, it didn't smell like beer, but it was intoxicating.  The exotic air tickling my nostrils spoke of grain and spice and sweetness and, as I found out later, pure awesome!

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I was a clean slate the day I stepped through that door, an empty mug.  I found myself confronted with an amazing array of items: sacks of grain and powdery stuff, hops, yeast, and cans of syrup, buckets and beakers and bottles, oh my!  I had no idea where to begin.

Apparently the blank stare on my face labeling me as a first-timer was nothing new to the gentleman behind the counter.  Long story short, I walked out with a Mr. Beer Home Microbrewery System.  Looking back now, I realize that the shop owner could have up-sold me and made three times as much as he did on that sale, but in me he seemed to recognize someone who was on the fence.  He'd probably heard a thousand times the same story I've heard about the brother or cousin or uncle or buddy who'd tried making beer once upon a time, only to have it turn out horrible.  He knew the kit was a high quality, yet inexpensive place for beginners to learn about the craft of brewing.

Unpacking the kit, I found a two and a half gallon fermenter; an ingredient kit with a can of pre-hopped malt extract, a packet of brewers' yeast, and a "Booster Pack" of brewer's sugar; some PET plastic screw-top bottles for the finished product; and a recipe book with a short explanation of the brewing process.  A single ingredient kit for this system is good for about a case of beer--that is, twenty four 12 oz. bottles.  Using this kit is as simple as boiling water and combining all the ingredients together in the brewing container.  It is probably one of the most basic types of kit out there, and I highly recommend it as a way to dabble a little and find out if brewing is something you want to explore more.  You can always get bigger and better equipment, as I eventually did; on the other hand, if you decide that brewing is not your mug of ale, you're out less than fifty bucks.

A great aspect of the Mr. Beer system is how cheaply expandable it is with a little ingenuity.  When I realized that the fermenter was nothing more than a barrel-shaped plastic jug with a spigot, I went to Wal-Mart and tripled my brewing capacity for about the cost of a good twelve pack.  After that, I was able to stagger my batches and have three different ones fermenting at the same time.

When it came to packaging, I found that the bottles included in the Mr. Beer kit were useful, but functionally not much different from other PET plastic bottles.  At the time, I lived in a place where the tap water had way too much chlorine, so I just happened to have a couple of cases of 12 oz. bottles of Dasani spring water.  Batch after batch, I used the water (which was just enough) to brew the beer, and the bottles (also just enough) to store it.  Put a teaspoon of sugar in the bottom of each bottle, fill with beer and screw the cap on tightly--a week or so later, your beer is carbonated and ready to enjoy!  Two warnings, though, if you're re-using water bottles as I did:  first, most beer bottles are colored brown in order to keep out sunlight that can change the flavor of your beer, so store any beer bottled in clear water bottles in a dark place; and second, some bottled water companies have changed their packaging over the last few years in order to use less plastic, so it's possible that the ones on the market now might not stand up to the pressure that develops in beer during the carbonation process.

Well, that's it!  In my next post, I'll talk about stepping up to a five-gallon brewing setup, and to more complex brews.  If you've brewed with Mr. Beer before, leave me a comment and tell me all about it.  And don't forget to check out my Recipes page, where I've got recipes for all the beers I've made, including these first few with Mr. Beer ingredient kits.

Happy Brewing!

Five Easy Steps to Brewing

Greetings, Alehounds--Alemonger here.

You know, for a long time I wanted to be a homebrewer, but I held off because I thought it was such an involved process that I was scared away. I suspect many budding homebrewers are in the same boat, so I want to share some of my thoughts on how to begin.

I'd first like to address the notion that homebrewing is or has to be difficult. Sure, it can be as complicated or involved as you want, but in its most basic form it's as easy as cooking, and just as rewarding! I posted a basic explanation of how beer is made a couple of posts ago, so check that out along with these five easy steps, and you could be having your first homebrew in just a few days.

Five Easy Steps to Homebrewing

• Equipment.  It all starts with selecting the right equipment. Home brewing will not be successful if you are not armed with the right equipment. Now don't be distracted by the costs associated with buying these items--for less than $100 you can have your own basic set of tools that you can use to make many batches of great beer. At a minimum, to start out you'll need a brewing bucket, air lock (which lets carbon dioxide out, but doesn't let outside air come back in), bottles, and a big cooking pot--two gallons or bigger.  You should have a hydrometer as well.  There is more equipment available out there that you can get later, but this will get you started.

• Ingredients. You can either buy the ingredients separately, or pick up an ingredient kit from one of the many homebrew supply companies out there. If you're a first time brewer, I'd suggest using a kit for whatever style of beer you find most appealing. The kit should include the malt extract, hops, and yeast at a minimum, plus a set of instructions on how to use these ingredients. Additionally, the kit may include a mesh muslin or cheesecloth bag for infusing the hops, brewing sugar for the bottling process, specialty grains, and spices or flavorings if applicable to your beer.

• Preparing the beer. This is where the cooking part comes in. Start by making sure all your equipment is cleaned and sanitized. I cannot overstress the importance of cleanliness in brewing--there's nothing more disappointing than spending time and money to make a great beer, only to have it contaminated by bacteria or wild yeasts. Following the directions that come with your kit, start with one to two gallons of water in your cooking pot and heat it to the proper temperature. You will then add the malt extract and bring to a boil. Once the wort (that's what it's called before it becomes beer!) is boiling, add the hops and other ingredients according to the schedule in the instructions--the boil should go for about an hour. It's very important during process this that you stay close and keep stirring--all that sweet syrupy goodness can make quite a nasty mess if it boils over, and if you look away even for a minute, chances are that it will! Once the boil is done, it is important that you cool down the wort as quickly as you can. More advanced brewers will use fancy counterflow chilling aparatus, but when I started out, I used a simple ice-water bath in the kitchen sink. When the wort is cool enough, pour it into the brewing bucket, add cold water to make the proper volume, and add the yeast--this step is called pitching the yeast. Cap the bucket and add the airlock.

• Monitoring the fermenting process. This is where the yeast does its job. There is little to do but wait during this process, which takes anywhere from a week to a month, depending on a host of factors. Just make sure the temperature stays constant, and check daily to see if carbon dioxide is still bubbling out of the air lock.  When this stops, or slows down to about one bubble a minute, it's time to check the beer with a hydrometer. We'll talk about this tool in another post, but for now, just use it to measure the specific gravity of your beer. When the reading is the same on two consecutive days, you're ready to bottle.

• Priming and Bottling. There are lots of options for packaging your beer. When I started out, I reused 12 ounce plastic water bottles, which worked great. You can also purchase or re-use glass beer bottles. Some advanced brewers will even keg their beer, which saves time. Priming the beer means adding a small amount of sugar to the beer to "wake up" the yeast cells for a small amount of fermentation. The primed beer is then put into bottles, which are capped tightly. Meanwhile, the yeast cells consume the priming sugar and make carbon dioxide, which goes into solution inside the capped bottles, creating carbonation. This process takes about a week or so. After that, chill a few down, open one up, and enjoy!