Lee's Homebrew

A Lesson in Extract brewing

1. Basic equipment and supplies:
        a six gallon plastic or glass container
        a five gallon glass carboy
        a three gallon ss pot
        a plastic spatula
        a pair of pliers
        a can opener
        a wort cooler
        a thermometer
        a hydrometer
        a wine thief
        a funnel
        a racking cane
        some iodophor
        a can of hopped malt extract
        a couple ounces of  hop pellets
        a couple or three pounds of dry malt extract (or not)
        a packet of yeast
        corn sugar
        50 beer bottles (not twist off capped) and caps and capper

2. Doing it
        involves various combinations of the above

3. What I do with the results
        before drinking it?

Doing it

No matter what anyone tells you, there is no one way to make beer. It mostly depends on your personality.  Since this isn't a book, you'll have to take my word on this, because I'm not going into details.  This is my way.

Set-up

Chances are that you will have to share the kitchen when you make beer.   To help make brewing a happy, positive endeavor, try to schedule your beermaking shortly after dishes were washed, dried, and put away because you are going to tie up the use of the stove and sink for a couple or three hours.  Use a stove top protector  to make cleanup easier in case of boil-over (quite likely).  Heat your opened   can of liquid malt extract (take the label off first) by setting it in a 3 gallon pot which has a gallon and a half or two of warm water.  Turn on the gas and bring the water up to a boil.   It helps to put the lid on the pot.

Stove top protector - aluminum foil with hole cut in middle

Heat - The water does not cover the can of malt, that's just some water vapor.

Brewing

Once the water gets to boiling, turn off the fire and, with  your pliers, grab onto the top edge of the malt can and tip it over so the contents go into the water.  Carefully so you don't splash.  Dip the can in the water and swish it around a few time to get all the extract out. Put the empty can in the sink.  You should notice that most of the extract sank to the bottom of the pot.  Use the plastic spatula and stir the malt and water until well mixed.  If you leave malt syrup on the bottom of the pot, it will scorch when the heat is turned on (which is why you turned the heat off in the first place).  Turn the heat back on and bring up to a boil, stirring once in a while.  This is a case when you DO watch the pot no matter how long it takes to reach a boil. When it starts to boil, shut the heat off again and stir like a mad man unless you're really experienced cooking syrups.  This is the point where the house burns down if you're not careful.  When first boiled, the wort WILL foam and overflow the pot unless you know what you're doing.  Assuming you lived through this, add an ounce of high acid hops, stir it in and turn the heat on low and bring to boil again  What I call a boil is not a rolling boil...more of a simmer.

Simmer

Set a timer or rely on your memory.  You will be boiling the wort for one hour to extract the bitterness from the hops.  After about 50 minutes or so add an ounce of a low acid hop for flavor and aroma.   Be careful of boil-over when adding the hops.   At about 55 minutes, add your wort cooler to sterilize it.  At 60 minutes, turn off the heat and put the pot (hot) by the sink - might need a pot holder or trivet to set it on - to cool.

Sterilizing the wort cooler

Wort cooler

Hook up the cooler and turn on the cold water.  Not too fast of a flow because it might blow the end off the faucet.  The water coming out the discharge end is HOT to start with.  CLICK HERE  Stir with the spatula and cool to around 70-75º.  Cover, in case you're not reading ahead.

Rinse out your fermenting bucket or glass carboy with a few ounces of iodophor solution.  Don't forget the lid to the bucket.  Rinse out your funnel if you're using a carboy.  Rinse a coffee cup with iodophor and dip out a half a cup of wort. Rinse off a small spoon.  Pour your yeast into the cup, stirring all the time until there is no clumps of yeast.  Take note of how much wort you have in the pot.   It should be 2 -2 1/2 gallons.  Pour the wort into your fermenting container and top off with 70º tap water until you have about 5.5 gallon of wort.  Rinse the wine thief and hydrometer in iodophor, get a sample of wort and check the Specific Gravity (write it down)  By now there should be some foam in your cup which means the yeast is alive and well.   Pour the yeast into the fermenting container and agitate the mixture to get some air in it.  Put the lid on the plastic bucket or cork & blow-off tube in the carboy and put somewhere out of the way to ferment.  I've got a spare bathtub.

After a bit, within 24 hours,  the fermentation gets going good.   It will furiously bubble for 1 to 4 days  and look a little like the picture below.  Sometimes the foam will go out the tube.  That's why the tube is in a bottle with the end in water.

In about 5 or 6 days, you rack the wort into a secondary fermenter, which should be a 5 gal. glass carboy with an airlock  It can sit in this carboy almost forever, but not too many people are that patient.  Check the Specific Gravity after about a week.  Check it again in a couple days.  After it's stable for a couple days, it's ready for the next step. 

Bottling

I hope you cleaned out that primary fermenter.  Sanitize the primary and racking cane assembly.  Sanitize the beer bottles,  Sanitize the bottle caps.  Rack the beer (yup, it's beer now) into the clean fermenting container,   pour in a half a cup of corn sugar and stir it in.  This is to provide food for the yeast to carbonate the beer in the bottle.  Sanitize your finger because you're going to have to stop the flow of beer when you change bottles.  Put a few bottles in a cake pan  (so the beer doesn't get slopped all over the kitchen).   Start the siphon and fill the bottles to about an inch from the top.  Cap'm and set them somewhere out of the way but at room temperature for 10 days.  Put them somewhere cool for another ten days (if you have any willpower).  Have one.

It took me over a year to get this much up.  It may take a year to get a glossary up.  It you have any questions, drop an e-mail on me.

You might have noticed that up to this point I haven't said much of anything about cleanliness or sterilization.  That's because it wasn't necessary.......until now.   You just made a great breeding place for bacteria and yeast.  You just got the wort to the optimum temperature for growth. 
    I use an iodine solution (iodophor) to sanitize my equipment.  I don't try to sterilize anything...that's just about impossible in a home environment.   Sterilizing=killing all pathogens.  Sanitizing=reducing the number of pathogens to a reasonable level.  I use a commercial product used in the dairy industry for cleaning and sanitizing milking equipment.  It's available at farm supply stores for about $10 a gallon.  You can also buy a similar product at homebrew stores for a buck an ounce ($128/gallon).  I never make more than 2 quarts of sanitizing solution so a 2qt plastic pitcher works fine.    Measure out 1 tsp. of iodophor and mix it with 1.75 or 2 qt of hot water (not over120ºF).   Everything except the pot, cooler, and spatula gets rinsed with the solution before it touches the wort.  I air dry everything also.  It doesn't do to dry anything with a towel because the towel is dirtier that you think.