20 Tips for Better Brewing
It’s simple. If you want to make good homebrewed beer, all you need are the best possible ingredients, the best possible equipment, good recipes, and sound technique.
The first three requirements can be met by taking a trip to your local homebrew shop or ordering from your favorite mail-order supplier. But the requirement of sound technique is satisfied only by practice, practice, practice, and by listening to the advice of other homebrewers.
You see, homebrewers are an ingenious lot. Any homebrewer worth his wort is constantly trying to improve some aspect or other of his brewing process. Just when you think you have heard it all, someone comes up with a simple yet effective tip for the brewing process that makes you slap your forehead and say, “Well, of course! Why didn’t I think about that before?” Every time you add another piece of advice to your bag of tricks you enhance that last, most subjective requirement for making good beer: technique.
What follows is a quick tour of the brewing process, including tips and tricks that have been
picked up from an assortment of homebrewers over the years. Some of these may be old news. Others may take you one step closer to making that perfect pint of beer.
1. Try to employ full five-gallon boils as soon as possible. Think of malt extract as concentrated wort. To make beer that rivals the best home- and microbrews, you must reconstitute the wort. That is, you must restore the concentrated wort back to its original gravity. Once you have, you can begin to treat it as wort retrieved from an all-grain mash and sparge. This is especially important for hop utilization. Yes, you will probably need a wort
chiller. But the sooner you start using one, the sooner you will wonder how you ever lived without it.
2. Avoid straight extract recipes. Can you make decent beer by dumping two cans of prehopped malt extract into a pot and boiling it for an hour? Well, yes. But it will never be as good as using light malt extract, crushed specialty grains, and fresh or pelletized hops.
Craft your beers by consulting all-grain recipes. Most five-gallon all-grain recipes will call for eight to 10 pounds of pale malt, a variety of specialty grains (crystal malt for amber ales,
chocolate malt for dark ales, for example), and fresh or pelletized hops. Simply substitute two
cans of your favorite light malt extract for the eight to 10 pounds of pale malt. You can boost
the gravity of your wort if necessary by adding small amounts of dried malt extract. Grind the
specialty malts. Place them in a mesh bag and submerge them in your water as it comes to a boil. Pseudo-sparge by dipping them in and out of the water several times. Remove them once the water hits 180° F to avoid extracting excessive tannins from the grains. Be very careful not to boil the grains. Bring the “malt tea” to a boil. Add the extract and proceed with hop additions per the recipe.
A side benefit of this technique is that you only have to buy one kind of malt extract. Therefore, you can buy in bulk or case lots and get a reduced price. This will help you save on the total cost of your beer.
3. Pre-mix liquid malt extracts with equal parts boiling water before adding them to the brewpot. This will eliminate the heavy syrup from glopping on the bottom of the pot, the malt sugars caramelizing, and the subsequent burnt sugar taste in your beer.
4. Remove the brewpot from its heat source when adding malt extract. This, too, will help eliminate the possibility of scorching the malt on the bottom of your boiling kettle.
5. Brew two batches of beer at once. The hardest part of any job is getting started, so once started, why not brew two batches of beer instead of just one?
This works well for both extract and all-grain brews. The key is to understand that most of the
time spent brewing beer, especially all-grain, is spent waiting for each process to finish. So while the first batch is mashing, grind the grains for the second batch. While sparging the first batch, mash the second. While boiling the first batch, sparge the second. While chilling the first batch, boil the second. While cleaning up the first batch, chill the second. It makes for a busy afternoon but by spending an extra hour brewing, you have two batches of beer to show for your efforts instead of just one.
Should you try this stagger-step brewing process (no pun intended!), measure all your ingredients and schedule the brewhouse procedure the night before. The brew day will go much smoother if you do.
6. Eliminate the dreaded boilover! It has happened to every brewer. But it does not have to keep happening. Have you ever noticed how boilover usually happens during the first few minutes of the boil? This is because proteins in the wort coagulate and form a sticky film as the wort comes to a boil. This film literally blows into a giant wort bubble once steam is released from the wort at the onset of the boil. There are two ways to help prevent this wort bubble from forming:
- Skim off the thick, creamy protein head that forms on top of the wort as it approaches boiling temperature.
- Throw a few hops into the wort before it comes to a boil.
7. Boil the wort for 10 minutes before adding the bittering hops. Many proteins will coagulate and fall out of solution during the first 10 minutes of the boil. If you add hops before these proteins have a chance to coagulate, they will coat the hops and interfere with utilization.
There are several technical reasons you should achieve as clear a runoff as possible when
transferring the wort from the boiler to the fermenter. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain all the issues at stake here. Suffice to say that pouring wort through a funnel and screen into a fermenter is risky. Instead, either drain the wort through a drain valve at the bottom of the boiling vessel (the hops and trub form an effective filter bed) or siphon the wort off the top of the trub. If you choose to siphon, follow these steps:
8. With your brewing spoon, create a whirlpool in the brewing kettle. This will force the hops and trub into a cone at the bottom, leaving a moat of wort around the edges of the kettle.
9. The key to success when siphoning from the boiling pot is filtering out the hops and trub. Tie a copper-wound pot scrubber around the bottom of your pick-up tube to filter the hops and prevent them from clogging the siphon hose. The Chore-Boy brand pot scrubber is a good choice because it is made of pure copper. You can find them at most grocery stores with the cleaning supplies. Secure the pot scrubber to the bottom of the pick-up tube with a short piece of copper wire.
Suspend the bottom of the pick-up tube just above the trub layer at the bottom of the kettle. There are a couple of nifty siphon tube holders on the market now that make this an easy task. Halfway through the siphon, tip the boiling pot over a bit by placing a large book under the side opposite the pick-up tube. At the end of the siphon, all the wort will have run around the moat and will be sitting in a small pool of wort at the bottom of the pickup tube.
10. Aeration of the wort is essential before fermentation. One brewer active on the Internet came up with an ingenious idea for achieving this. You will need a 12-inch piece of 3/8-inch-diameter copper tubing, a drill, and a small (3/32-inch or so) drill bit. One inch from the end of the copper tubing, drill a hole straight through the tubing and out the other side. Turn the tubing 90 degrees and drill another set of holes. Sterilize the tubing and insert the drilled end into the outlet end of your siphon hose.
Start the siphon. As the wort goes by the holes you have drilled, it will suck (entrain) air into the wort. Prepare to shake down all the bubbles that form in the collected wort.
11. Siphoning is an essential brewing skill! Here is one technique:
The key piece of equipment is a siphon starter, a two-inch piece of 3/8-inch copper tubing. Insert the siphon starter into the outlet end of the siphon hose and put your mouth on it to start your siphon. Never, but never, place your mouth in direct contact with the siphon hose itself.
One reason people have problems siphoning is because they begin by keeping the outlet end of the hose below the top level of the liquid from which they are siphoning. Wrong! The secret is to keep the outlet end of the siphon hose above the top level of the liquid from which you are siphoning when you start to pull the liquid.
Stand up straight, with the siphon hose draping down from the pick-up tube back up to your mouth, forming a U-shaped loop. Suck on the siphon starter; the wort will travel down and up the siphon hose, stopping at a level equal to the top level of the wort in the kettle. (Practice this with water until you get it down.) Remove the copper tubing from the end of the siphon hose, replace it with the aeration tube described above, pinch the hose, and drop it into the fermenter.
12. Keep your fermentation temperatures stable. Stable temperatures are almost more important than maintaining proper temperatures; to a point. Do not allow the temperature of your beer to fluctuate more than five degrees per day.
13. Pure (liquid) yeast cultures are here, and they are wonderful. Use them if you can.
14. If you cannot use a pure yeast culture and need to use dried yeast, rehydrate the yeast. It is preferable to do two packs for 30 minutes in water that has been boiled and cooled to at least 80° F. (Grolsch bottles with flip-top lids, called cage caps, are great for this.) Do not pour dried yeast on top of the wort in the fermenter. The osmotic pressure on the yeast cells as they rehydrate is too great, causing many of them to burst. The result is a low yeast count.
15. Absolutely, positively replace all the rubber parts if you own a five-gallon Cornelius keg that has had cola or root beer in it. If you are not sure if it has held soda, replace the parts anyway!
16. Consider trimming one inch from the bottom of the pick-up tube in your keg to ensure clear beer from the first glass. You can always re-extend the tube by slipping a one inch piece of siphon hose over the end later.
17. Force-carbonate your beer at room temperature by placing it under 40 pounds of pressure or at 34° F at 13 psi for three days. Either method will give the same carbonation. Do not shake the carbon dioxide into the solution. Big “fish eye” bubbles in your brew may be the result once the beer is poured into the glass. Let the CO2 gradually dissolve into solution.
18. Here’s another great gadget invented by a homebrewer: the $3 counter pressure bottle filler!
Parts list: A 12-inch piece of 3/8-inch copper tubing. A one-holed stopper that fits your
bottles. A standard dispensing tap (you know, the kind that came with your kegging set-up).
Stick the copper tubing through the one-holed stopper. Adjust it so the copper tubing just clears the bottom of the bottle as the stopper fits snugly into the mouth of the bottle. Jam the mouth of the tap onto the copper tubing sticking through the top of the bottle.
Fill each bottle with carbon dioxide from your keg, dispensed at around four pounds per square inch (psi). Fill them all at once. Since CO2 is heavier than air, it will stay in the bottles.
Stick your $3 counterpressure filler into the first bottle. Instead of pressing down on the handle of the tap to release beer into the bottle, flip the handle backwards. This locks it in the open position. Beer will then flow into the bottle until the pressure equalizes. Gently push the stopper back with your thumb, releasing some pressure, and the bottle will continue filling! Flip the handle back down and fill more bottles.
19. Quick-drain a carboy by sticking a semi-rigid tube (low-density polyethylene tubing or copper tubing) through the neck of the carboy into the “head” space at the bottom. The tube will vent air, allowing the water to rush out without gurgling.
20. If you still ferment in plastic buckets, it is important to store them properly. Refill your fermenter to the brim with a dilute solution of bleach and water (one teaspoon of bleach per gallon). Let it “pickle” until your next brew day. Rinse with boiling water.
The poor reputation of plastic fermenters probably comes more from the way they are stored between brewing sessions than anything having to do with the plastic itself.
