Sugar Free Beer (must be good for you)
February 4th, 2009 - Posted in crafts, self-sufficiency - by Brendhan|
It’s probably been said before but you need a good supply of beer if you are attempting any serious building work 
. With this in mind I recently attempted my first all grain batch of home brew beer. Brewing all grain means just that, no tin of malt extract or dried extract, no sugar, just ground malted barley, hops, yeast and water.
Malted barley and hops
In the picture the brown paper bags contain the base malt which is 4.4 kg of Maris Otter malted barley that has been crushed with hulls. The left hand bowl contains chocolate malt, crystal malt and black malt (about 140g all together) which is all really just normal malted barley that has been heated to varying degrees in order to change the colour and flavour. The middle bowl contains Williamette hops in full cone form and the right hand bowl NZ Goldings hops in compressed pellet form. The recipe I adapted from a recipe for a clone of Newcastle Brown Ale from the book Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers by Tess Szamatulski and Mark Szamatulski. All of the ingredients (along with the liquid yeast) I bought from the helpful guys at the Dunedin Malt House.
Mash Equipment
With the equipment all set-up I pre-heated the mash tun (the bright orange insulated water cooler) and heated up some water in the pot on the top shelf. Once the water had reached 70C exactly I siphoned it into mash tun to which I had already added the malted barley. When it was all mixed together I brought the temperature up to 65C by adding boiling water and keep it there for 90mins. During this time the natural enzymes in the barley converted the complex carbohydrates into more simple ones that the yeast can eat – sugars.
Once the mash was complete it was time to sparge. This is the process of separating the sweet liquid ( the wort) from the spent grains. To accomplish this I have made a filter that sits in the bottom of the mash tun. The filter is made from a stainless steel braided hose that I have removed the inner from and attached to a valve forming a loop that sits in the bottom of the mash tun. You can see the valve poking out of the mash tun. I found the design for this in John J. Palmer’s excellent book How to Brew: Everything You Need to Know to Brew Beer Right for the First Time an older edition of which is available to view free at www.howtobrew.com.
Mash Tun Filter
Sparging
The first couple of litres were very cloudy and I returned it to the top of the tun to be filtered through the grain bed. When all the wort had drained the tun was refilled with 70C water, stirred and left for another 15mins to absorb the remaining sugar. It was then drained using the same process. This method is called batch sparging.
The next step was the boil. This is the most smelly part of the process and involves boiling the wort for an hour and a half. At the beginning of the boil I added the Williamette hops to provide the bittering and then the flavour hops (NZ Goldings) and Irish moss (a natural fining agent) about 15 mins before the end of the boil.
The boiling wort with the hops floating on top.
Once the boil is completed the wort needs to be cooled rapidly. This is to prevent chill haze in the finished beer and also to minimise the amount of time spent between about 30 and 70C because this is when it is most vulnerable to infection.
Home made cooling gear.
I made my chilling gear from an old fish tank pump and 15m of soft copper piping. based on a design in a book called Brew Ware: How to Find, Adapt and Build Homebrewing Equipment. I use the pump to pump water that is cooled by ice through the coiled copper pipe that is submerged in the wort. This seemed to work very effectively with ice cold water entering the copper pipe and very hot water coming out of the other end. One bag of party ice was enough to cool the wort down to about 25C in about 15mins, hopefully fast enough!.
The yeast starter.
After this it is simply a matter of cleanliness and time. I siphoned the wort it into the sanitised fermenting bucket being careful to splash it as much as possible. Yeast needs oxygen to live and the more it is splashed the more airated it gets. Then I pitched the worryingly inactive yeast starter into the fermenter as well and waited. Sure enough after about 24 hours it started bubbling away and smelled nice and yeasty. After a week in the fermenter I racked it to a 23litre glass carboy for another week of conditioning. At bottling time it smelled like a beautiful clean brown beer!
The finished product.
For those that want the gritty technical details the recipe was supposed to make 19 litres of beer with an original gravity (OG) of 1.048 to 1.051 and a final gravity (FG) of 1.011 to 1.013. I ended up with about 16 litres as I underestimated the amount that would evaporate during the boil. This turned out to be a good thing as my mash efficiency was only about 60% (the recipe assumed 70%) and my actual OG was 1.049 and my FG 1.008. So if I had got a full 19l my OG would have been too low. But the best test is in the drinking! I’ll add to this post when I have tried it in a couple more weeks to let you know what it tastes like.
We also made some wine a few months ago but I forgot to take pictures at the time. I did remember when it came time to bottle though:
Sarah bottling the wine.
The finished product: Kaimata Croft Pinot Noir.
It tasted pretty good at christmas time but it seems to be getting better and more drinkable with age.
