Hi, my name's James! Welcome back to Malt & Make and today we're gonna make some beer!
The first thing you have to do is
collect your water and I normally do
this the night before because trying to
get it through a filter system and heat
it up takes quite a long time.
One of the other main components of beer is malted barley.
and I like to mill it the night
before you can see me putting my grain
mill on top of the mash tun and
pretending to plug it in there isn't
actually a socket there! What we're trying
to do is to make porridge and cracking
the grains makes it a more efficient
process of extracting the sugars, flavour
and colour from the grain once that
porridge is being left to sit for a
while about an hour to let the enzymes
convert the starches in the malt into
sugars we then drain off the liquid and
boil it adding hops or other flavorings
chill it down and put it in a fermenter
with some yeast and leave it to turn
into beer which takes about two weeks so
in total it's about a day's work to brew
the beer and a couple of weeks before it's ready.
Part of the filtering process takes the
minerals out of the water now I'm doing
this on purpose because I've got really
hard water where I brew but it does mean
I have to add some back in. While you're
only using small quantities it's really
important because these minerals
determine a lot of the flavor of the beer
And you can see me adding them just
on top of that grain that I've milled
This is my brewery control panel and I've got
an all-electric brewery so they heating
elements and the pumps are all
controlled here.
While the water is heating up
up I tend to recirculate it round and
round in that hot liquor tank so that
the controller's got a more accurate
temperature to work to all I need to do
is set the temperature I want and then
wait and it'll take care of everything else.
Now what you're aiming for is
something between 55 and 0 degrees
Celsius or one hundred and fifty and one
hundred and fifty-five Fahrenheit for
the mash that you create that's the
mixture of water and grain.
This is exactly the right temperature to get the
enzymes that naturally occur in the
malted barley to break down the starches
into sugars which is what the yeast will turn into alcohol
Now the water's up to
temperature it's time to transfer some
of it across I use a program called BeerSmith to calculate just how hot the
water needs to be and how much I need to
move across you can see the water's
coming up underneath the grain which is
why it's almost floating on top and
because I have my kettles all on scales
I can figure out exactly how much water
I've added now if you do this slowly
enough it'll mix perfectly with the
grain but if you do a bit quicker you
can always just use a mash paddle to get
it to mix about. As you can see I hit
sixty six point four degrees bang on I
don't know if that's what I was aiming
for but it's a good number anyway
during the mash I take the liquid out of
the bottom of the mash tun through a
pump which pushes it through a coil in
my hot liquor tank this does a couple of
things the grain bed acts as a filter but
I can also change the temperature of the
mash tun by changing the water temperature in the hot liquor tank.
While I've gotsome time to spare I'm going to sanitize
the fermenter that's the thing on the
right and black neoprene jacket it's a
big stainless steel tank and it's what
the beer is made in by the yeast,.
After about an hour the mash is done and it's
time to zero out the scales I'm going to
be adding water on top of the mash while
simultaneously taking liquid from the
bottom. This is a process called sparging
and this particular method is called a fly sparge
Now you can see that this hot
wort which is the sugary liquid that
we've made is going to come from the
bottom through the coil that's in the
hot liquor tank and into the final
kettle which is the boil kettle where
the hops going to be added this kettle
has an exhaust above it and a filter
inside to try and keep the hop matter in
the boil kettle
Keeping an eye on the scales gives me an idea of what's
happening during the sparge
I aim to keep the volume of the mash tun
about the same so you're adding as much
water as you're taking off liquid from
the bottom the other thing I'm looking
for is that we're getting the right
volume inside the boil kettle and again
the brewing software will tell you just
how much you're aiming to collect
If we have a look in the bottom of the boil
kettle you can start to see that hot
wort coming in that's the sugary liquid
that we've created in the mash once we
get to the end of the sparge it's time
to turn on the electric heating element
and get rid of the grain that's in the
mash tun a lot of brewing is cleaning
checking the scale on the boil kettle
shows we've collected 46 ish kilos as we
get towards the end
the extractor fans going getting rid of
the moisture that we're boiling off and
we're just going to wait for that boil
kettle to hit 100 degrees before we
start our boil timer we're going to be
boiling for about an hour during that
process we're going to be adding hops at
different times here you can see me
adding the first amount this one one
hour from the end is to give some bitterness to it
The thing to watch out
for is boil overs as the foam that's
created on top gets higher and higher
it's sometimes important to cut the power
and just let it die down for a few
seconds but don't worry this tends to
only last for the first 15 minutes of
the boil or so
10 minutes ago and it's time to add some more hops these ones are going to add flavor and aroma to the
beer in a minute we're gonna start
chilling it down so I'm gonna connect to
all the hoses up to my plate chiller
this uses water to chill down the beer
and gives me the added advantage of
having some hot liquid at the end so I
can use to clean last hop addition this
one's going into a filter cuz these are
whole cone hops cut the power and start
to chill like I said a lot of brewing is
cleaning so it's useful to have some hot
water on hand after the brewing process
is done to clean up
The hottest water goes into the hot liquor tank to be used
for cleaning and then after that it has
to just go down the drain unfortunately
once everything's cooled down to around
20 degrees that's 20 Celsius it goes
into the fermenter
you can see I'm filling it from the
bottom as I open the valve here
of course it's yeast that makes beer so
I'm going to rehydrate this yeast in
some water at about 25 degrees according
to the packet while I fill up the
fermenter once I have done it needs to
be oxygenated then it's just a case of
adding the yeast and keeping it just the
right temperature for it to work and in
a couple of weeks you'll have beer well
I've got to do some cleaning up
I'll see you next time!
