Note: This is another article geared to beginning brewers. If you’ve brewed before, you probably have a fair share of experience with extract brewing and know all of this, have all the equipment mentioned, and otherwise have no need to read on — but you should feel free to do the people this article is directed to a favor and chime in with advice of your own.
In the last “How do I do that?” I provided a general list of equipment you would need to brew beer. This time we’ll actually talk about how to do an extract brew.
The following is a recipe for the first beer I made, courtesy of Wootown member and Vice President, Lloyd Snyder. I’ll explain the process from start to finish.
The ingredients you will need are:
- Edme pre-hopped wheat beer kit: $18. This is pretty ubiquitous in most of the homebrew shops I’ve been to. This one is the can with the shark on the label. Can’t miss it. You can use the yeast that comes in this kit, but seriously, $6 or $7 for yeast isn’t going to kill you, and you’ll see a better product, guaranteed.
- 3 LBs Light DME: $13. This is a big bag of powdered dry malt extract.
- Yeast: $7. You’ll want a Hefeweizen yeast. White Labs and Wyeast are the two big brands of liquid yeast. I find them basically interchangable in terms of quality, but some people have other opinions. The Wyeast smackpacks are pretty cool, but most homebrewers will make a starter regardless so that feature isn’t always a selling point. I don’t really think a starter is imperative for this recipe, and insisting on it will only cost you more in the form of equipment and dried malt extract, and time. Once you’ve gotten into things a bit more, it’s definitely a habit you should get into.
- Primetabs. These look like a bag full of rootbeer barrel candies. They’re nothing but pre-measured sugar tabs used to get your bottles to carbonate. For a twelve ounce bottle, you basically drop one in the bottom of each bottle before you fill it. You can mix up some unfermented malt extract in your bottling bucket instead, but this isn’t foolproof and can lead to bottle explosions or under-carbonations. Primetabs are easy.
- Spring Water: This is an option. Some municipalities have water that is excellent for making beer. Others not so much. If you have unfiltered well water at home, I wouldn’t recommend using it to brew with unless you have it tested. No worries about infection, lots about mineral content that can SERIOUSLY affect the flavor of your end result. Besides, if you’re buying five or six gallons of water, it’s all pre-measured for you.
With these items acquired, you’ve got everything you need to make a wheat beer. Measure out at least three and a half gallons of water, bring it to a boil and add the Edme can and the dried malt extract, and stir it up enough so it’s a homogenous mix. It may be a bit thick, but it shouldn’t be a syrup. Add more water as needed to achieve a manageable consistency. Bring it back up to a rolling boil that isn’t threatening to climb out of your pot, and set a timer for a half hour. You’ll want to keep a watchful eye on this in order to avoid boilovers. I also suggest stirring it frequently to ensure it’s not scorching on the bottom, and ultimately darkening your beer.
Once that timer goes off, cover the pot and let it cool down a bit. If you’re looking to cool it off quickly, and your sink is large enough to fit the pot without obstructing the drain, you can set up a running water bath to speed the process.
I often use this cooling time to make sure my equipment is properly sanitized. You’ll find out very quickly that most of brewing is cleaning and moving heavy things, with a little cooking mixed in. Make sure your funnel is clean, and your fermenter, airlock and cap are completely cleaned and sanitized. This means that you’ve scrubbed it with a PBW or Oxyclean solution, rinsed it thoroughly, then soaked it in a Starsan solution.
Another trick I like to use involves using one of those empty gallon water jugs to measure out exactly five gallons of water into your fermenter, since they are not graduated. At the water line once you’ve emptied five jugloads of water into the fermenter, use a Sharpie marker to point out where five gallons is.
You can add the wort to your fermenter through the funnel now or you can wait for it to completely cool down to about room temperature. Top the wort up with your spring water to the Sharpie line. You may notice that it took more than a total of five gallons, and the missing water will have evaporated during that half hour of boil. Thus the six gallons of water for a five gallon batch. Shaking the wort to aerate it a bit will give your yeast a quicker blast off once you’ve poured it into the fermenter. Try to make sure it all goes in the wort with as little as possible running down the inside of the glass. Cap it, insert the airlock into the cap, then fill the airlock with some Starsan solution.
And wait. A five gallon batch will almost never need a blowoff tube if it’s fermenting in a six and a half gallon carboy. This is because you’ll have enough air space in the fermenter to keep the yeast from bubbling out through the airlock, which can lead to infection and a big mess on the floor you’re fermenting on.
We’re not bothering at this level with measuring attenuation, so the best way to tell if your beer is through fermenting is to look at the airlock. When it’s not bubbling anymore, give it a day and then prepare to bottle, which means more cleaning. This usually takes about a week.
Being that this is a wheat beer, you’ll actually want to take some of the yeast from the carboy into the bottles, so there’s no need for a secondary fermentation in which you’d transfer the fermented wort into another vessel to age. We’re going to go straight from the carboy to the bottle with this beer. This doesn’t mean that you want all of that yeast cake to move over to the bottle, so use the racking cane and auto-siphon to try not to disturb the settled yeast cake at the bottom. You’ll notice that the business end of the cane — the part that sticks down into the beer within the carboy — has what looks like a cap on the end of it. This cap allows the beer to be drawn from above the bottom of the carboy into the siphon and then out the tubing into the sanitized bottling bucket, hopefully leaving the majority of the yeast behind. The auto-siphon acts as a hand-powered vacuum pump. You pull up on the cane, and the negative pressure produced within the sleeve portion of the tube causes the beer to rise up in the cane. When you push down, the liquid is forced into the cane within the sleeve, and the liquid begins to flow into the tubing, and — assuming your bottles or bottling bucket are beneath the carboy — gravity does the rest. So you only really pump it enough to get the siphon running downhill and the rest happens naturally.
You’ll want to make sure that your bottles have been through both a detergent solution — PBW or Oxyclean — and then a Starsan solution to sanitize. Drop a primetab into each bottle, then use your also sanitized bottle filler according to its directions to get a fill. You’ll want to have the bottle filled to just above the neck line. Think about how full most of the bottled beers you drink are before you start drinking. Mirror this as best as you can, maybe even use a full beer as a model. Immediately cap your bottle according to the directions that came with your capper, then move on to the next one. If you get to the end of your beer and there is a bottle that you can’t fill to approximately the same level as the others, go ahead and drink that one now. Underfilled bottles are far more likely to explode than overfilled ones. And exploding bottles are not only messy, they’re dangerous too.
You’ll want to place the filled bottles in a dark place that is about room temperature. This will give the remaining yeast in the beer an ideal environment to ferment the sugar you added to your beer in the form of the primetab into carbon dioxide that under pressure will dissolve into solution with the beer. This will take at least another week, but it’s probably best to wait a full ten days just to be sure they’re fully primed. It’s like Tom Petty said: the waiting is the hardest part.
After ten days, go ahead and get your bottles cold, and enjoy your first batch of beer.
Tags: Beer, Beginner Brewing, Brewing, Fermentation, How do I do that?
[...] and stove gas to produce a starter for a beer that doesn’t need it? As mentioned in our last How do I do that? a wheat beer with a relatively low gravity doesn’t really need a massive starter to ferment [...]