General Tips
When brewing beer cover the carboy or bucket with black garbage bag to
keep light out.
Cover bottlebrush with electrical tape or hose to keep from scratching
glass carboy.
Substitute corn sugar with malt, you beer will taste better. use
1 and 1/4 cups of dme instead of 1 cup corn sugar.
Cool wort as quickly as possible to keep contaminates out.
Be sure to aerate the wort before putting into carboy - slosh around or
stir. wort must be below 80 degrees!!! *** very important ***
To determine if yeast is alive or not during rehydration, live yeast
will float in the water and turn creamy - dead yeast will sink to the bottom
and remain granular after 10-15 mins.
To empty a carboy without all the sloshing, put a tube or racking cane
in as you empty.
What causes a hangover? dehydration and depletion of vitamin b12, as it
turns out, homebrew has plenty of vitamin b12 in the yeast.
Ideally you should rack your beer into the secondary fermenter after the
krausen settles, but you can leave it as long as ten days.
Change hose and racking cane every few months. These
are cheap and will insure good beer.
Beer is ready to be transferred to secondary fermenter when the air lock
bubbling is less than one minute or more.
To prevent a boil over, have a glass of cold water on hand. one
splash will kill the rising wert.
Make sure you bottle fill level is no more than one half to ¾ inch
from the top. You can achieve this by keeping your filler wand at the bottom
of the bottle and when it gets to the top, remove, this will leave beer at
proper level.
You can kick start fermentation by using two packs of yeast instead of
one. The wert is at its most vulnerable stage before yeast activity.
This tip is to use a 5 gallon carboy to do a primary fermentation:
use high-gravity brewing to ferment in a 5-gallon carboy without a blow off.
To do this, make the recipe exactly as you would for 5 gallons but only
fill to 4 or 4 and a half. Then when ready to bottle, boil the other
half gallon or gallon and cover till cool, then add to the bottling bucket
with the priming sugar and wert. The result will be very close to
the initial recipe. Many big breweries use this method.
You can use PET bottles for up to 6 months storage because oxygen will
start to pass through after that.
Use clover or light honey to increase the alcohol content without the
off flavors associated with other sugars. Do not use more than 30%.
Beer made with honey has a crisper, lighter and higher alcohol content than
beer made with corn sugar.
Want to make a light beer? Just add one gallon of pre boiled, cooled
water to the bottling bucket with the primer sugar and bottle as usual.
You will end up with a light beer and an extra 12 bottles of beer.
Normal priming sugar is ¾ cups to 1 cup per 5 gallons or you can
use 1 and 1/4 cups dme per 5 gallons.
5 gallons is equal to 640 ounces or: (53) 12 oz bottles, (40) 16 oz bottles,
(32) 20 oz bottles, (29) 22 oz bottles, or (18) liter bottles.
Add hops right after flame out you will get more aroma this way since
most aroma will go up in the steam if you do it on the heat. Or you
can add them 2 mins before flame out (no more though)
Cascade hops are good to dry hop with, in fact they are a very versatile
hop.
You can tell when whole hops get old by the yellow lupulin turns orange.
hops should be sticky when rubbed between your fingers and aromatic.
A dusty and non sticky felling also shows age.
If using honey, be sure to boil to pasteurize it.
Don't forget to give the bottles a "spin" in about five days after bottling
to free any yeast that may be stuck to the side of the bottles.
To make a starter: boil 2 cups (16o/z) water and add ½ cup
(about 6 of my big spoons) dme close to the type that will be used to make
the beer. Boil this for 10 mins. You can repeat if necessary.
Very important the night before you plan to make the beer, put in refrig
to flocculate (make yeast go dormant). Then the next day just pour
off most of the beer and proceed.
With yeast washing, when pouring the yeast and troob into a mason jar
and swirling around, as it settles, the gunk will settle first, leaving
a milky liquid over it. The milky liquid is the yeast. If you
were to let this set for about a day or so it would for three layers, 1
the crud and gunk, two the clean yeast, and 3 clear liquid. The best
thing to do is decant the milky yeast off as soon as the gunk settles out.
Leaving you beer in the primary for more that 10 days can lead to off
tastes and airborne bacteria could contaminate your beer.
You can estimate the alcohol by volume by taking the og minus the fg and
then multiply by .129 (example 1.045 - 1.012 = .033 x .129 = 4.3%)
When buying hose: 5/16 is the little diameter hose used for bottling.
3/8 is the bigger hose used to transfer beer using a racking cane.
I can never remember this!
Extract Tips
Always boil wort at least 15 mins - even with kits that do not call for
it. This will kill any microorganisms and will extend shelf life.
Always steep grains before adding malt extract. This will insure
that tanin will not stick to the wort.
Rule of thumb: when designing a beer or using malt extracts in a recipe,
use ¾ to 2½ pound of malt extract per-gallon of beer.
How much malt to use? Liquid malt extract will make a wort of approximately
1.034 specific gravity per pound of extract per gallon of water. Dried malt
extract will yield approximately 1.045 points per pound of extract per gallon
of water. To figure out how much to use, multiply either 34 or 45 times the
number of pounds and divide by the gallons in your batch. for example, if
we used 7 pounds of liquid malt extract in a 5 gallon batch, we’d multiply
34 times 7 (to get 238) and divide that by 5 to get 47.60 so our wort should
have a starting gravity between 1.047 and 1.048.
All Grain Tips
One cup of grain is equal to a quarter pound or four cups is equal
to one pound of grain.
To calculate the mash water needed, use this formula: mash h20 gal. =
0.33 x pounds of grain. Example for 9.5 pounds of grain it would be: 0.33
x 9.5 = 3.135 or about 3 gallons of water.
Generally use one quart of water for every pound of grain for the mash.
Heat the strike water 16-18 degrees above the temp desired. Example if
you want to hit 152 you would heat the water to 170.
Generally the lower you are in the range of 145-158, the less body and
higher the alcohol. The higher you are in the range, the more body
and less alcohol.
Heat the water for the hot water tank to 175-180 so that when stabilize
it will be about 170.
You will need about ½ gallon of water per pound for the sparge.
Put 6 or 7 gallons of water in the hot water tank and shoot to sparge
at a rate so that you sparge for one hour.
Only collect 6 gallons of wort and then stop, otherwise you may over sparge
and the result will be a grainy taste in the beer.
Plan on loosing 1 gallon an hour during the boil and ¼ to ½
left in the hot break sediment.
You can add some extra water during the boil to compensate the loss of
water so that you end up with 5 gallons of wort at the end.
Mash out – to mash out boil a half a gallon of water and add to mash to
bring to 168-170 and then stir to mix. Close cover for 15 minutes
to stop the enzyme process. Do not go above 170.
Optimum ph is 5.1 – 5.3 – values in the 5.0 – 5.7 are ok.
Measure ph at room temp – very important.
Adjust the hot water to 5.7 and this will hold the runoff down in the
proper range throughout the sparge.
Do not scrub stainless steel with steel wool. This will remove the stainless
finish.
Do not sparge over 170 degrees this will cause husk tannins to dissolve
into the wort.
Grain bed temp of 165 - 170 is fine on the sparge. Boil just shy of 2
gallons of water to heat grain to 165 - 170. This is with a 5 gallon
batch and about 10 pounds of grain.
Heat sparge water to about 180 - 185 this will
compensate for the heat loss during sparge.
When the reading drops to 1.008 I stop sparging. Once you get below 1.008
you are risking getting tannins into your beer, and you’re not adding much
in terms of gravity.