Idiot's Guide to Making Incredible Beer at Home

Even if I have to do this, we are both equal. Wow, many of you know that I've been pretty obsessed with food fermentation for the last couple of years, I've just been trying to absorb as much information as possible, learn the basics, and spread that wealth around. Guys, when I walk through a bookstore and I see a book called The Fermented Man, of course I'm going to pick it up and it's about a guy named Derek Dillinger, well, he wrote the book, he's the author and he wrote. about his year of only eating fermented foods, super interesting stuff, but what really caught my attention in that book was the chapter on brewing

beer

.

I never really thought I was going to make

beer

, but the guys were talking about how rewarding it is and I can relate because I really liked sourdough bread, which is one of the most rewarding things I've ever made in the kitchen, so this guy He was very convincing and that really pushed me over the edge. I said I have to do this and it turns out that Derek is actually the brewmaster at a microbrewery about three hours from my house, so I contacted him looking for that little push to get me into the brewing game and he obliged, so So I headed to Kent Connecticut in the dead of winter to get a real feel for what's brewed.

It's like Derek started brewing, like many of us, as avid

home

brewers. He had a blog that was very popular and then he got this job as a head brewmaster at a microbrewery, which is cool because it turns out that beer culture and beer are American. Beer culture is the fastest growing beer culture in the world, mainly because there are so many avid

home

brewers, so these people are taking their skills to the next level, they are opening microbreweries and they are spreading their craft, which is amazing, maybe you guys can even open that microbrewery, who knows.

When I spent the day at the Kent Falls Brewery, I was learning pretty much all the operations of a classic microbrewery, from grinding the greens to mashing, boiling, and adding hops. how they creatively named their beers and of course we had to do an extensive taste test. They also sent me home with about 12 different styles of beers, so it will be very exciting to spend the next few weeks in my apartment while I indulge and learn about all the different ones. styles of beer aromas, one of my main takeaways from Kent Falls, besides of course learning how to make beer, we are learning about the wide variety of beers you can brew, there are endless opportunities when it comes to brewing because you have so many different variables you have the green type you have the hop types you have the different yeast strains you have the additional flavorings you can add you have the fermentation temperatures there are so many options out there and I think that's why beer brewing is spreading so much because people are really starting to taste it, at least in the United States people are opening up to all these varieties and moving away from those stupid light beers that reinvent beer culture.

So of course when it comes to

making

beer you need to get your equipment, so I took another little excursion to a local place in Brooklyn called bitter and Esther's and talked to the owner, John, and he gave me a rundown on the equipment for beginners and this place is amazing because not only do they have brewing classes but you can also choose custom recipes from the ones with sour nests and then you can weigh the vegetables, you can also choose extracts if you want and when it comes to the kiss growing. Of course, they have a ton of different options at all price points.

In fact, I ended up going with the cheapest option, which is basically converted five-gallon buckets and also comes with everything you need to tap and bottle the beer, in addition to the glass beer. You have to order the bottles themselves separately, although my favorites are those little caps you can get on Amazon. Those things are reusable and work great. The entire kit cost me a little over a hundred dollars and you can buy a similar kit online. Amazon has a cool one, in fact I'm giving one away so click on the description to see the details of that contest so you can start brewing immediately once you have your beer

making

equipment you need to get your brewing ingredient beer and there are two.

The main categories of ingredients that you're going to be dealing with are all grains, and I'm going to show you how to do it, which is actually taking the grains, breaking them up, and putting them through a grinding process that releases all the sugars. into those grains so you can convert those sugars into alcohol, which is the hardest process, but I really enjoy it because you're doing it from scratch. I like the whole process if you want to skip a few hours on the day of preparation if you don't want to. You don't have to know all day to brew, you can simply take an extract that eliminates the mashing process entirely.

It's basically the extracted form of what we do in that maceration process and, honestly, it takes about three hours on the day of brewing. So you can choose between those two things. Another note on the brewing process is that I'm going to use a brew-in-a-bag method that has become extremely popular recently among home brewers, mainly because you're skipping the entire sparging process, which if all. This filtering process is a little complicated, it takes a little longer and the actual end result won't be much different, so I highly recommend getting one of the blue bags if you are new to brewing, they have worked very well for me and that's the technique I'm going to use in this video so let's start with the actual mashing process and first you need to get out your brewing pot.

I have a four and a half gallon brew pot and that's perfect because I'm only making two and a half gallons of beer which is about a case of beer which is enough for me of course if you want to make five gallons you should Get a larger pot, so you'll need four gallons of water. There are markings on the side of my pot which makes it very easy and if you are using tap water just make sure it is not overly chlorinated. I'm using a mixture of half water and filtered water, so you're adding an extra 1.5. gallons of water is because it will be displaced and that will happen when you are brewing in the bag along with the evaporation of when you remove your wart later in the process, heat the water according to your actual recipe for my IPA I.

I'm heating it up at one hundred and sixty degrees and then I'm going to take my brew bag which works just like a tea bag, you put it around the edges and then you start pouring in all the cracked green, make sure you stir. your grains so they don't clump together because, again, you don't want them to clump together into flower balls or you won't extract the maximum amount of sugar from your grains, so the water started at one hundred and sixty degrees because we added all the grains are going to go down. at about one hundred and forty-eight degrees and the goal is to maintain that temperature for thirty minutes, so what I do is I put the lid on and I check it from time to time and give it a stir. to make sure it doesn't clump and if the temperature has dropped to a low level, if it's dropped about ten degrees, just turn the heat on for about a minute to get it back to that range, whatever your recipe says, since there is a lot of water and all that. residual heat I usually don't have much trouble maintaining a constant temperature, just keep the lid on, stir it around a bit and thirty minutes will fly by, after that half hour the water should completely change color and the smell will be amazing. you have this sugared barley water now as a tea bag take your brew bag and it will be a little bit hot so you can wrap a towel around the top and just scoop the blue bag straight out of the liquid and let everything drain make sure Don't squeeze the bag once you get it out of the liquid, you just want to let it drain naturally until it stops dripping, you can get an undesirable bitterness if you squeeze the beer out and we're already accounting for all that displacement so you don't have to squeeze out any liquid. additional.

This is now what they call the wort, which is basically the liquid from the mashing process. Barley water too sugary. Another big part of the prep bag process is now you. You have your beer brewed in there, you don't have to respond in any other pot, you are ready to boil your beer and the boiling process will destroy all the bacteria in there, so you are basically starting from a blank slate. for a yeast to come in and ferment and also during the boiling process, is when you will start to add hops for flavor. Now hops are magical flowers and when you smell them, you instantly understand why hoppy beers like IPAs have such a distinctive flavor.

Tasty flavor and there are a ton of different varieties of hops, they come in pellet form for convenience as I'm going for a more tropical vibe with my beer, the hops we're adding have a ton of natural citrus tones that should pair perfectly. with mango, when you add the hops at the beginning of the boiling process, you will get more bitterness because you are boiling a flower, so it will taste a little bitter when you add them towards the end. We'll get more aroma and then there's a dry hop process that we'll get into later. The IPA I'm making uses both techniques for adding hops, so I'm going to bring my wort to a boil first. to a nice quick boil like this and I'll immediately add about a half ounce of my hops to a boil for the full 60 minutes, just make sure to stir the wort from time to time so it doesn't boil over. and then once I get to 45 minutes I'm going to add another point five ounces of hops and then I'm going to boil it for another 15 minutes, once the sixty minutes of boiling is done I'm going to turn off the heat and then I'm going to add 1.5 ounces more hops.

Now we have to cool the wort to room temperature because if you add yeast to hot water you will destroy it and there are a million different techniques to cool your real wort. I'm probably going to use the lowest-tech method, which is basically taking your work, putting it in the sink, and filling it with cold water. The cold water will start to lower the temperature of the beer once the temperature outside is very hot, I drain it, fill it with more cold water and then add ice to that water and then I would say in half an hour it should be room temperature, in At this point everything that comes into contact with that wart except the yeast needs to be sanitized because we have our slate blank, we don't want to add foreign bacteria or anything that could spoil the beer, first we are going to sanitize our fermenter so just follow the instructions. instructions for your disinfectant and fill it. fill that fermenter with sanitized water once it's all sanitized you can save that sanitizer liquid and pour it into your bottling jar and save it for bottling day when you pour the sanitizer liquid don't worry about the extra bubbles just keep them in there.

We're not going to damage your beer and then you'll just pour your wort into your sanitized fermenter. Now you are ready to pitch your yeast, which basically means just adding it to the wort and once the yeast is added, you pretty much have your beer sorted. of you have to wait two weeks for it to ferment. Now I'll give you a fermenter with a few vigorous shakes back and forth, which will oxygenate your wort, so you'll hit the lid and chill it in a dark place for about two weeks, temperature control is one of the most important parts. important and also one of the most difficult in home brewing.

You want to keep it at a nice, regulated temperature or you can get rid of a lot of stuff in the process. For me, it's about to happen. It's summer and I don't really have a lot of air conditioning in this place, so I ordered this brew bag, this refrigerator brew bag, so I can put all my fermenter in the bag and I can change out some ice packs from time to time and that should keep it at a comfortable temperature regulated around 65 to 70 degrees. If you have a really cool basement in your house, you can definitely try a beer and if you have a really hot house and have no way to cool it down, try a For now, this is an optional step, but many beer brewing kits They come with a hydrometer, which is basically a way of measuring the sugar levels in your beer and it will ultimately tell you the alcohol levels in your beer so you can fill a small container with your beer and take the reading of the hydrometer.

I'm not really going to explain how to read it, but I will put a link in the description below that will explain everything you need to know and just remember if you are tasting your beer during fermentation. process that I suggest you do, you will not get a producttasty at first, it will be a little bitter, it will have a strange taste at first, but the flavors will develop and improve, but even after two weeks, when it has finished fermenting, you will still have warm and flat beer, so don't be discouraged If it is not perfect, the final product, once carbonated, will be light.

Gear is tastier than what you have there. You may have seen the term dry jumping. a beer label and what that basically means is adding hops to the fermentation process, not cooking the hops in the boiling process. My IPA has a dry hop process, so once the beer has fermented for seven days out of 14 total days, you're going to grab a muslin bag and make sure the bag is nice and sanitized, you're going to add another Point five ounces of hops and throw it directly into the fermenter for the last seven days. I thought it would also be a good time to add the mango since they say it's best to give the yeast just a few days to develop and then you can start adding the flavorings.

It's very important when you add any flavoring to beer and fermenting a process where you heat those things up to kill all the unwanted bacteria, so that's what I did with the mango. I heated it to 100 70 degrees. I also froze the handle, installed it several times and what does it do. This starts to break down the cell walls which will release more of that flavor, so I added the mango to a muslin bag and let the hops and mango ferment for another seven days, so it's been two weeks and the last step What am I going to give?

What I have to do before bottling is put my fermenter in the refrigerator and what this will do is kill the beer and a lot of that sediment and yeast will fall to the bottom which will ultimately result in a cleaner final beer product because It will be trapped at the bottom, so when you go to bottle the beer, all the sediment will stick to the bottom. The first thing we will do for the bottling process is to boil 2 cups of water with our primer sugar to dissolve it well. and your recipe will tell you exactly how much ground sugar you need, the sugar is there to carbonate the beer and the nice thing about making beer is that you are adding a very specific amount of sugar, so once the yeast eats the sugars and is convert Convert it to CO2, your beer is no longer carbonated, that's why beers can sit on the shelf forever and not explode, hopefully they won't explode, so then take any bottles you have and make sure you rinse them a little with a some soap and then we're going to add all that sanitizing liquid that you reserved from the first phase, your kit should come with a tube that has a liquid release valve to make this process really simple so once you've filled all your bottles, you can throw away everything disinfected.

English lid and again, don't worry about any of those extra bubbles, just keep them there, don't try to wash them now, this is a very important step, we are going to put the beer in the bottle and the sanitizing bucket, make sure to do this very slowly because you'll see we did a good job of removing all that gunk on the bottom, they actually call it trub and you want to pour the liquid out so you're leaving a lot of problems. at the bottom so that it does not enter the final product. Now you can start bottling your beer.

Follow the same process that we did with the disinfectant solution and what I found is that if you fill the bottles completely to the top once you take them out. With the real stem, you will have the perfect amount of headroom for your beer because you want to leave a little room in your bottles. If you are using bottle caps, make sure your bottle caps are sanitized and many of the kits will come as well. with a bottle capper and that's this process, but again, these little caps work great and it's a much easier process to make sure they're sanitized as well, now you're going to store your beer for at least two weeks.

I'd say 2-3 weeks would be safe and I'd keep it between 65-67 degrees if you can and then you'll want to make sure you chill the beer. My recipe says to chill it for a week. I mean, it's a pretty deep chill. but be sure to chill the beer for at least a few days before drinking it to make it extra crisp and delicious. We get happily well. I'm five weeks older than when I started this. How was it necessary to do this. It's worth it? I brought Derrick Lucci and then my other friend here. My name is Rat Kylie.

Are you really a brother? No, no, so let's try this guy's. This is a mango mango IPA so the IPA is obviously heavy in the hop game so a lot of spiciness and then I tried the fruit for the first time so this head and these are the chips now what smells what Mel likes mango or something so I pay attention International Pancake Association in association with I Don't Drink Anymore and Drive Kids even if I have to do this oh we're both the same Wow how do you get the mangrove is there? Here you can do a little more.

Oh, this smells good. It's melting, guys. Awesome so fruit how do you manage to destroy the chair I can watch the video but I want you to have to watch it oh nice and crunchy this is good great you know I'm not going to lie. I tried one of these. I already tried this weekend. I drank. like two of them, hops, it's the first time I took it to the maximum. I've made only the pale one, otherwise it's a little more bitter, it definitely has more than enough, so the fruity flavor is there, you like to squeeze some out to make this thing you really want. to know how you get the mango, this is a name, it's a feeling of what you like, squeeze in a little orange or something, look, I think it would actually do a great job with the bitterness, a little orange too , the bitterness is welcome, better answer your question you will see the video it is good, it is fine as long as I like to try home-made beer.

I hope it doesn't taste like beer, yes, even the carbonation in this homebrew tastes amazing to me, but there is a freshness to it that you don't get when you try regular beer unless it's like it came straight from the brewery tap. I tell you guys it really isn't that hard to make beer, all you have to do is follow the instructions every time I make it. I've done it three times and it's worked perfectly every time you've tried it, yeah, every team, this is like the combination of this here, yeah, a different nomination, yeah, it really is that maybe you're right, you're right, it's like kombucha.

Think that with fruit you could get a little more carbonation. I like that. It was like when you let me know. I love beer. I've always loved beer, but I don't really drink much these days, so I appreciate just having it. it's good like you don't need money it's like your shitty beard is okay with the two as well as five it is I would take everything Josh and a great job at a good point because I don't really drink too much either and it's not that you have to be heavy, although a big part of brewing is that there are a lot of drinkers, but I don't, I don't get drunk, I like to have a beer every now and then, so this is the perfect way to do it.

I let you know 24 bottles a month and then you know you come back after a long day, you drink one of these and it's more like drinking just a cool soda that makes you a little drunk, but you know, I'm not trying to get drunk. so that's something to know, you don't have to be like a huge thank you for that beer, yeah, I'll take you guys home, I gotta drive and drink, guys, yeah, auspicious for you.