Home Brewing

Brewing beer involves a decent number of steps that initially may seem complicated. I hope, however, that you will find this documentation of my making a Belgian-style Chou Chou helpful as you make your own beer. For those who are serious about making their own Belgian-style ale, I would highly suggest getting yourself a copy of Pierre Rajotte's Belgian Ale (Classic Beer Styles Series). The following recipe is taken from this book and the description of the process comes from Chapter Four, "Brewing with a Belgian Masterbrewer," but adapted for the home brewer.

Making the Mash

The first step in brewing, at least for the home brewer, is making the mash. Mashing is basically the process of extracting from the malted barley all the sugars which will feed the yeast during fermentation. Most beers call for an infusion mash (like making tea with grain), although some may require decoction (a complicated process I have yet to master in my kitchen). Mashing is, without question, the messiest step in making beer and may be by-passed by purchasing liquid extracts of grains. I, however, find mashing the most enjoyable part of the process, as it gives a connection to the grains one misses when using an extract. Mashing also produces a beautiful aroma in the kitchen that I would miss.

You will need six things to make mash: water, malted barley, a mash tun, a source of heat, a floating thermometer, and a stirring device.
As far as water is concerned, each style of beer is tailored to fit the local water supply. I am fortunate to have a well on our property which delivers relatively soft water of a nice taste and adequate pH for making Belgian style beers. I use the water filter in our refrigerator to remove any odors which may be present before using any water in the brewing process.
Malted barley consists of barley grains which have been harvested, then soaked until just before they germinate which are subsequently kiln roasted. The type of barley, the season in which it was grown, and the process of kiln drying all effect the quality of the final product, the amount of sugar in the grain, and the color of the grain. I buy my malted grain from the local home brew store, American Brewmaster. (I do, however, harbor fantasies of growing and malting our own grain, which is no simple process). You will need to crack all the grains you will be using before you can make the mash. Most home brew outlets have a grain grinder you can use on site.For this recipe I used 12 pounds of American two-row pale malted barley (1.8 Lovibond) and one pound of Belgian two-row aromatic pale malted barley.
A mash tun is the container used to make the mash. For my home brewing, this consists of two pasta pots (one 2.5 gallon and the other 2 gallon), both with thick bottoms and well insulated lids. It is not ideal having two pots and trying to keep them at the same temperature, but given the limitations of my heat source and our budget, we cannot justify buying a 7.5 gallon stainless steel stock pot.
A floating thermometer is a must and they are inexpensive, so just get a good dairy thermometer somewhere (they come in all home brew starter kits). Large scale operations use a paddle installed in their mash tun or shovels as a stirring device, but I am content with our strong handled Cutco spoon.

Once you have all the ingredients and tools, begin by heating 3.25 gallons of water to 140° F. It doesn't matter how quickly you do this, but just be sure you have a stable temperature for several minutes before proceeding. Especially if you have done your heating on an electric stove, as I am forced to do, the temperature will keep going up if you have heated too quickly. Holding the temperature stable at 140° F, slowly stir in all 13 pounds of the grain (see picture). Turn the heat on slightly and raise the temperature of the mash to 145° F in about 15-20 minutes, stirring constantly. Once you have reached 145° F, cover the mash tun (if you are using pots), turn off the heat, and let everything rest at 145° F for 15 minutes. You may want to stir the mash a couple of times during this rest, making sure that the grain at the sides of the pot do not cool too much. I find the pulling the grains from the sides inward and pulling up the mash from the warm bottom does the best job of distributing the heat. After this rest, turn the heat back on and raise the temperature to 151° F. This is the saccharification temperature; it may need to be adjusted depending on the degree of modification of your grain. You will want to let the mash rest at this temperature until all the starch has been converted to sugar. This can take as long as 90 minutes, although it may be longer or shorter depending on a number of factors (See Eric Warner's German Wheat Beer for an extensive discussion of the effects of temperature on saccharification and other processes for both barley and wheat). The best way to determine whether or not saccharification is complete is to do an iodine test. Take a small sample of your mash (including grains) and add a drop or two of iodine. Stir it around in the spoon with a fork and press the grains with the fork to squeeze the liquid into another spoon. If it has turned a deep blue/grey color (see photo), starch still remains in the mash.(I suggest doing a sample early in the process to get an idea of the color when starch is present). If there is no discernible color change, than all the starch has been converted to sugar and saccharification has taken place. Holding the temperature at 151° F for up to 90 minutes can prove to be challenging, but with vigilance, stirring, and slight applications of heat I have managed to make it work most of the time. Once saccharification is complete, raise the temperature of the mash to 160° F and let it rest for 15 minutes. Finally, raise the temperature to 169° F. Ideally this is done by adding 1.5 gallons of filtered well water heated to 194° F. Given the limited volume of pasta pots, however, I am only able to add a little heated water (making up for what has evaporated) and am then forced to achieve the remaining temperature increade by just turning up the heat on our electric range. The advantage of adding additional heated water is that it makes the subsequent phase much easier.

Lautering (or Sparging)

Once the mashing has been completed, we want to separate the grains from the liquid (called wort, but pronounced wert). Those who have real brewing facilities do this with the aid of a lautering tun, but I have found that the strainer of the pasta pot, placed over the fermenting bucket (see picture) works just fine.This sieving of the spent grains from the precious wort is called lautering. Part of this process is sparging, which consists in extracting any remaining useful nutrients from the spent grains with heated water. In professional places this is generally done by running water at 170° F over the spent grain until the desired final volume of wort is attained. I generally add water of about 190° F to the spent grains, which I have placed back in the pasta pot, and stir around for some time (checking the final temperature to be 169° F) before straining once again. Use whatever method works best for you, but keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to extract as much sugar as possible from the grains; the denser your wort, the better your beer will turn out. Thus, you want to avoid adding too much water, while at the same time attaining the desired final volume of wort. Before any sparging, the specific gravity of my wort (just under 2.5 gallons) was 1.098. After sparging, the final volume of wort was slightly more than five gallons with a specific gravity of 1.058 (before boiling or addition of candi).

Boiling the Wort

Once you have attained the desired volume of wort, the wort is transfered to the brewing kettle. For those of us using pasta pots, chances are pretty good that the kettle used for boiling will be the same as used for making the mash. Professional brewers have sealed kettles that are used to boil the wort without worrying about boil-overs. Unless you are one of those lucky ones, once you have scooped the spent (and sparged) grains into your compost pile, rinse out the pasta pot and return the wort to it. Because I ended up with more than five gallons of wort, much more than will fit into my two pasta pots, I used an additional pan of 1.25 gallons. Before beginning the boil, it is important to use a hydrometer to read the specific gravity of the wort. Specific gravity is a comparison of the density of the liquid (in this case the wort) to that of water. This will be important to know a) how much sugar was extracted from the grains, b) to estimate the possible alcohol content of the final product, and c) to determine the degree of fermentation and actual alcohol content before bottling the beer. A hydrometer comes with most home brew starter kits and fortunately they are inexpensive because you will break them in the course of your home brewing experience. Fortunately, unlike the thermometer, there is no poisonous mercury that is lost when the thermometer also inevitably gets broken.

The wort used for the boil should be relatively free of particles, so an efficient and effective lautering process is of great import. During the boil, the most important thing to watch out for is boil-over. Keeping a liquid that is high in sugar content boiling without spilling the wort onto the stove to make a caramelized mess takes quite a bit of vigilance. But the wort will not burn in the pots the same way the mash could have earlier. That said, you want to stir the boiling wort frequently and attend to the hops. The hops are added at various times during the boil, depending on the recipe. Hops are the flowers of female hops plants, which you can grow yourself from a rhizome cultivar. Although I have grown my own hops, I generally use pellet hops (see picture), because they are easier to measure and clean up.Hops are generally added to a brew in two parts—bittering and aroma. Because Belgian-style ales are not particularly bitter (and thus much of why I like them), only a small amount of hops are added to the boil. After bringing the wort to a boil in the brew kettle, I added 18g of Styrian hops (4.9% alpha Goldings from Slovenia). Half an hour later, I added another 9g of the same Styrian hops pellets and 9g of Saaz (3.6% alpha from the Czech Republic). After yet another 30 minutes (one hour into the boil), I added 6.5oz candi sugar. This was allowed to dissolve into the boiling wort for another 30 minutes. Candi sugar is dark, solid sucrose made by a slow crystallization of highly concentrated caramelized sugar solution, resembling the stuff you get on sticks at old time candy stores. Then I tossed an additional 9g of Hallertauer hops pellets (4.2% alpha from Germany). Finally, at the very end of the boil, I added 15g of Hallertauer (avg. 3.7% alpha from Germany). (The recipe called for Northern Moravian of 3.8% alpha, but I could not find any of this variety and replaced them with Hallertauer because of a similar alpha acid content). Because I am not throwing all my hops into a single brew kettle, I generally place the hops in a bag and move the bag around between the various pots to distribute the hops somewhat evenly across the three vessels. Once all the hops have been added, the heat was then turned off, I added 18g of coriander, and poured the wort immediately into the fermenter.

Fermenting

The true magic of beer begins when the yeast are introduced. After boiling the wort, adding the hops and any additional flavors (coriander in this case), and sugars, the wort is poured into the fermenter. For home brewers, this is a modified 7.5 gallon plastic bucket. Mine came as part of a home brew starter kit from my friend, Peter. The bucket has lines marking each half gallon, a spigot at the bottom, and the lid is outfitted with an air lock (see picture).Because yeast produce, in addition to alcohol, carbon dioxide, it is important that the airlock allow the gas to escape from the fermenter without allowing other gases or contamination into the fermenter.

Because yeast are living beings, the conditions of the wort determine their effectiveness at converting the sugars in the wort into alcohol. Each yeast strain has been found to have different optimum temperatures for production, although in general top-fermenting yeasts (used for ales) prefer warmer temperatures and bottom-fermenting yeasts (used for lagers) prefer cooler temperatures. The particular recipe I am using called for pitching the yeast at the relatively high temperature of 76° F and fermenting for four to five days between 76° and 85° F. Because this temperature, high though it is for yeast, is much lower than that of the boiled wort, we must cool the boiled wort to this range in such a way that no contaminants can be introduced into the wort. Once the wort has been boiled everything with which it will come in contact (e.g., fermenting bucket, thermometer, hydrometer, top of yeast packet, spoon, etc.) must be sanitized using an iodine solution. This is because the wort makes an excellent medium for growing not only the yeast but also bacteria which may contaminate the solution. It is therefore important to maintain a sanitary environment for the yeast and to ensure a rapid start to the yeast, allowing the yeast to reproduce faster than other microorganisms that will be present despite our best efforts. In order to cool the wort to a temperature appropriate for the yeast, professional and many home brewers employ a wort cooler, which functions like a radiator dropped into the wort, serving to cool it with ice cold water that does not contact the wort. The temperature differential also causes the wort to circulate, removing the need to stir the wort while it is cooling. I generally fill up the sink with cold water and ice and wait for the temperature to drop, replacing the ice and water when the bath becomes too warm. Because other microorganisms may begin to reproduce rapidly, it is important to pitch the yeast as soon as possible after the boil has finished, thus cooling the wort to a temperature at which the yeast can be safely pitched is of great importance. It took an excessively lenghty 3.5 hours to get my wort cooled to 76° F.

Once the wort reached 76&def; F, I pitched the yeast. I used an activator slurry of 100 billion yeast cells of Trappist ale yeast from Wyeast. I have had good luck with the Wyeast products as well as with yeast from White Labs, a San Diego based yeast producer. Each yeast imparts a particular flavor to the finished beer; the distinctive taste from the yeast is more noticeable than any other factor in the beer, except perhaps an excessive use of hops, giving fruity esters and special aromas. So it is important to use a good yeast strain that is appropriate for the profile you are trying to make. In addition to the sugar to be consumed in producing the alcohol, the yeast require a substantial amount of oxygen for full attenuation. Shaking the bucket to aerate the wort is generally a good way to provide oxygen. Although I would like to do so at some point, I have not tried to propagate my own yeast lines. It becomes difficult because continuing a yeast culture requires not only a sanitary environment, like the rest of the fermenting process, but a sterile environment, which is difficult to maintain outside of a laboratory situation. Back to the point, once I have oxygenated the yeast and wort, I put the bucket in a closet, away from light and other disturbances. There it sits until bottling day. Now it is time to clean up the caramelized mess on the stove, mop the sticky goop off the floor, and to get the pots cleaned up before Michelle gets home!

Bottling

Once the beer has finished fermenting, it is time to bottle. For bottling day I use an additional food grade bucket, a length of plastic tubing, a bottling spigot, a capper, our hydrometer, and fifty 12 ounce dark glass beer bottles. Even before proceeding, the beer bottles need to be prepared. It is easiest if you rinse your beer bottles out after each drink, however, since we were getting our bottles from a fellow craisgslist user, we were unsure as to whether they had been cleaned. With bottle brush in hand and one sink full of soapy water, Michelle washed 55 bottles. And I rinsed them all in clean water, emptying the rinse water every 18 bottles or so, to make sure no soap residue is left. Once all of the bottles had been washed, we them sanitized using the our same iodine solution which must be done with every batch of beer, regardless of how clean the bottles might be. I put enough iodine in the second bucket with warm water and soaked the bottles, 18 at a time, for at least five minutes. I then rinsed them and set them in the dishwasher to drip dry for a bit (see photo).

It is now time to prepare the beer for bottling. Each recipe calls for a different amount of time to be allowed for fermentation. The recipe I am using called for four to five days. Because I thought the temperature in the closet under our stairs might have been lower than ideal (although I had set up a small space heater to help out), I allowed for the full five days. You can also check using the hydrometer to see if the finishing gravity matches that called for in the recipe. Rajotte specified a finishing gravity of 1.022 for this Chou Chou. Because there was an enormous head of yeast on the top of our fermenter (see photo), it was not possible to use the hydrometer before racking the beer. I took a reading after racking and we were safe with a finishing gravity of 1.020. If your finishing gravity is the same as your original gravity then fermentation has not taken place and the yeast did not start for some reason. If your finishing gravity has changed from the starting gravity, but not as low as called for in the recipe, then fermentation may not be complete and you may want to wait before bottling. Bottling beer that is still actively fermenting can be quite dangerous and the bottles can explode. This has thankfully never happened to any of my brews.

Racking is the first step in bottling and consists in siphoning the beer from the fermenter into a second bucket. This is done with a length of plastic tubing which is submerged in the beer in the fermenter and transfered to the second bucket. I find that putting the fermenter on the counter and placing the second bucket on a chair works well. You want to avoid sucking up the settled yeast and other particles from the bottom and from overly aerating the beer during the racking process. The goal is to get a relatively clear beer, leaving the sediment in the fermenter. At this point I was able to take a hydrometer reading (see above), which can be used to calculate the alcohol content of the beer. Once racked, priming sugar is generally added to the beer. Priming sugar is added in order to give the small amount of remaining yeast in the beer some additional nutrients on which to feed. This results in a miniscule increase in the alcohol content, but the primary purpose in doing so is to increase the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the beer. Because few home brewers have carbonation equipment and nearly all use bottles, this addition of priming sugar creates the needed carbonation in the final beer. For this recipe I used 9 Tablespoons (3 ounces) of pure dextrose sugar dissolved in less than one cup of boiling water. This is then slowing stirred into the beer in the second bucket. While some recipes, specifically German recipes that seek to adhere to the Reinheitsgebot use wort that has been kept from brewing day (called spiese) for this process, I worry more about keeping an uncontaminated wort than adherence to a fifteenth century purity law. Some Belgian beers, especially ones high in alcohol content, are bottle conditioned, which means adding a small second batch of yeast to the beer immediately before bottling.

With the priming sugar added, the plastic tube is rinsed clean, the bottling spigot is attached, and the valve on the bottom of the bucket is opened. This results in filling the beer bottles from the bottom, which restricts contamination and reduces the aeration of the beer. Aeration at this point in the process will result in a stale tasting final product. This filling process (see photo) is repeated until all the beer is used (about ten bottles per gallon of beer). The bottles are then immediately capped (see photo), put into six-pack containers and ferried back to the closet to mature. This Chou Chou, which I have nick named my quick and dirty recipe, is excellent after only two weeks in the bottle. Others, such as a barley wine I made, needs a minimum of six months in bottles to mature. When you are ready to drink your beer, transfer to the refrigerator for a few days. The cool temperature will help to clarify the beer, increasing the sediment at the bottom of the bottles but fewer particles in your beer.