Homebrewing 101

Hey Imgur! First post here, I'm sharing today how to brew your own beer at home!
I'll try to explain the best I can the basics of homebrewing.

First, you'll need some equipment and brewing supplies.

Pictured here are:

* Grains: they are the cornerstone of any beer, and will supply the sugars needed to ferment the liquid into some alcoholic goodness.
* Hops: they will bring bitterness to your beer, along with some flavour, depending on how you use them. They are also very useful to keep unwanted pathogens out of your beer.
* Detergent/Sanitizer: as we are dealing with living organisms and since we will leave our wort to ferment at room temperature for a few weeks, sanitation is very important. If not done properly, your will face the risk of contaminating your beer, rendering it undrinkable (I have witnessed some of my brews go this path, and it's heart-wrenching).

* Brewing pot: this is where most of the job is done during brewday; mashing and boiling.
* Fermentation bucket: when you are done with making wort, this is where yeast will work and transform the sugary liquid into what you are expecting: beer!

* Bazooka screen: this is the mesh-thingy you see on the table. It will be fixed onto the brewing pot, and will act as a filter for grain and hops during the mash and boil steps.
* Paddle: required to mix the ingredients into the water and wort later.

As mentioned above, sanitation is important, therefore, here are some equipment settling in a solution of detergent and water.
This is an important step, especially for the pieces of equipment pictured here, since they will come into contact with chilled wort, where contamination is especially sensitive.

Pictured here are:

* Tubing: the yellow-ish ones are smaller in diameter, and used in my setup for transferring wort from the brewing pot to the fermenter.
* Heat exchanger: this beautiful device has some copper plates in it, which speeds up the cooling process at the end of the boil step. You need plug the two wort-tubing pieces on one side of the exchanger, and a cold water supply on the other side. With the magic of copper, heat is quickly exchanged between the cold water and the near-boiling wort, bringing the temperatures of the wort from ~100 degrees celsius to ~25 almost instantly.

Note on heat exchanging: since the heat exchanger I'm using costs nearly 100 bucks, it might seem a little expensive for a new brewer, especially if on a budget. Thankfully, some other solutions exist.
When I started brewing at home, I did some immersion chilling outside of the pot. Basically, I prepared a bed of ice cubes in the sink, some water, and I placed the brewing pot in it.
Mind you, this is a slow process, bringing the 22 L of wort to an acceptable temperature took almost an hour. But it was cheap, so I has that going for me, which is nice.

Another solution is to use a copper pipe as immersion chiller. Basically, you will need a roll of copper tubing, make it into a coil, plug some tubing on both sides, and drive cold water through it while immersing it into the wort. It is cheaper than an heat exchanger, and works as well (or at least, almost as well).

Here we go! First, you will need to measure a certain amount of water into your brewing pot, and bring it to mash temperature.

Mashing is the step where the starches contained in your grain is transformed into fermentable sugars.
Typically, for a single-step mash (most homebrewers do it that way, simple and efficient enough), the range of temperatures to aim for is between 62 and 70 degrees celsius (between 143 and 158 freedoms).

Mashing temperature has an effect on the body of your beer, basically a higher-temperature mash will yield a beer with more mouthfeel due to the presence of more unfermentable sugars (at least using traditional beer yeast, some strains can however consume these sugars).
Mashing higher will also reduce the final amount of alcohol in your beer since less sugars are fermented.

For the amount of water needed, I generally aim for a ratio of 1.25qt/lbs of grain. This has almost always been a good ratio, ensuring no problems with my mash (no dough balls, and enough fluid to keep everything moving around).

In here, I have measured 17.5L (~18.5 qt) of water for my grain bill (6.7 kg => 14.771 lbs)

Close-up of the miled grain.

In the grain bags, I have used the following:

* 4.5 kg of Maris Otter as base malt
* 700 g of Munich Malt
* 700 g of Vienna Malt
* 300 g of Biscuit Malt
* 300 g of Chocolate Malt
* 200 g of Roasted Malt

As some of you may have guessed reading this grain bill, I'm brewing a stout!
Stouts are faily dark beers (ranging from 28 to 35 SRM in their regular versions).
I'm aiming for a stout with a strong malt flavour, which is why I used many speciality malts in the recipe.

For those who know little of brewing yet, base malts are extremely important to all-grain brewing.
Most speciality malts (chocolate, roasted, crystal, etc.) underwent some transformations after malting (mostly through heating), which have in some cases killed the enzymes responsible for the transformation of starch into sugar.
Therefore, when using these malts, you will need some base malts to provide these enzymes (if you want to learn more, look up Lintner degrees and base malts to speciality malts ratios in beer brewing).

Since I want my stout to have a heavy mouthfeel, I'm mashing at a faily high temperature: 69 celsius.

Therefore, before I add the grain, I heat the water up to 73 celsius, before cutting the heat and adding the grain.

By overshooting by a few degrees, adding the grain to the mixture will bring the temperature down by 3-5 degrees, getting me exactly where I need to be.

When the water has attained the desired temperature, let's add the grain, and mix the whole thing into a nice slurry of water and crushed grain!

Then, we leave it to rest for 60 minutes.

Some brews require a longer mash time, especially when mashing low (61-64 celsius).

This is mostly due to the fact that the enzymes most active at these temperatures (beta-amylases) are slower than their counterparts at higher temperatures (alpha-amylases).
They will however break starches in shorter sugars, which will be easier to consume by yeast later, hence the lighter mouthfeel and the higher alcohol percentage :)

Meanwhile, take your favourite book, and something to drink!I did not have beer on hand, so here's some sweet cider, all that remained in my fridge. Not bad though!
You'll have to wait for one hour at least (some mash for longer, close to 2/3 hours for the longest mashes).
60 minutes is a good estimate for a standard mash rest.

Prepare water for lautering in the last 15-20 minutes of mash rest, as this will be useful soon!

Once done with the mash rest, now is time for lautering!

The lautering step is a very important step, since it will extract most of the remaining sugars in your grain.

Doing a proper lauter is key to good efficiency, and will augment the amount of sugars in the final product.

Lautering is done using hot water (78 celsius), by adding water at this temperature, you will improve efficiency (by a small percentage, mind you, Kai Troster from Braukaiser estimates the efficiency improvement at around 1%).
Adding water at this temperature also reduces viscosity, rendering the lautering step easier.

What you see here in picture is the vorlauf step.
Vorlauf pre-filters the wort, filtering small particles, avoiding having them in the wort.
What you need to do is keep 1-2 L of wort in a temporary recipient, and re-circulate it in the wort.
By doing so, the grain "cake" will naturally filter those particles, rendering your wort clearer in the end.

Here's what the first runnings look like!

They will be denser at first, but will become thinner as lautering progresses.

Some brewers keep these first runnings to make a stronger brew, and use the lautering results to brew lighter beers, sometimes with the addition of malt extract or more grain.

This is not the case here, as this requires more processing time and equipment.

This is what the liquid looks like at the end of the lautering step!~23/24 L of wort, ready to boil!

This does not look clearer considering this is a dark brew, black remains black!
You will however see a difference when dealing with lighter coloured brews like weizens or witbiers.

The grain cake!

This is what remains to be discarded after the mash step. The grain absorbed a lot of water, and is now a lot heavier than it was at first, you will need to be confident in your garbage bags if you want to dispose of all that!

Of course, if you have a compost bin, now is a good time to feed it ! (I don't however for now, but soon my city will make them available where I live, which is nice)

Will you look at this! 23/24L of beautiful wort, transferred back into the brewing pot, ready for the boiling step!

Boiling is primordial in brewing, as it is the time where hops bring their bitterness to the beer (more on that later).
It is also a very efficient way to sanitize the whole wort, and is believed to have kept people healthy in the middle-ages, as water was generally unsafe for drinking by itself (though people had no idea why at the time!)

Nearing boil! You will notice the foam forming on the top of the wort.

When the pellicle starts breaking up is generally a good time to add your hops, as it is boiling (gently, you don't need a rolling boil for the process to work properly).

A rolling boil will lower the volume of the beer considerably during the whole hour of boiling (or longer depending on the recipe), which is why you will want the boil to be gentle.

The two remaining ingredients in the process! Hops for bitterness and flavour, and yeat to tranform all the sugars we've extracted before into alcohol and CO2!

As for the equation, pretty much every glucose molecule is transformed in two alcohol molecules, and two CO2 molecules!

C6H2O6 -> 2 CO2 + 2 CH3-CH2-OH

The 5.5 written on the hop bag is the Alpha-Acid content, basically, the higher the alpha-acids, the higher the bitterness will be for the same amount of hops used during boil.

Some of you might have heard about dry-hopping, in this case, alpha-acids will not be hydrolyzed and will not contribute to bitterness.
They will however impart flavour to your beer, but be mindful not to leave them for too long in the wort, as they will start tasting like hay or cut grass (not something you wish).

Depending on hop variety, the flavour imparted by your hops will change a lot, which is why depending on the style you are aiming for, you will need to select different varieties of hops.

Hops added to the wort, and boiling! Now is the time where bitterness develops in the beer!

In this case, the 100 g of hops will be added in two batches, one of 60g at 60 min before the end of boil, and 40 g at 20 minutes.

The late additions will bring a little bitterness, but will contribute to the hoppy flavour of the beer.
This is due to the fact that oils are volatile, and will evaporate when boiled for a long time.

Bitterness however will be bolder, the longer the boiling time of the hops, up to a certain point.
Some brewers boil their hops for as long as 120 minutes!

When you are done boiling your wort, now is the time to chill it and store it in your fermenter!

In my case, this is where the heat exchanger becomes indispensable, as it will fasten cooling the wort.

This step takes about 20-30 minutes all by itself, the transparent tubes bring cold water to the exchanger, and the two pieces of tubing coming from the pot and into the fermenter contain the wort.

When you are done transferring the wort from the pot into the fermenter, this is what you end-up with!

In my case, that is 21 liters of liquid, but when taking into account the losses from trubs (protein deposits) and yeast by-products, I will easily lose about one liter, bringing the end-total to about 20L of finished product!

The yeast, ready to be pitched into the wort!

After pitching the yeast into the fermenter, seal it properly with an airlock.

This will prevent airbourne contamination from a third-party.

Measuring gravity!

Not every homebrewer perform that step, but it will give you a good estimate of what to expect from your beer, in terms of ABV.When stable, it gives a good estimate of when fermentation has finished too.

In this case, the gravity reading is around 1.065 SG. When attenuated by our yeast, it should bring us to about 1.010-1.015 SG, which means an ABV of 6-7%.

What remains after filtering the wort into the fermenter.
100 g of wet hops do take some volume, and they will hardly be filtered by your sink, a colander is highly recommanded for this step!

Bonus: After ~1 day of fermentation, foam started to form in the fermenter, this is called the Krausen.

A high krausen indicates a healthy fermentation, which is all good in this case :)

Aside from our Dark Side beer is an older brew, a sour, fruit-based wheat ale, which will be good to drink in the next months!

Sorry for the long post, I hope it has been interesting however!

To make amends for it all, this is a picture of the device I used for taking all those pictures during the brewday!