Basic Beer Brewing
There are several different ways to begin your adventures
in brewing your own beer. The average person will want to try his or her hand
at brewing but won’t want to spend a ton of money t do it. That’s smart! You
may not really get into it so way spend so much hard earned cash when you can
get your feet wet and learn the basics very inexpensively with the mini kits
they have available today?
In the animation above I have shown several types
of fermenting vessels from the least expensive Mr. Beer to the more expensive
V-Vessel. If you’re thinking about brewing beer but your not sure if you’ll
stick with it or you just want to brew a few gallons at a time - go with the
Mr. Beer kit! The cheapest kit goes for around $40 and gives you everything
you’ll need to brew your first batch of beer except the bottles. Save your soda
pop bottles for a few days and you’ve got bottles. This kit will give you the
opportunity to get familiar with the process and decide what you want to do.
The purists will say go with the carboy spend a lot of money that’s how the
pros do it! Well your not a pro, you may never even want to be a pro and you
may not want or need to brew more than a few gallons at a time.
When I
tried to briefly describe the four methods of brewing with the basic type
fermenters listed above without complicating
it with all the scientific whys and wherefores it became:
Deejay’s Very Basic
Brewers Guide
The non scientific guide to brewing
(everything you’ll
find on the site) – an 88 page, - 4 mb PDF
There are Four Basic ways to brew Beer
Extract
Brewing – Kind of like making condensed soup. Put water
in the pot, pour in the concentrated beer malt and away you go. You still have
the option of adding additional ingredients, to make a special recipe but
that’s basically it. When you purchase a beer extract kit you usually get a can
of condensed malt syrup in the style of your choice with the hops already
added, maybe a can of plain malt syrup and sometimes the yeast. * Note the
concentrate may be in the form of a powder.
Extracts with Steeped Grains - Same as the extract above but you
add a few ounces of crushed malt grains you steep in a small muslin bag like
making tea. Not a whole lot more effort but a big difference in taste for some
beer styles.
Partial Mash – In one pot boil water. Put
specialty grains in a muslin bag, place in a second small pot of water, bring
water up to 170°F turn off heat and let it steep like tea for about 20 minutes
then remove the bag. When the water in the big pot boils add extracts and the
“tea” from the small pot. Add hops as needed.
All-Grain – This is the most complicated of
the four and takes some extra equipment. This is how beer has been made for
thousands of years. You need a mash tun to soak to grains in and two large
pots, one to add the water to the mash tun and one to collect the water from
the mash tun. The basic process is to add the grains to the mash tun, allow the
water to be filtered through the grains to extract the sugars and boil the
collected sugar water down to make an extract – then it’s just like extract
brewing.
NOTE: These are just a basic descriptions
I’ll get into more details in later pages.
The Mini Homebrew Kits
There are several types of beer
brewing kits available from the more traditional bucket and carboy to the newer
self contained keg fermenters. If you not sure about how much you’ll like
brewing, you are short on space or you don’t expect to make more than a few
gallons at a time, I recommend the self contained fermenting kits such as Mr.
Beer or Beer Machine. These kits make roughly 2.5 gallons of beer at a time.
I’ll go over several types to give
you an idea of what’s available and to help you choose the one that’s right for
you. I’ll try to list an average price per unit you can use these information
for comparison purposes.
The Beer Machine
The simplest type of Mini Brew
system is the Beer Machine. This is a self- contained single step unit which
allows you to brew 2.6 gallon batches of beer. I have seen this unit at
Wal-Mart at Christmas time and I believe it can be purchased at the As Seen On
TV stores for around $129.
A friend of mine who just returned
from Iraq said they had these in the barracks. I have not personally used this
unit, but I do know people who do and they seem to be somewhat happy with it.
According to the instructions you
just pour water into the airtight Beer Machine cask, pour in one of the
prepackaged Beer Mixes, seal the cask, leave the Beer Machine out at room
temperature for 3 to 5 days, then move it into your refrigerator for 4 to 5
days. It uses small CO2 cartridges (similar to the ones used in paintball) to add
carbonation to the beer in the cask. The beer may be dispensed from the cask or
bottled. The Beer Machine
Website
Mr. Beer
A more traditional yet small sized
brewing system. I actually got started brewing with the Mr. Beer brew system. I
love the little keg fermenters! They are easy to use and easy to clean. It’s
just a little PVC container with a spigot and a cap. The cap threads have
little cuts down them to let excess CO2 bleed out if needed, so an airlock is not needed. Each keg
produces about 2.5 gallons of beer. This is a great size for testing the waters
or experimenting with different malt extracts, hops, steeped grains and even
mini mash recipes.
I love these little fermeters and I
personally have 6 of them. It’s a great way to make multiple batches of beer
and not take up lots of space. Two of
these will fit in a large Rubbermaid container and can be stacked up almost
anywhere if lined with brown paper to block out light. It’s also a good way to
store your supplies when not in use.
There are a few different packaging
variations of this kit. The Deluxe Kit comes with the keg, the ingredients in
make one batch of beer sanitizer and plastic bottle caps for $30 . The Premium
Kit also comes with eight, one liter PET bottles as well $40. Mr. Beer Kegs and Mr. Beer Products or Mr. Beer in the UK
The Homemade Mini Fermenter
If your really frugal like I am and like
cheese balls you can buy the large container of cheese balls for about $3 at
Wal Mart, add a spigot and an airlock and for about $8 build a 3 gallon
fermenter. You will have to put it in a cardboard box or something to keep the
light out as this container is clear but it works! You’ll notice I use this
same type of container to brine chicken and
small turkeys on the smoking pages. I have a ton of them now and
recycle them all of one thing or another. They don’t take much more room than a
gallon of milk and fit well in the fridge. Nice if your going to be lagering.
Here are two Yahoo forums that deal with brewers
using the smaller 2.5 gallon size fermenters - the Mr. Beer and Beer Machine:
BeerMUG Mr Beer Brewing Club
Vendor Support For Mini Microbrew
Systems
Dan Listermann's
- Mini Kits Homebrew Adventures
- Mini Brew Kits
Note: You can always buy a kit designed
for 5 gallon batches and just use half the ingredients. Put te remaining
ingredients in an air tight container and use it within a few weeks. It’s cheaper and it works great!
The Simple Food Grade Bucket
Fermenter
This is the simplest of the
traditional brew fermenters. They can be purchased completely assembled for
about $20 or you can do it yourself.
It’s not hard to make and you may
already have the parts laying around the house.
Do you have a restaurant you frequent? Maybe you could ask them if they
throw away their white food buckets? A lot of stuff comes in these buckets,
pickles, pancake mixes, iced tea mixes, sea food you name it! They come in
sizes from about 55 gallons to 1 gallon. You’ll want at least one (two is
better) 5 gallon size and don’t forget the lids!
Look around you might get them for
free. I got one free from a lunch counter at work. Then one day I went by one
by favorite Chinese Supermarket and they had at least 50 of these things
sitting out back. I asked the woman in the store if I could have one and she
sold me one for $3. I would have paid at least $6.50 just for the shipping so I
was still way ahead of the game. If your
bucket smells of I former contents just wash it in soapy water, fill it full of
crumpled newspaper and let it sit for a few days. The newspaper will remove the
smell.
Add an airlock and a spigot and
you’ve got a fermenter!
The Glass / Plastic Carboy Fermenter
Glass carboys are the most tradition
method of fermenting beer or wine. Today they are also made of plastic. They
come in sizes from 3.5 gallons ($16) to 6.5 gallons ($25). They are very
popular but very slippery and heavy (especially when full) and explode when
dropped!
Conical Fermenters
Commercial breweries and micro breweries
generally use huge conical fermenters. Conical fermenters make brewing
amazingly easy (especially on your back). No lifting heavy buckets or carboys,
no need to transfer to a secondary fermenter to clarify your beer. One
container does it all! The most common conical fermenters are made of stainless
steel or copper, needless to say they are VERY expensive but they also come in
PVC . This one costs about $500!
The steeply angled bottom (about 60 degrees) allows all of the trub and spent yeast fall
to the bottom. The trub can be dumped out using the lower ball valves for
cleaner, clearer beer. It is also good for capturing the yeast for reuse later.
The upper ball valve is used to remove your beer above the trub line so you
could simply leave the old yeast in there and add new wort to start a whole new
batch of beer!
The V-Vessel
Another style of conical fermenter
and one that I use for larger batches is
called the V-Vessel. The V-Vessel System consist of the unit itself (looks like
a big light bulb) with the collection capsule, bracket and mounting
accessories, cleaning brush, rubber bung and airlock, an extra female coupler
with a tubing adapter and 5 ft of tubing.
It’s designed to hang on a wall but
I have mine setup on a stand made of some scrap angle iron and rebar. I use the
“extra female coupler and tubing adapter for racking (it’s hanging over the
stand).
