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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Home brew book
  • Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 11:32:20 EST

Papazian's is a very good book.

Based on his book and a description by the late (and very great) John Seymour
("The Fat of the Land") I determined a few years ago to taste real, right off
the homestead, brew.

You can begin with brewing kits which are basically hopped malt syrup. You
really can't go far wrong with them and even if they do go wrong they are
infinitely better than the piss-water pilsners in the Marts.

You can also go a step farther back and buy malt sugar and compressed hops.

Or you can go farther back still and buy malted barley.

OR ... you can go lunatic fringe and grow the only two ingredients you need,
barley and hops, and make beer entirely off the homestead.

I have done this, and here is the outline:

Don't get balled up and lost in the types of barley or types of hops. Those
are subtle aspects of brewing and do not make or break a feasible beer.
It's
like obsessing over some rare breed of livestock or the other before you've
raised even one common garden variety.

Soak the barley in cold water over night. The next day drain it and keep it
damp in a collander or such by rinisng it once or twice a day with cold
water.
I detest the metric system but this works out too close to not mention it.
You need about one kilo (2.2 lbs) of barley for a gallon of beer.

In six days or so the barley will sprout. Look at the spire, the stalk of
the plant that grows from one end of the seed under the husk and would
eventually emerge from the other end. I say 'eventually' because you only
want to let
the barley sprout until the spire is 1/3 the length of the barleycorn. At
this point the roots of the sprouting corns will be 1/2 to 3/4" long.

Dry the barley to check any further sprouting. If you just dry it, say in a
warm oven or dehydrator, you will have crystal malt. You can heat the barley
to caramelize some of the sugars giving you amber, brown or black malt for
darker beers. The enzymes needed for conversion are not harmed up to the
brown
stage, but are killed if the malt turns black. That's why you only add a
little black malt to the wort and do not make beer out of all black malt.

When the malt is very dry, break it into pieces by running it through the
likes of a Corona mill set on vary coarse or else use a dough roller or
bottom of
a skillet to break up the corns.

The dried malt will weigh just about the same as the original barley. Put
the 2 1/4 or so pounds of malt into a gallon (or little less) of water. Here
it
is good to realize that you are going to activate the enzymes Alpha-amylase
and Beta-amylase. Alpha-amylase breaks up the long chains of starches in the
middle of the chain resulting in shorter chains. Beta-amylase works on the
ends of the chains to break off indivisual glucose molecules. Alpha-amylase
is
most active at about 150 degrees and Beta-amylase at abut 130 degrees. So to
get the best starch to sugar conversion, heat the wort up to 150 degrees for
a
few minutes and then let it cool a bit to around 140 degrees and keep it at
that temp for at least an hour. This process is "mashing".

A great deal of the starch will have been converted to sugar. Drain the wort
from the bottom or siphon it (draining from a spigot or bung-hole at the
bottom of the vessel works much better). Check your volume which will be
considerably less than a gallon since the mash has soaked up and retained a
lot of the
water. Pour cold water through the spent mash and drain it just as you did
the wort. This water dissolves more sugars. Keep doing this until you have
your gallon.

Feed the spent mash to the chickens.

Tie up about an ounce and a half of hops in a cloth and put it in the wort.
Bring to a boil and let it continue for at a low boil for a few minutes.
Remove the hops. Let the wort cool to a simmer and tie up an additional half
ounce of hops in a cloth and let it simmer in the hot wort for a few minutes.

Hops contains resins that are released when it is boiled, these resins are
bitter, and so the first hops are the 'bittering hops'. Alas, that wonderful
hops
aroma and much of the hops taste is destroyed or boils off when the wort is
boiled. So the second hops brews in the wort and is the 'flavoring' hops.
Much is made about using this or that hops for the one or the other. But any
hops makes a decent beer and flowers from the same plant can be used for both.

Take out a pint of the wort, seal it tightly, and put it in the refrigerator.

Cool the wort to blood temperature. In the ongoing brewing process you will
add the slightly soured dregs from a previous bottle of beer for the yeast,
but the first time use some sort of ale yeast. Bread yeast is no good and
wine
yeast isn't much better. Pitch the yeast and put an airlock on the jug (or
whatever). On a small batch, a balloon works fine. Even stuffing the neck
with cloth or cotton works OK. An airlock of some type is best though.

In about six days or so the fermentation will cease and the brew will
clarify, all the solids percipitating out and settling to the bottom. Rack
the brew
off the lees by siphoning. Then add the pint of wort you refrigerated to the
brew, this is to carbonate the beer.

Decant the beer into bottles, eight old Grolsch bottles are ideal for this.
Leave the bottles at room temp for at least three weeks, six is better.

Then refrigerate the beer very cold. This natural home beer has no chemical
anti-gushing agents and such so if you open a warm bottle, it is likely to
all
come flying out of the bottle ... a tragedy, that.

Pour the beer out of the bottle into a glass. Do this slowly and
deliberately, there are dreggs in the bottom of the bottle and you want to
sac the last
half ounce of so of beer to avoid them.

Real beer is NOT the same thing you buy in the store. The closest you came
to it are craft beers, but even at that, a real, living, active
(non-pasturized), all barley beer is even better.

This outline works for any quantity of beer, the gallon proportion is just a
convenient place to start for math's sake.



James




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