Brew Day

 This is it, don't get scared. 

All the research over the last couple of weeks has led to this, the actual brew. I have my ingredients prepared and I know what each of them does. Now I need to put each of them to work and create a wonderful beer.

Brew Day Preparation

Robobrew (BreqHq)

Brewers are expert cleaners. Contamination can lead to very bad beer so the first step of brewing beer is

to make sure all the equipment is cleaned and sanitized. I started by washing everything that would come in contact with the beer with Oxyclean. Then I used an iodine-based sanitizer to clean every surface that I had just washed. If I cleaned the kitchen as well as I did before this brew day, my wife would ask me to brew every weekend.

There are many different types of equipment used to make beer. It can be as simple as a pot on your stovetop or as complex as the brewing equipment that you see at a brewery. For this blog, I was able to borrow a piece of equipment called a Brewzilla from a friend. This piece of equipment is like a large coffee urn. It heats the water electrically, has a built-in pump to circulate the water, and has built-in temperature controls to control the temperature precisely.

With everything clean, I filled the pot that I had with 20L of water. The recipe that was posted in the last blog post had all the steps laid out which was excellent and easy to follow. Conner at KJ Urban Winery gave me a little tip about using Hamilton city water. The water is great for brewing but it has a chemical called Chloramine added to help clean the water. This chemical creates subtle off flavours in a beer. To counteract this, he provided me with a tiny tablet of something called Campden. You add one little tablet of Campden for 20L of water and the Campden will react with the chlorine and chloramine in tap water and render the chemical inert. Problem solved.

Mashing

The first step in brewing is called Mashing. This is a process that extracts the sugar from the malted grain. These sugars will be the feast for the yeast to create beer. Mashing is a process in which you steep the malt in hot water. The water hydrates the malt, gelatinizes its starches, and releases natural enzymes. These starches are then converted to fermentable sugars (1). The malt has to be crushed in order for this process to work but the great folks at KJ crushed the grain for me when I purchased it. In order for the mashing process to work, the temperature of the malt and water needs to be kept between 65-68℃ for a full hour. If the temperature raises too high then not enough sugars are released. If the temperature dips too low then the result is a thin-tasting beer. 

Mashing. Ustrzycki © (2023)

  

With everything clean and my water ready to brew, I began heating my water to my first stage. Since the crushed grains were still at room temperature, I raised my water a little higher than the 65℃ called for in the recipe. This is called my strike temperature(1). I placed all the grain into a massive muslin bag. This would allow the water to penetrate into the bag and soak the grains while still keeping the grains contained so I didn't make a huge mess. I plunged the grains into the strike water and was off to the races. With the strike water being a little higher and the grains being at room temperature, the water temperature ended up being right at 65℃. Yay for thermodynamics! I stirred the malt around inside the bag and we were off to the races. The grain looked like a big bowl of oatmeal and it smelled amazing. 1 hour of mashing to extract all the sugars.

At the end of the hour, I took a little taste test of the water. It was deliciously sweet. The mashing process changed my water into something called wort (1). With the wort ready to go, I raised the bag up and let the remaining water drain into the pot. I then did something called sparging. Sparging involves taking hot water and rinsing the grain to extract any remaining sugars. I had to get every last sugar out of the gain to make a great beer.

Boiling

Boil. Ustrzycki ©(2023)

Now that all the sugars have been extracted from the malt, it is time to kick the temperature into high gear. The wort is typically boiled for at least 1 hour. The main reason for boiling the wort is to fully sanitize it. There will be no harmful bacteria or any other bad things left in the beer after this time. Boiling is also when we add the hops into the beer. As mentioned in the previous post, the time in which the hops are boiled gives varying results. If they are added early in the boil, they will impart more bitterness, if it is added in the middle of the boil, they will impart flavour and at the end of the boil, the hop aromas take centre stage. My goal for this beer is to create an India Pale Ale (IPA) with pronounced hop bitterness and flavour while also imparting a great tropical hop aroma. To do this, I needed to add a bunch of hops and various stages through the boil. Here's the breakdown of the full hop schedule:

• 1 oz Idaho #7 hops @ 60 minutes 
• These hops will add some great, strong bitterness to my beer
• 0.5 oz Centennial hops@ 30 minutes 
• Centennial hops gave an aroma of pine, citrus and floral notes.
• 0.5 oz Centennial hops @15 minutes
• 0.5 oz Cascade hops @ 0 minutes
• Cascade hops smelled just like grapefruit to me
• 0.5 oz Centennial hops @ 0 minutes

There was one last ingredient that I added with about 15 minutes left in the boil. This ingredient was something called Whirlfloc and its job is to clarify the beer. Hazy beers are definitely all the crazy right now. Personally, I like to be able to see through my beer and not have it look like sludge so I chose to add this ingredient to help with that.

Cooling

Yeast going in.
Ustrzycki ©(2023)

    With the boil completed, the next step was to cool the beer down. If you add yeast at a boiling temperature then those little microorganisms would get boiled alive and no fermentation would take place. The wort must be cooled down to the temperature range specified by the yeast manufacturer. To do this, carefully drained the boiling wort into a separate food-grade bucket. This bucket would be the home for the beer as it would go through its fermentation. 

    During this stage, I also took a small sample of the wort and set it aside. This sample was used to test the sugar content of my wort. To do this, I used a tool called a hydrometer. This tool floated inside the wort. On the hydrometer, there were numbers corresponding to a measurement of the sugar content of the beer, called specific gravity (1). This number would measure how much sugar my beer started at. After fermentation, I could take another measurement and use these values to figure out the alcohol content of my beer. 

    To cool down the remainder of the wort, I placed the bucket in a bathtub full of ice to cool it down. It was important that I upped my cleaning stage from this point on. Any contamination would lead to a contaminated beer. After another 30-40 minutes of hanging out in the ice bath, the wort was down to 23℃. The yeast could now be added. Stay tuned for next week's blog post where I share the information that I have discovered about yeast and fermentation. 

1. Palmer, J. J. (2017). How to brew: Everything you need to know to brew great beer every time. Brewers Publications, a division of the Brewers Association.