Brew Day

This was September, 2002. Feedback form is on the main page if you wish to tell or ask me something

Lots of regular household items have fancy names when used in brewing. I'll try to point them out below.

Getting ready to strike

The small white bucket hold the 11 pounds of grain used in today's recipe. Fancy name for the grain is "grist." The grains were crushed by the homebrew shop because I do not have my own mill. I weighed the grains one pound at a time on my ancient triple-beam scale.

The silver pot is military surplus 32qt stainless steel. the fancy name for this pot is the HLT or "hot liquor tank." It it heating about 3.5 gallons of "strike" water to 170F.

The rectangular box is a 48qt Rubbermaid cooler with a slotted CPVC manifold in the bottom. The grains and strike water will be mixed together in this cooler and allowed to sit for a while. This is called the "mash" and looks like a big batch of oatmeal. When used in this way, the cooler is called a "mash tun."

Mashing

The water and grain are happily stewing away at 150-something degrees. Usually the lid is on, but I had just taken its temperature before I took its picture. It sits this way for an hour or so, then I added another gallon of hot water from the HLT a few minutes before starting to drain the liquid.

Vorlauf & Lauter

The tube, pot and measuring cup on the right side are used to drain the liquid from the cooler. The liquid is called "extract" because we are extracting the sweet sugars from the grains. When the draining begins, the cooler magically becomes a "lauter tun." and the act of draining is the "lauter."

Finally it is time to open up the valve and gather the first of the sweet extract. This simple act has a fancy name - "vorlauf" which I'm told is German for something like "fore-runnings." We recycle these fore-runnings back into the tun because they are all cloudy with bits of grain and husk. Eventually the grains rest up against the slots in the manifold and make for a nice natural filter. Then I open up the valve and let the extract drain into the pot.

This should put about 1/2 the total amount of expected extract in the boil pot, or 3 gallons in this case. The remaining water is trapped in the wet grains.

Sparge

There is still a lot of sugar trapped in the grains, so we have to rinse them out. This rinsing is called the "sparge" and there are several ways to do it. I used a "batch sparge." That means another three gallons of hot water are added to the lauter tun from the HLT, stirred, left to sit a few minutes, vorlaufed, then drained. This provides the other half of the extract for the boil pot.

Boil

The muddy-brown extract starts heating on the turkey-fryer burner. At some point - when the heat is turned on? When the boil starts? When the hops are added in the next step? -- the extract gets a special name: "wort" which is an old English word pronounced like "word" but with a "t" at the end.

On the right is the thick layer of foam that forms just before the pot is ready to boil. I stirred regularly with my charismatic spoon to make sure the liquid did not scorch to the bottom of the pot or superheat under that blanket of foam and blurp out of the pot in a sticky, messy boilover.

After the rolling boil runs for a few minutes, add the leafy, deliciously aromatic petals of the hop cones. These hops provide bitterness to offset the sweetness of the malt and make for a balanced beverage.

After boiling an hour or more, the wort must be cooled quickly to limit the chance of wild yeast or bacteria landing in the pot and spoiling the whole lot. Hose water runs through the copper coils of the "immersion chiller" and then is drained, steaming hot, out the other side. This carries away the heat from the wort and cools it to near room temperature less than 30 minutes.

Transferring & aerating

Once the wort is cool, it gets siphoned out of the pot and into the large glass jug called a "carboy" where it will ferment. The tall stick coming out of the pot with the tube attached is an AutoSiphon which makes getting the fluid moving much easier and more sanitary. The other end of the tube is held just inside the neck of the carboy so that it splashes all the way to the bottom and foams up, getting a little bit of oxygen mixed in for the yeasts' benefit.

Oddly enough, when transferring wort it is called "transferring" or "siphoning" or whatever other name you care to use. When it becomes beer, transferring has the fancy name of "racking."

A bit more oxygen is dissolved by resting the carboy on a folded towel and rocking it back and forth for several minutes to build up a good head of foam.

Pitching and Fermenting

The dry yeast used in this batch was rehydrated in a cup of warm water for about 15 minutes. This wakes them gently rather than plunging them straight into the sugar-filled wort. I used two packets because it's summertime here in Florida and I wanted to make sure the good yeast had the upper hand over any rogue organisms that might have found their way in. Pouring the yeast into the wort has the fancy name "pitching."

Once the yeast have been pitched and swirled around, a water-filled one-way valve called an "airlock" is fitted so that carbon dioxide produced by fermentation can escape yet no outside microbes can find their way in. This whole arrangement is then put in a chest freezer fitted with a temperature controller that will hold it in the mid-60Fs. The yeast like it better that way and make better tasing beer than when they are kept at the usual Florida room-temp of 78F.

Update December 2005: Some things have changed since this page was first put together.

I now have my own grain mill, an original PhilMill
I now have a 15 gallon kettle so I can make 10 gallon batches.
The cooler mash tun you see here was sacrificed for Hurricane Charley relief effors, but I replaced it with one the same size. It works as fine for 10 gallon batches as it did for 5.
I made a bigger copper-coil chiller to fit the larger pot.
Because of Florida's warm tap water, I bought a fountain pump to push icewater through the chiller to get those last few degrees.
Instead of shaking for aeration I bought a 99 cent paint mixer and put it in a drill like a giant blender to whip the wort in to a froth.
The glass carboys scared me around the pets and kids, so I have switched to plastic buckets.

I brewed many batches using only the equipment and techniques on this page. If you are just starting out or considering moving to all-grain, you will likely do well following these steps. Back to Main.

Last updated December 22, 2005