After years of making beer from kits I wanted to move on to making it from scratch as Horden Hillbilly does so well. So not wanting to run before I could walk, there's an intermediate method of brewing called malt extract brewing which allegedly makes a far better pint than kit beer but isn't up to scratch with the all grain brews as done by HH.
The wife's out so I thought I'd give it a go...
Firstly, here's the kit, left to right, a fermenting vessel, my mango chutney boiler, a paddle for stirring, then at the rear, the malt extract then in front of that some irish moss (clearing the brew),three bags of hops (to give the bitterness and flavour) and some yeast.
Here's my boiler in close up - she's a beauty aint she?
Inside you can see the element from a tesco value kettle and the copper work is a hop strainer, ther are holes on the bottom which act like a filter to stop the hops going through the tap when ypu drain it into the fermenter.
So first things first, mix the malt extract with 23 litres of warm water and start to boil
It took a while to come to the boil, so I might add another element, but once it did, I added two lots of hops, these will boil for an hour and a quarter then some more will be added for the last 15 mins of the boild
Right, next installment, after an hour and 20, it was time to add the irish moss and the last 10 minute boil hops.
In with the Irish moss
after another 10 minutes of boiling, off with the heat and time to transfer into the fermenter
the aim now is to get the wort (the boiled extract and hops) cooled down to below 30degC as quickly as possible. You can buy or make chillers which use cold water to do this quite quickly but as this was my 1st attempt and I don't have all the gear yet, a few tonic bottles filled with water and plonked in the freezer had to do for now - I reckoned 6 would be enough but I could have done with 9 or more, oh well, it's all a learning curve
after most of the wort has drained from the boiler, this is what I was left with
apparently the boiling knocks all of the air out of the wort, and yeast needs oxygen to breed. So, it's important to aeriate the wort before adding the yeast. Happily, I read in a very good book on home brewing that one of the best methods was to attach a paddle to an electric drill - voila!!
Here it is in action
Right, lack of proper chiller means the wort is still cooling so I'm off to check it now.........
Temp now below 30 so yeast added, stirred in well, brew tucked up in my cupboard and I'm off to bed!!
What a great night.
