Instructions for new extract brewers and piccies

[skipper]

This is the way I've been extract brewing which I hope will be a starting point for people having a go at extract brewing. This isn't a full guide and is more pointers for getting everything done in some sort of order without getting to the end and finding you haven't got any yeast. Feel free to copy the instructions and add/amend as you learn/make mistakes/find something inspirational/lob 19 litres of wort down the sink. This will give you something written to make sure you don't miss anything out and that you have all the necessary temperatures etc. to hand. This takes between 4 and 5 hours but as an added bonus you will have a free brewery Ambi Pur freshener for your house (not available in the shops). I use a 14 litre brew pot and make 19 litre batches which works out at around 33 x 500ml bottles. My brew pot can boil 9.3 litres comfortably and the recipes I make with Beersmith (this is really useful) work on the basis that I'm boiling 9.3 litres rather than a full boil (hop utilisation is affect by the reduced boil so the quantity of boiling liquid is important). You can play around with the quantities to suit your equipment. They are by no means supposed to be the definitive guide as I am fairly new to this myself - instead they have been put together following hours (when I should have been doing something else like sleeping or working!) of reading other helpful guides and learning as I go along. In particular I've found the instructions in Charlie Papazian's books, posts and technique advice on this forum and the details on brewandbake.com really helpful. If anyone can add any suggestions to this then feel free.

Extract Brewing

1. Put 2 x 1.5 litre water bottles in the freezer for around 2 hours and put 2 bottles in the fridge. Have two more water bottles at room temperature. Basically this will give you water at different temperatures to cool/dilute your wort later to pitching temperature. Have ice ready in the freezer too.
2. Clean and spray bleach kitchen surface. No need to get too precious about this.
3. Wash your brew pot. Fill with 4 litres of water (tap or bottled, but not from the 6 bottles above). Put on low heat.
4. Put 15 litres of warm water in the FV with sanitiser and sanitise all the equipment i.e. FV, FV lid, beer stirrer, jug, large glass dish to hold sanitised items, small glass dish to hydrate yeast in, brew pot lid, bung, airlock, sieve, muslin strainer, temperature probe, cup measure, small spoon. Rinse well.
5. Fill FB with 6 litres of water (if bottled water no need to do this right now). Rest lid on top, put bung and airlock in and put out of way. Put the other sanitised items in the sanitised glass dish.
6. Weigh hops / speciality grains / malt extract and put in bowls ready.
7. Fill yeast container with 1 1/2 cups of water boiled for 10 minutes. Put some foil over the container and leave.
8. Bring the brew pot water to required temperature of 169F / 76c. Cut heat.
9. Put the speciality grains in a muslin bag and steep for 30mins (keep between 148F/ 64c & 155F / 68c, maximum 77c), moving around the brew pot from time to time.
10. Remove speciality grains (don’t squeeze). Add around 1.3 litres of water poured through the muslin bag held over the brew pot to extract the goodness. Let it drip and resist the temptation to squeeze. This will give you 9.3 litres of water in your brew pot.
11. Add the malt extract, stir continuously, heat gently until boil – a steady rolling boil.
12. Monitor carefully to make sure it doesn’t boil over.
13. Start timer and add the bittering hops in a muslin bag. Tie bag to handle of brew pot.
14. Boil for 60 mins moving the bag occasionally.
15. Add other hop additions (into the same muslin bag if big enough) at relevant times.
16. Add yeast to the sanitised yeast dish with 30 minutes to go. Temperature 100F / 35-38c.
17. Add Irish Moss with 10 minutes to go (1/4 teaspoon rehydrated).
18. Remove from the heat at the end of the boil. Add the water which was in the freezer to the brew pot through the hop bag/s. Give them a gentle squeeze and throw away. You could clean the muslin but this is not a fun job and they cost next to nothing.
19. Put the brew pot in the sink with ice and water surrounding it. Probe temperature.
20. Stir brew pot and monitor temperature until around 35c. The lid can be put on to protect the wort. 35c means that when the cold water is added the temperature will come down to around pitching temperature.
21. Alcohol rub hands.
22. Pour the wort through a muslin strainer wrapped around a sieve into your FV. The sanitised measuring jug can be used while the brew pot is full and difficult to lift up.
23. Top the FV up to 19 litres, pouring the water from a height to aerate the wort. Use the water bottles which were in the fridge or ones at room temperature to get to the right pitching temperature.
24. Get the temperature of the stirred wort to between 65F / 18c to 75F / 24c.
25. Stir to ensure the wort is mixed well and then dip the sanitised cup measure into the wort. Pour the wort sample into a trial jar and take the OG gravity reading and record. Drink some wort. It won't taste nice but drink it and feel proud anyway.
26. Stir and splash the wort for 5 minutes to aerate.
27. Check the temperature of the yeast. This should be around the temperature of the wort. If necessary, add wort in small quantities from the cup measure until within a few degrees. Stir with the sanitised spoon.
28. Pitch yeast.
29. Fit lid and add water to air lock.
30. Watch the airlock for bubbling an inappropriate amount of time over the next few days. Staring for minutes is normal behaviour. Wake in the night to the sound of bubbling and feel a lot like you have a 19 litre child to look after.

Leave to ferment...


weight hops etc.


steep speciality grains


adding malt


boil


wort in FV


beer (no instructions necessary here!) There was chill haze until 6 weeks conditioning and then the beer was clear.

[Dances]

Great post - some details in there that I will definately use.

I have only done one extract brew so far but am about to try my second. Waiting for the first taste of my first attempt is as bad as when I did my first ever brew.

One question though: why don't you squeeze the grain bag when it is finished with? I have read other instructions that tell you to do this.

[skipper]

i've found that by pouring the water through the muslin bag to make up the volume in the brew pot to the boil volume it extracts all the speciality grain 'juice.' I read that squeezing the grain bag can add astringent flavours like squeezing a tea bag although i can't say that i've squeezed one and found this out for myself. I squeeze the hog bags a little as otherwise some malt might stay in them and that might lower the OG. and i like hops!

[mshergold]

I've been 'squeezing my bag' and hadn't noticed any problem. That said, I've not made two batches the same, one having squeezed the bag and one having not. I did wonder whether or not I was doing the right thing and on reflection Skipper is probably right (after all, I think I'm correct in saying that we only want the sugars from the grain and anything else may cause at least some haze if nothing else) and therefore it probably does make much more sense to 'wash' the sugars from the grain rather than squeezing it out.

[Chase24]

Just need to find a pale malt recepie thats uses Cascade and Chinook Hops.

Thanks : :

Hey - don't find a recipe - make one of your own! As long as you add some hops at the beginning for bitterness, some with 15 minutes to go for flavour and then a bunch at the end for aroma, you'll make a good beer! Don't get hung up on trying to replicate someone else's because they'll do it better anyway....

[Alex NG]

A nice guide. I'm just trying to do as much reading as possible before giving my first extract a go next week.

Here, skipper says that he does his entire boil with about 9 litres of water.

Then, AFTER the boil, he tops the wort upto 19 litres.

I guess 9 litres is much easier to boil than 19 litres. But is this common practice? Just boiling up a 'concentrate' and then diluting it with water after the boil?

Or is it more common to boil up the full volume first?

[OldSpeckledBadger]

You can do either a full or a partial boil depending on the size of your boiler/stock pot. If you're doing a partial boil you really need to keep some of the malt extract back until the end otherwise you'll ruin your hop utilisation.

[skipper]

Glad to hear the guide has been useful.

I boil 9 litres purely based on the limitations of my stockpot.

I brewed an Amarillo Pale Ale at the weekend with 3kg of light malt extract and I held back half the extract until the last 15 minutes as suggested by OSB. As well as improving hop utilisation I read doing this will keep the colour slightly lighter as well. Good news all round!

Good luck with your first extract brew

[Alex NG]

Hi, thanks fella. I should just add - I'm not really sure about this "hop utilisation" business.

If you're only boiling 9 litres, but you add ALL of the malt extract, this will give a very concentrated wort. This high concentration will prevent the hops from infusing bitterness / flavour / aroma into the wort.

Is that what is meant? Or have I totally missed the point?

As it happens, I have just bought a 23 litre boiler. But, I can imagine that bringing 23l of water up to the boil will take aaages.

[skipper]

Yeah - you can only get 30% of the alpha acid in hops (isomerised into isomerised alpha acids) in ideal conditions. One factor that affects this utilisation is wort gravity i.e. how much malt extract and a high gravity boil is not ideal conditions. I've previously not worried about this too much and made up for it by using more hops but this seems wasteful when there is an easy solution. If you use beersmith or other similar programme then it will tell you the expected IBUs based on your recipe and it will automatically change the figure depending on if you select late addition of extract or not - you can therefore see the improvement adding the extract late will have on utilisation

[Alex NG]

Thanks again skipper.

For my first brew I probably won't go for the full 19 litres anyway, but it's definitely something to remember for future reference.

Good luck with your Amarillo Pale Ale. I plan to try something similar once all my kit arrives, so if you get time, please do let us know how it turns out.

Thanks again!

[Beer O'Clock]

For us newbies to EB this sort of guide is invaluable !!!
After a bit of experience, I suppose, it becomes more a case of 'what works for you', but initially this is veeeeery usefull.

[LeedsLad]

Thanks Skipper, great post on a great forum.

I'm going to try this method out for my first EB. Decided on the 19 liter Summer Lighting recipe out of the CAMRA brewing book.

A couple of things I'm not 100% on, at point 18 you say to 'Add the water which was in the freezer to the brew pot through the hop bag/s. Give them a gentle squeeze and throw away'. Does this assume that water from the freezer has not frozen solid and the very cold water is run through the hop bag to wash out the last of the flavours. Or are the frozen bottles added to pot to help cool it down before pitching?

I did my first Brewers Choice kit at the weekend and had trouble getting the DME to mix due to major clumping, even though the water wasn’t boiling and it took about 20mins to sort it. For my Summer Lightning brew, I was planning on holding back half the extract until the last 15mins. Would you advise against using DME due to the clumping issue or can I take the time I need to fully mix the DME and then put back on the heat for the last 15mins.

Cheers

FV - Brewers Choice ESB

[skipper]

yeah the water doesnt freeze in my freezer in two hours its just very cold so it washes the goodness out the hop bag and cools the wort.

not sure why your clumping was so bad that it took 20 minutes to fix? were you using 500g packs of dme and it was clumping as it poured out due to steam? maybe it would be better to put the other half of the extract in something like a pan (to get it out the packs) and then add it with the stock pot off the heat, stirring as you add it? it doesn't bother me too much taking the stock pot off the heat for a few minutes but 20 would start upsetting me. it should only take a couple of minutes to stir the extract in