Am I mad, or could this work...

[gregv12345]

HI folks,

I'm a kit brewer with a hankering to try an extract brew using odds and ends lying around the place......I have a 10l aluminium pot and a gas cooker and all the kit brewing equipment, so my plan for a pale ale is this;

iNGREDIENTS - crystal malt, hops, light or extra light DME and yeast.

Process
1) Heat 6l of water in the aluminium pot
2) Steep a muslin bag of crystal malt in the hot water at about 65 degrees for about half an hour
3) Put muslin bag in colendar and sparge using another litre of hot water at about the same temperature
4) Bring to the boil
5) Add appropriate amount of DME
5) Add hops at appropriate intervals according to the recipe
6) At end of the boil syphon into fermenting bucket (syphoning from a height in order to aerate)
7) Dunk fermenting bucket in cold water (I'm think of the garden water butt!) to bring down to pitching temp
Pitch yeast
9) Bottle after a couple of weeks
10) Exercise patience until it's ready to drink

I can figure out the DME, crystal malt and hop volumes, so I'm hoping to get about 6l of pale ale.

Any comments? Does it sound achievable? NOt too concerned about excellence, just trying to figure out if I like making the extra effort.....

[Rubbery]

short answer: Yes that will make beer!

Step 2 - why 65 degrees? Crystal malt is pre-converted and will not contain enzymes for conversion anyway. Sugars will dissolve at any high enough temperature.

Step 7 - I would not put your unfermented wort anywhere near your butt Why not leave it in the boiler overnight?

[Jocky]

Definitely not crazy - this is very similar to my whole process, and there's more than enough room to make award winning beer of almost any kind. My personal tip is to use DME instead of LME. DME just seems to produce more consistent results for me.


Steeping wise, 65-70 degrees is right and ensures that you get the goodness out of the crystal without extracting any unwanted, bitter tannins that start to come out at higher temperatures (80 degrees plus).

Only criticism of your process is that I would say is you want to get the temperature down before aerating. Basically swap steps 7 and 6 around, and dunk your pan in cold water for step 6. Garden water butt works, but as I don't have one I just put my 11 litre pan in a kitchen sink, and find that a couple of changes of water usually does the job in getting everything down to pitching temperature very quickly.

With a small amount of wort like that you can even get away without syphoning anything - just wait until your pan/wort is cooled, and then pour through a sanitised sieve or bag. It'll catch the hops, filter out chunks of break and aerate your wort all in one go.

I normally start by boiling around 9 litres, and after boil off I top up a bit to end up with 8.5 litres in the fermenter, and 7.5-8 litres gets bottled at the end.

[gregv12345]

Thanks for the replies,

Adjust my plan accordingly.

Regards,

[keelbolt]

Yep. Whatever you do, don't aerate wort unless the temperature is well below 80 degrees. Apart from the risk of scalding, you will almost certainly spoil the taste by hot side aeration problems. Best thing is to cool as quickly as you can, then siphon into a closed fermenter so that bugs, stray yeasts, etc, can't gain entry (the build up of a slightly higher pressure in the fermenting vessel keeps them out), and then aerate once the wort is in the sealed vessel, and before pitching the yeast. It also helps if you've got a yeast supplement in there....