Boll Weevil Brewery

Extract Brewing Session

Brewed a batch of Listermann's American Pale Ale today, and thought that I would take some pictures while I was brewing, if for no other reason then to add some more content to the site (well, content of sorts I guess, heh heh). I have been meaning to take some pictures for a while now during a brew session and finally got around to doing it today!

As I mentioned, the kit that I'm brewing is an American Pale Ale from Listermann's. As you can see in the picture this kit comes with a good assortment of hops (Nugget for bittering and Cascade for the flavor, aroma, and dry hop additions), Liquid Malt Extract, steeping grains, yeast, priming sugar, hop and grain bags, bottle caps and instructions. Pretty much everything you need to whip up a batch of quality beer minus the water!

First step is to put about 2 gallons or so of water into the crusty old brew pot. This will be heated up to 150-155ish and then we'll let the grains steep for about 30 minish(also ish). :) Just about everything in brewing can be "ish" I've found. Your wort desperately wants to become beer so the best you can do is to just stand back out of the way and let it, heh heh.

 

I don't know if you can see it clearly in this picture, but the timer/thermometer I use is absolutely wonderful. This particular one is a Pampered Chef brand, but I've seen the exact same thing minus the brand name for about 1/3 the price she paid. While I'm on the subject...most of the Pampered Chef crap that I've seen her drag into the house is just low quality Chinese plastic kitchen wares that could easily and much more affordably be purchased elsewhere.  Anyway...the timer is also a digital thermometer, and you can set both time and temp alarms. This is useful as you are waiting for the water to come up to temperature. You can be doing something else and just wait for the BEEP BEEP without having to hover over it. As you can see, I've already got the timer on 30 minutes for the steeping, and I have the temp alarm set at 155. The number on the left, 72, is the current water temp.

 

While the water is heating up, I am putting the grains into the grain bag, tying it as close to the top as I can get it so that it has as much room to circulate water as possible...

And also I'm heating up the LME in a pan of water on my grill's side burner. You don't have to do this step, but preheating the LME makes it a LOT easier to mix in with the rest of the wort when the time comes.

As the grains are steeping, pickup the bag they are in out of the water every few minutes or so and let them drip back into the pot, and then dip them in again. This helps to make sure that all of the grains are exposed to the hot water and helps release all of the malty goodness that you're using them for. Also, as I'm letting the bags drip, I will fire up the burner if necessary to get the water back up to the target temperature. After the grains have steeped the required amount of time, I'll let them drip over the stirring spoon while I bring the wort up to boiling...

After this steeping liquid has reached boiling, I shut off the heat and mix in the LME, stirring well to help insure that it is well mixed. The LME is heavier than the liquid, so it will try to sink to the bottom of the pot where it might scorch. Liberal amounts of elbow grease at this stage will help to avoid that. Since I do not bottle, I also mix in the priming sugar with the wort at this stage as well. The small amount doesn't contribute any great amount to the starting gravity, but I feel better not wasting it. Here's the wort as I'm heating up the full volume for boiling. I start with about 6.25 gallons in my turkey frying pot.

Here is the pot after the initial "crap, it's gonna boil over!" phase. I usully baby sit it for 5 or 10 minutes or until it will maintain a nice boil on it's on without boiling over. At this point I've added all the ingredients and put in the bittering hops, a good dose of Nugget in this case.

This particular brew calls for boiling 45 minutes of the full 60 before adding the next hop addition. Since this will leave 15 minutes of the boil, I stick in my immersion chiller and add 1 tsp of Irish Moss. Some people say that Irish Moss isn't really necessary with an extract brew, but I do it anyway, as i just might help and it will in no way hurt. What I normally do is put in the immersion chiller, reset my timer to 15 minutes, but don't start the timer until the wort has returned to a boil, and then put in the hop addition. It usually takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes for the wort to come back up to boiling. I could turn up the burner to "turbo mode"...but there's that scorching thing we discussed above.  :-)

After this boil, the flame was turned off and then I put in another ounce of cascases for Aroma. This sat in the hot pot for another 10 minutes, then I fired up the chiller.

These next pics are of my temp/timer while the immersion chiller was running. The timer is now counting up instead of down, so you can use the minutes:seconds as a guage of the chiller's performance. I took all of the pics just after I had stirred the hot wort. Stirring GREATLY enhances the performance of an immersion chiller, and one of my next projects is making a Wort Stirrer out of an old Ice Cream maker that I purchased at a local thrift shop. I think that with constant stirring from that little device the cooling time will go down greatly. My intake water is now about 70 degrees by the way.

As you can see, the performance is great down to about 100 degrees, but then the cooling levels off. With a Wort Stirrer I should be able to hit the 100ish degree mark a lot quicker, and then I would use a prechiller to decrease the temperature of my incoming water. I figure I'll just make another 50' immersion chiller and put it in an ice bath and then when the temp is around 100 or so I'll run the incoming water through it to drop down to pitching rates. I didn't get a pic of the final temp (which was about 74 or so) but it took about 40-45 minutes total to get it down that low.  :-(

 After the wort has reached (or is very near) pitching temps (I target 70ish for ales) then I grunt and groan and hoist the thing up to my patio table. I acquired a new toy a few weeks ago, an Auto Syphon, and this is my first time using it. I'm going to reserve judgement on this thing until I've used it for a full brewing cycle (boiler --> fermenter, fermenter --> secondary, secondary -->keg). So far, I will say that it is a lot easier than my pervious method of racking, but without a clip to hold it onto the side of the pot, it flops around and stirs up the sediment. Maybe before I rack to secondary I'll whip up some sort of holder for it. I like a holder so that I can hold the tip of the racking tube above the sediment a bit more and then when it's almost finished I will tip the vessel to get the remainder. I seem to get less sediment into the target vessel this way, but as I said, I'll reserve judgement till I've used it for a full brewing's worth of racking.

There is a good shot of Babette, the brew dog in this picture. No, she isn't dead, she's just VERY old and like her owner, a bit overweight. Ok, so we're both a LOT overweight, heh heh.

I have a 5 gallon paint stirrer that I put on my electric drill and use to aerate the wort, but I moved it somewhere and could not find it for either batch that I brewed this weekend. Since I didn't have that to whip the wort into a lather, I used my "other method." I pinch the tip of the racking tubing and squirt the wort into the bucket. This usually makes two little streams instead of one bigger one, and it seems to lather up the wort fairly good. Some people also put the lid on the bucket and shake the crap out of it to aerate it, but I'm using dry yeast in this batch. Dry yeast has a higher cell count than liquid yeasts, so it won't need to reproduce as much. Oxygen (what we're adding when we aerate) is only needed during the reproductive cycle of the yeast.

Some might argue that this squirting method doesn't increase the Oxygen level enough, but i've done it countless times before and never had any problems. In homebrewing, even the bad beer is usually pretty darned good!  :-)

As I said before, your wort wants to become beer, all we have to do is give it a few gentle pushes in the right direction!