How it all happens in the Middle of Town brewery
Note: this is the Middle of Town process. It is not authoritative. Other people do it differently.
Every beer starts as a recipe, and a good recipe starts with intention. Beer has four essential ingredients: water, malt, hops, and yeast. Within just those four ingredients there are infinite combinations of flavors. Once you start thinking about other adjunct ingredients (cacao nibs, ginger, peppers, vanilla… the list is never-ending), the possibilities multiply even further. What kind of beer do you want to make? Is there a specific flavor that you want to achieve, or a combination of flavors that you want to experiment with? Do you want the beer to be a particular color? For me, this is the most fun part of homebrewing, and the reason why I got into the hobby.
My process, typically, is to start with a particular style of beer in mind. I like to research that style a bit, which includes reading recipes from other brewers (the Brewer’s Friend website is a great place to go for this), as well as shopping for several examples of the style and having a tasting-and-note-taking session to get my thoughts down. For beers that I especially like, I try to find a recipe (or a clone recipe) for that specific beer, to help me understand where it gets its flavors. Then I use an app (my current favorite is Brew Cloud) to build a recipe. Modern apps have all kinds of useful calculators built in, so they are great tools to help to understand how adding a particular ingredient will affect the color, bitterness, alcohol content, etc.
Once I have a recipe, it’s time to move onto the planning stage, but it is worth pointing out here that almost all of my recipes have undergone revisions. The first iteration of a recipe seldom achieves exactly I was going for, so I end up changing one hop for another, or adding more, or changing the timing, or adjusting the grains, or scrapping the recipe altogether. For some people, this is a very unattractive prospect. To those of you who feel that way: I truly get it. Use other people’s recipes, or even buy a kit with all of the ingredients already measured out for you. It is perfectly ok.
It seems almost silly to point this out here, but a good plan makes a lot of difference in a batch of beer. Buy all of the ingredients ahead of time. Keep your yeast cool. Make sure that you have a place to put everything for the duration of the beer’s life. Make sure that you will actually be available to add hops or other ingredients when you are supposed to, and move or package the beer on the right day. Remember that life happens, and make the brewing process fit into it in a way that is comfortable. This is a hobby that is supposed to be fun, not stressful.
Time for the first ingredient! My approach is to keep this super simple; I use water directly from the garden hose. Some water goes into the hot liquor tank, and some water goes into the mash tun. Regardless of how much sparge water I think I’ll need, I always fill my hot liquor tank up to about 7.5 gallons. Having extra can be useful for sanitization later. The amount of water to put in the mash tun varies by the amount of grain in the recipe. The classic ratio here is 1.25 quarts of water for every pound of grain, and that’s what I go with almost every time. Where I live, the city water has quite a lot of chlorine in it, so I typically bring both kettles to a rolling boil for about 5 minutes to burn the chlorine off. This is not a necessary step, but it definitely improves the flavor of the final product.
Whole, malted grains need to be crushed before mashing to expose the starches. Grinding too fine will result in flour, which would become paste if added to water, and be impossible to work with. The goal is simply to allow the sugars to escape the hull of the grain. I use a mill called The Barley Crusher, which sits on top of a 5-gallon plastic bucket. The malt is poured into the hopper, and the grinding roll is turned using a cordless drill. The result is a bucket of very coarsely crushed malt.
A mash is nothing more than the crushed (milled) malt steeped in water. Like making a cup of tea, the idea is to extract all of the flavors and sugar from the malt into the water. There is a lot of science here that is best not to dwell on too much, but the goal is to activate some specific enzymes that accomplish the desired extraction. Generally speaking, this magic happens at around 150 degrees Fahrenheit. The water collected in the mash tun needs to be brought to the right temperature, which brewers call “strike temperature,” so that when you add the grains, the overall mash has a temperature of around 150 (or whatever the recipe calls for). Again, there are many calculators for this. Bring the water to strike temperature, and then gradually stir in the grain. This step is called “doughing in,” and besides being fun to say, is a very important step in the overall process. Ideally, each grain is coated and saturated by the water. Any clumps that form will likely result in some grains getting little to no extraction at all. I use a Very Large Whisk and stir vigorously while slowly and gently adding all of the grains. This takes a while, but taking the time to ensure that everything is hydrated is very worth it. Many brewers use a specialized tool called a Mash Paddle to stir their mash. Use what you want, but I think chefs’ tools have the upper hand in the world of utensils, and I stand proudly by the Very Large Whisk. After you dough in, the temperature needs to be held steady for about an hour (again, follow your recipe). I generally give the mash a thorough stir two additional times to make sure that everything is around the same temperature and hopefully to let the more active areas blend in with the less active areas to maximize extraction.
My mashing setup is a 10-gallon kettle with a false bottom. For a typical one-hour mash, the mash tends to start getting too cold after about 30 minutes. When that happens, I attach an arm to my kettle (The Ultimate Sparge Arm, from MoreBeer!) and some tubes and a pump, and recirculate the water through the mash, while also lighting the gas burner to bring the mash temperature back to its target. This recirculation serves several purposes: the temperature is more consistent throughout the mash (rather than hot at the bottom, where the fire is, while still being too cold at the top), the extraction is slightly improved because the running water moves the enzymes around and spreads them out, and the liquid is clarified because the flow turns the bed of grains into a natural filter. “Clear Beer” is often a challenge for homebrewers, but this system of recirculation is the easy way to get it.
[thank you for your patience... the rest of the process coming soon]