Monday 31 March 2014

The Homebrew Sessions Vol. 2: Process

This time I wanted to know how these brewers go about doing what they do...


Andrew Drinkwater 

"What do you put your brewing success down to? Is it being able to put together a good recipe? Is it your brewing process (your equipment, your method of working, etc)? Is it your overall understanding of what you are actually doing, which allows you to problem solve by first principles as you go along (rather than just following instructions by rote)? Or something else? How much have you changed your process since you first started brewing? Have you ever/would you consider brewing something solely to learn a particular process/style of brewing?” 


I think any success is always relative... but it tends to come down to process and refinement and repetition of that process. A lot of process is driven by your equipment - working out what works with your kit, which elements require particular thought and where you have weaknesses that you need to hide. I have a three-vessel setup with a 25-litre Electrim boiler as an HLT, a converted 45l Igloo cooler as a mashtun and a Brupaks boiler as my kettle, with a copper immersion chiller to handle my chilling. That setup makes complicated mash schedules a bit more difficult, and as I don't have a hopback or any way of achieving a whirlpool, I've had to experiment with adding late hops at flameout or during the chilling process to see what gets the best results.


The brewday usually starts as early as I can wake up these days, after some ill-advised late night brewdays that ended up finishing at 5am. The night before, I'll weigh out the grist and keep it covered in a fermenting bucket. I've started using Beersmith to calculate my strike and sparge water, so I'll fill the HLT with whatever it tells me to and add CRS as required. In the past, I didn't bother calculating the water, which has led to a lot of over-collection of wort or efficiency issues. I've learned from those mistakes.


HLT goes on while I make a bacon sandwich and a pot of coffee and review the hop additions, then add the water and grain to the tun together, adjust the temp with tap or boiling water as required, and set a timer (I usually do 90 minute single infusion mashes). About 15 mins from the end, I'll refill the HLT and set it to heat up, so that by the time I need to start sparging, I'm at about 75-80c as required. I vorlauf until I get bored of it, if I'm honest - I rarely see clear wort even if I do this for half an hour, so I usually recirculate about 20-25 litres and then start taking runnings slowly.


I don't have any fancy equipment for distributing sparge water - I use a sheet of tin foil with holes punched in it with my thermometer. Really rudimentary stuff. I've always sparged very, very slowly, a relic of my first all-grain brew which had loads of oats in it - on the plus side, I've had decent efficiency since. Any time I've sparged quickly, I've ended up with disappointing efficiency, and brewdays are far too much effort to ruin them for the sake of cutting 20 minutes off a sparge.


I collect in a marked fermenting bin as my boiler doesn't have a sight glass, then I jug it over, reserving a sample jar to test the pre-boil gravity once it's cooled to a reasonable level. I don't have a pH meter or a refractometer, but those would be my next investments - at the moment, I tend to repeat last-known-good processes and malt bill, or try to correct the process based on identifiable faults in the end product. The next investment will be in a pH meter, definitely.


At the end of the boil, I try to chill to 24c as quickly as possible using the coil, then drain through a wire mesh hop filter inside the kettle and into an FV. The drop into the FV and associated aeration usually takes the last couple of degrees celsius out of the wort, ready for pitching. My fermentation room keeps a constant 18c, even in summer, so I use a heatpad for driving up the temperature for Belgian yeasts and a fridge for lagering. I rarely go straight from primary to packaging - only with something like a Belgian witbier, where a bit of yeastiness is acceptable and I'm not bothered about clarity too much.


A bit on dry-hopping... almost everything I brew is dry-hopped, usually just dropping pellets into the secondary. Occasionally they go into a muslin bag if I'm being very cautious about clarity, but otherwise I just crash-cool to get rid of all the pellets before bottling. That said, I remember one beer I bottled with lots of matter still in suspension, and they were all horrific - gushing, infected, nasty bitterness... grim.


One last thing: record everything. If your brew goes well, you'll want to do everything again in exactly the same way.


Andy Parker


"What do you put your brewing success down to? Is it being able to put together a good recipe? Is it your brewing process (your equipment, your method of working, etc)? Is it your overall understanding of what you are actually doing, which allows you to problem solve by first principles as you go along (rather than just following instructions by rote)? Or something else?"

First and foremost I put in down to a willingness to listen and learn. I started out with no clue as to what I was doing and I’d assert that this is the same place all brewers start so you’re not at a disadvantage. Some may have a natural flair for recipes but without a grasp of the basic science behind it and the process required they won’t be able to put those ideas into motion. I started out by reading John Palmer’s How To Brew and found it completely overwhelming at first, especially when it got into detail. So then I started reading blogs such as David Bishop: broadfordbrewer to see how others were applying the theory in a practical sense. This was an iterative thing before eventually plucking up the courage to take the plunge. For me, the most important learning has been ‘on the job’. Books get you to a point and often help provide answers when things don’t turn out right but by far the best way to learn is to do. I’ve had some disastrous brew days but you get through them and bring a bit more experience to the fold each time you fire up your trusty HLT.


“How much have you changed your process since you first started brewing?”


The basic process has remained the same but I’ve refined things in terms of approach and equipment as I’ve progressed. My first brew was boiled up in a stainless pot on our electric hob and cooled in a garden bucket. The brew day was very long because everything took much longer than it needed to. I’ve invested in kit to help improve the process and reduce the length of brew days especially. The biggest win was an electric HLT/kettle that shaved off over 2 hours! Also worth noting here is my approach to temperature control. Until very recently I didn’t do anything here beyond wrapping blankets around the FV when it was cold and finding a cool part of the house when it was warm. The key thing was to pick yeasts that were happy with the temperatures within which they had to work. Yeasts such as Wyeast 1056 (Chico - see also Fermentis US 05) and 3711 (French Saison) work very well at room temperature. My first brews with specific yeast strains that like to work at warmer temperatures dictated the need to buy a heater plate more recently. My advice to home brewers starting out is to get your basic process and especially sanitation sorted out before starting to worry about complicated temperature controlled set ups. Don’t run before you can walk. My second bit of advice when it comes to fermentation would be to have patience!


“Have you ever/would you consider brewing something solely to learn a particular process/style of brewing?”

I’ve done this once before with an ESB. It’s not a style drink too much of but one I wanted to know how to brew. I didn’t even bottle any - just tasted it, let it sit there for a while, tasted it again then poured it away because I needed the fermenter back. That’s not something I can see myself doing too often! I’d like to try a decoction mash at some point and would also like to expand my knowledge of brewing with wild yeast strains, even though the beers the styles of beers implied there are not my favourites.


Alan Wall


"What do you put your brewing success down to? Is it being able to put together a good recipe? Is it your brewing process (your equipment, your method of working, etc)? Is it your overall understanding of what you are actually doing, which allows you to problem solve by first principles as you go along (rather than just following instructions by rote)? Or something else? How much have you changed your process since you first started brewing? Have you ever/would you consider brewing something solely to learn a particular process/style of brewing?” 


Sometimes my brewing is (in my opinion) pretty good, sometimes it’s not. It’s all because I wish to experiment, and learn so quickly.  I started out having little clue as to what I was doing, using a brewing application, and mashing in a bag, in a coolbox and boiling in 3 pans on the stove. Very quickly I grew unhappy as I didn’t fully understand the things I was doing. So I started to build my spreadsheet up and learn from first principles how everything works. Most of my understanding, and I suppose fun, comes from the equations and numbers. That’s something that I spend more time working through.

Since then I’ve moved to bigger cool boxes, and from there to a converted keg mash tun/ kettle (this was meant to be a separate MT and kettle, but for now is a single keg used to do both) that I made myself. I will be making a new keg MT and kettle when I can either find another local brewer with damaged kegs, or I can afford to buy some for use.





As long as I find something interesting, I will put time and effort into it. That goes for my brewing. It can be interest in a process, a method, or an ingredient.  This has meant that I’ve gone through the entire brew process, fermentation, bottling, conditioning, and then thrown entire batches away because I found the beer to be not as I wanted it to be. That’s not to say it was wasted though, doing this has allowed me to learn about different methods that have only improved my brewing later down the line.


I assume that the brewday for me is going to be the same as everyone else who’s been doing it for about 18 months. I’ve tried to learn enough so that I can be fairly competent with the process which makes the actual brew easier. I still have so much learning and experimentation to do, and with the process understood I can spend more time developing ideas and recipes, and I suppose styles.

One thing I like to do now is to brew and split the batch, fermenting with different yeasts, that way I get to do side by side comparisons of how something can affect the final beer. I think this is something I’m going to do more of in the future.  I think I will expand that out to also include different methods of hopping as well.

Thanks again to our contributors. Look out for The Homebrew Sessions Vol. 3: Adjuncts coming soon.

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