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Version du 9 février 2009 à 21:08
Brewing Your First Beer With Malt Extract
Welcome to How To Brew! In this first section of the book, we are going to lay the groundwork for the rest of your brewing education. As with every new skill, it helps to learn to do things the right way the first time, rather than learning via short cuts that you will have to unlearn later on. On the other hand, when you learn how to drive, it is not necessary to learn how an internal combustion engine works. You just need to know that it does work when you keep it supplied with air and gasoline for fuel, oil for lubrication, and water for cooling.
To learn to brew beer, you don't need to learn how the yeast metabolize the malt sugars. But, you need to understand that metabolizing is what they do, and you need to understand what they need from you to get the job done. Once you understand that, you can do your part, they can do theirs, and the job should turn out right. Once you gain some familiarity with the brewing processes, you can delve deeper into the inner workings and make your beer better.
So, in Brewing Your First Beer With Extract, you will learn to drive. Chapter 1 - A Crash Course in Brewing, will provide an overview of the entire process for producing a beer. Chapter 2 - Brewing Preparations, explains why good preparation, including sanitation, is important, and how to go about it. Chapter 3 - Malt Extract and Beer Kits, examines the key ingredient of do-it-yourself beer and how to use it properly. Chapter 4 - Water For Extract Brewing, cuts to the chase with a few do's and don'ts about a very complex subject. Chapter 5 - Hops, covers the different kinds of hops, why to use them, how to use them, and how to measure them for consistency in your brewing. The last ingredient chapter in Section 1, Chapter 6 - Yeast, explains what yeast are, how to prepare them, and what they need to grow.
From there, Section 1 moves into the physical processes of brewing. Chapter 7 - Boiling and Cooling, walks you thru a typical brew day: mixing the wort, boiling it, and cooling it to prepare it for fermentation. Chapter 8 - Fermentation, examines how the yeast ferments wort into beer so you will understand what you are trying to do, without going into excruciating detail. Chapter 9 - Fermenting Your First Beer, does just what it says: takes what you have just learned and walks you through the practical application.
Everybody wants to brew their favorite beer that they buy at the store, and it is usually a lager. So, Chapter 10 - What is Different for Brewing Lager Beer? examines the key differences of lager brewing, building on what you have already learned about ale brewing. Section 1 finishes with Chapter 11 - Priming and Bottling, explaining each step of how to package your five gallons of new beer into something you can really use.
It is a long section, but you will learn to brew, and brew right the first time. Later sections of the book will delve deeper into malt and malted barley so you can take more control over the ingredients, and thus, your beer. The last section, Section 4 - Recipes, Experimentation, and Troubleshooting, will give you the roadmaps, the tools, and the repair manual you need to drive this hobby to new horizons. Have Fun!
Chapter 1 - A Crash Course in Brewing
What Do I Do?
If you are like me, you are probably standing in the kitchen, wanting to get started, your beer kit and equipment on the counter, wondering how long this will take and what to do first. Frankly, the first thing you should do is read all of Section I - Brewing Your First Beer With Extract. This book is going to teach you How To Brew, from the fundamentals to the advanced methods; you won't be confused by conflicting instructions on a beer kit, and you will have an outstanding first batch.
But if you are like me, you probably want to do this right now while you have some time. (It's going to take about 3 hours, depending.) So, in this first chapter, I will walk you through the steps necessary to get your first batch bubbling in the fermentor, and give you an overview of what you will do to ferment and bottle your beer.
The instructions in this chapter may not explain why you are doing each step or even what you are doing. To understand the Whats and Whys of brewing, you will need to read the rest of this book. Each of the chapters in Section I discuss the brewing steps in detail, giving you the purpose behind each step. You will know what you are doing, rather than doing it that way because "that's what it said..." You will know how long to boil the wort, how to really use hops, why to bother cooling the wort, why to bother re-hydrating the yeast, why to wait two weeks before bottling... Get the picture?
But, if you can't wait, this chapter should see you through. Beer production can be broken down into 3 main events: Brew Day, Fermentation, and Bottling Day. If you have questions about terminology or equipment, be sure to review the Glossary and Required Equipment sections via the links at the top of the page.
Chapter 2 - Brewing Preparations
The Road to Good Brewing
There are three important things to keep in mind every time you brew: Preparation, Sanitation, and Good Record Keeping. Good preparation prevents nasty surprises. You don't want to be halfway through your brewing and realize that you don't have any yeast. You don't want to pour good wort into a fermentor that you forgot to clean. Cleaning and Sanitizing are part of your preparation but are the most important factors for assuring a successful batch of beer. During an interview at a very successful brewpub, the head brewer told me, "Good brewing is 75% cleaning." And I believe it. Lastly, there are two types of brewers- lucky and consistent. The lucky brewer will sometimes produce an outstanding batch of beer, but just as often one that is not. He brews from the seat-of-his-pants, innovating and experimenting with mixed results. The consistent brewer has more outstanding batches than poor ones. He may be an innovator and an experimenter, the difference is that he takes note of what he did and how much he did of it so that he can always learn from his results. Good record keeping will make the difference between luck and skill.
Chapter 3 - Malt Extract and Beer Kits
What is Malt?
Beer is brewed from malted barley. More precisely, beer is made by fermenting the sugars extracted from malted barley (mostly maltose). Malt is a general term used as an abbreviation for several things associated with maltose and malted barley. Brewer's malt is not Malted Milk Balls, Malted Milk Shakes, nor is it malt extract. In those cases, malt refers to the use of maltose - the sugar. The malts that brewers talk about are the specific types of malted barley that are processed to yield a wide range of fermentable maltose sugars. These include Lager Malts, Pale Malts, Vienna Malts, Munich Malts, Toasted, Roasted and Chocolate Malts. But what is malted barley?
Malting is the process in which barley is soaked and drained to initiate the germination of the plant from the seed. When the seed germinates, it activates enzymes which start converting its starch reserves and proteins into sugars and amino acids that the growing plant can use. The purpose of malting a grain is to release these enzymes for use by the brewer. Once the seeds start to sprout, the grain is dried in a kiln to stop the enzymes until the brewer is ready to use the grain.
The brewer crushes the malted barley and soaks it in hot water to reactivate and accelerate the enzyme activity, converting the barley's starch reserves into sugars in a short period of time. The resulting sugar is boiled with hops and fermented by the yeast to make beer.
When making malt extract, the sugar solution is drawn off, pasteurized, and run into vacuum chambers for dehydration. By boiling off the water under a partial vacuum, the wort sugars are not caramelized by the heat of full boiling and a lighter tasting extract is produced. To make a hopped extract, Iso-Alpha Acid extracts of hops are added along with hop oils to give a complete hop character to the final wort extract. These hop extracts are added at the end of the process to prevent loss during dehydration. Malt extract takes a lot of the work out of brewing.
Malt extract is sold in both liquid (syrup) and powdered forms. The syrups are approximately 20 percent water, so 4 pounds of Dry Malt Extract (DME) is roughly equal to 5 pounds of Liquid Malt Extract (LME). DME is produced by heating the liquid extract and spraying it from an atomizer in a heated chamber. Strong air currents keep the droplets suspended until they dry and settle to the floor. DME is identical to LME except for the additional dehydration and lack of hopping. DME is not hopped because hop compounds would be lost during the final dehydration.
Chapter 4 - Water for Extract Brewing
The Taste of Water
Water is very important to beer. After all, beer is mostly water. Some waters are famous for brewing: the soft water of Pilsen, the hard water of Burton, Midlands, and pure Rocky Mtn. spring water. Each of these waters contributed to the production of a unique tasting beer. But what about your water? Can it make a good beer? When using malt extract, the answer is almost always "Yes". If you are brewing with grain, the answer can vary from "Sometimes" to "Absolutely".
The reason for the difference between the brewing methods is that the minerals in the water can affect the starch conversion of the mash, but once the sugars have been produced, the affect of water chemistry on the flavor of the beer is greatly reduced. When brewing with malt extract, if the water tastes good to begin with, the beer should taste good.
Chapter 5 - Hops
What are they?
Hops are the cone-like flowers of a climbing vine that is native to the temperate regions of North America, Europe and Asia. The species has separate male and female plants and only the female vines produce the cones. The vines will climb 20 ft or more up any available support and are commonly trained onto strings or wires when grown commercially. The leaves resemble grape leaves and the cones vaguely resemble pine cones in shape but are light green, thin and papery. At the base of the petals are the yellow lupulin glands which contain the essential oils and resins that are so prized by brewers
Hops have been cultivated for use in brewing for over 1000 years. The earliest known cultivation was in Central Europe, and by the early 1500s, cultivation had spread to Western Europe and Great Britain. At the turn of the century, about one dozen varieties of hop were being used for brewing; today, there are over one hundred. The focus of breeding programs has been to maintain desirable characteristics, while improving yield and disease resistance.
Chapter 6 - Yeast
What Is It?
There was a time when the role of yeast in brewing was unknown. In the days of the Vikings, each family had their own brewing stick that they used for stirring the wort. These brewing sticks were regarded as family heirlooms because it was the use of that stick that guaranteed that the beer would turn out right. Obviously, those sticks retained the family yeast culture. The German Beer Purity Law of 1516 - The Reinheitsgebot, listed the only allowable materials for brewing as malt, hops, and water. With the discovery of yeast and its function in the late 1860's by Louis Pasteur, the law had to be amended.
Brewer's Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is considered to be a type of fungus. It reproduces asexually by budding- splitting off little daughter cells. Yeast are unusual in that they can live and grow both with or without oxygen. Most micro-organisms can only do one or the other. Yeast can live without oxygen by a process that we refer to as fermentation. The yeast cells take in simple sugars like glucose and maltose and produce carbon dioxide and alcohol as waste products.
Along with converting sugar to ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide, yeast produce many other compounds, including esters, fusel alcohols, ketones, various phenolics and fatty acids. Esters are the molecular compound responsible for the fruity notes in beer, phenols cause the spicy notes, and in combination with chlorine, medicinal notes. Diacetyl is a ketone compound that can be beneficial in limited amounts. It gives a butter or butterscotch note to the flavor profile of a beer and is desired to a degree in heavier Pale Ales, Scotch Ales and Stouts. Unfortunately, Diacetyl tends to be unstable and can take on stale, raunchy tones due to oxidation as the beer ages. This is particularly true for light lagers, where the presence of diacetyl is considered to be a flaw. Fusel alcohols are heavier molecular weight alcohols and are thought to be a major contributor to hangovers. These alcohols also have low taste thresholds and are often readily apparent as "sharp" notes. Fatty acids, although they take part in the chemical reactions that produce the desired compounds, also tend to oxidize in old beers and produce off-flavors.
