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I Wish Someone Had Told Me about.... |
I first started brewing with my husband about twelve years ago. We saw the kits on the supermarket shelves and decided to give it a go. I cringe at the memories of some of my old brewing techniques. The only change I made to the directions that are supplied with the kits was to use raw sugar rather than white sugar. I went into a homebrew shop three times- once for a hydrometer, once for a capper and a once for a proper fermenter. I stopped brewing for eight to ten years. When we re-started, the brew shop had some good info pamphlets. We were hooked. The brewing techniques improved and I experimented with different finishing hops. I boiled the extra ingredients before adding to the fermenter to sterilise.
Well, I have made lots of kits, improved my techniques, moved onto liquid yeast and have now made the leap into partial mashing. This combines the extra flavours available from grain mashing with the ease of using extracts. I have made a lot of progress in my brewing techniques and have learnt a lot along the way. Thanks to Brian Noyes, Shawn Miles, Graham Sanders and heaps of others for their time and advice, Dad for the original bug, and David, my husband, for helping with the brews and emptying bottles so I could try out the next recipe!
Now I would like to share the most important lessons I have learned along the way. They are things I sure wish I knew when I started out!
The kit manufacturers can only include a certain amount of info on the leaflet under the tin without overloading you. There are important issues that are cheap and easy to implement that will greatly improve your beer. Sanitation and temperature control cost next to nothing and will make your brew better.
Rehydrate your yeasts to check they are alive and to give them a head start when pitching into your fermenter. Use the hydrometer and sample jar to make sure your brew is ready for bottling, wait an extra day or two before bottling. Use a dropper tube to exclude oxygen on bottling. Do yourself a favour and buy a bench capper if you are using a hammer on tool.
Check out John Palmer's online book http://www.howtobrew.com - it has heaps of good details for beginners onwards. John really knows his stuff.
Read "Complete Guide to Homebrewing in Australia" by Laurie Strachan. This is obviously an Australian book that talks about ingredients available in Australia. It is a very good beginners book.
Try the brewers chat at http://www.morgansbrewing.com.au. This is an Australian site with mostly Australian content. Browse through the al the older postings, lots of useful stuff. [We hope that the the new discussion group at the Craftbrewer web site will be even more valuable and helpful over time, Ed.]
Yeast is a living organism and there are thousands of varieties. There are some wild yeasts floating past your head now looking for a feed of yummy sugars. Brewers yeast is selected for its ability to make beer. Wild yeasts will happily eat your beer, create off flavours and your beer will be sour and undrinkable, in extreme, bottles explode.
Pull everything apart on your fermenter, buy snap taps as they can be pulled apart. Soak everything in bleach solution (unscented white king about 100 ml in fermenter topped up to brim with water- or similar dilution rate just splashed around in fermenter will do if fermenter is already very clean) then rinse with boiling water. Clean and sanitise your brew area. At brew time, leave lid on fermenter except when adding ingredients.
Buy your stuff from a homebrew shop. The owner will have stored the kits and yeasts properly. The yeast in the sachet is a living organism waiting to brew. If exposed to heat or it is old, the yeast will not work and you will end up throwing out brews. Also the people in the shop can give you great advice and steer you in whatever direction you want. They will have recipe sheets and lots of good ingredients and an extensive range of kits. They are usually committed home brewers themselves and will happily discuss any problems you are having. Try getting brewing info out of a checkout chic!
Sugar is cheap but makes a cidery taste in the brew. Replace your kilo of sugar with better quality ingredients, try dextrose, dry malt extract (DME), honey, maltodextrin etc. Your homebrew shop will have a good range of ready made up mixes. Beware that most dry yeasts as supplied are not good at working on all malt brews so include some dextrose as part of your kilo of extra ingredients. Using better ingredients pushes the brew price up a bit but you end up with a much better product.
As the yeasts are exposed to higher temps they produce off flavours. You don't need a fridge, just put the fermenter in a room that has the lowest temp fluctuations and is close to the temp range for the beer you are brewing. In summer, brew ales (18-25 °C optimum), winter is lager time (8-16 °C). Remember that the first few days of fermentation are the most critical - so timing your brewing to coincide with a few days of lower temperatures is one strategy for counteracting high summer temperatures
The yeast as supplied with your kit is designed to work with some malt and some sugar. Using 1 kg malt instead of sugar often ends up with a sweetish brew. Kits can be improved by using better yeasts. Try Safale in summer and Saflager in winter. The dry yeast supplied with lager kits is usually only ale yeast. Consider using liquid yeasts. There is a good range of liquid yeasts available. White labs California ale is a good starting point. It's a clean yeast that doesn't contribute extra flavours to your brew. If you are trying to brew to a particular style you will have to use a liquid yeast. $10 per brew is too expensive. See in the Morgans brewers chat how to make a single purchase last for 18 brews by storing in stubbies in the fridge.
The next step after kit brewing is extract brewing where you control the malt and the amount and type of hops. All grain brewing follows on from extract brewing and can seem a bit daunting. A partial mash is a good compromise. See at the Morgans chat thread how to use a drinks cooler, some cheesecloth and a large saucepan to do a partial mash, a great way to introduce yourself to the better flavours from wort extracted from grain rather than from malt extract. Moving from kits into extract and grain mashing needs a bit more equipment but the ingredients are cheaper.
Don't be fooled by the range of beers generally available. There is a huge range of beers world wide. The Australian market is governed by a few mega breweries that flog stuff that offends the least number of people. Everyone is used to pale, lightly hopped, heavily carbonated very cold beers, just the way the brewing companies want you to be. Try a Muntons Yorkshire bitter kit. It's a bit darker, and a bit bitter, everyone I try it on says, I don't like dark beers like stout - slurp slurp - "Hey, this is nice!".
Now, each of the above points could be an article in itself, so as your brewing improves and your horizons expand, your techniques and equipment will change. Brew on.
Happy brewing, Phillipa & Blue.