Continuing on this theme of “What is normal, successful homebrewing like?” I wanted to share a quick update.
Last weekend I prepared a simple pale ale. I purchased 8 lbs of Simpsons Maris Otter, 2 lbs of Breiss American Honey Malt, 1 oz Challenger hops, 2 oz Mosaic hops, and one pack of SafAle US-05 from Fermentis. Yes, dry yeast. I nearly always go for dry yeast. I’ll get into why later.
So here we are on day 4. Excuse the shoddy camera work. One take. That’s all you get.
If I really wanted to be picky, I could adjust my keezer to 68 degrees, but apparently December and my non-air-conditioned garage achieve 64 degrees just fine. I have been a perfectionist about temperature, and other things at other times in my life but these days I like easy. Easy-going, easy process, EASY easy. Got it? cool.
So that’s a shelf in the garage, right by where the car gets parked, next to an inside wall. If I wanted colder I could probably go to an outside wall or closer to the garage door, but US-05 actually prefers 64-74 degrees Fahrenheit. If anything, my space here is a bit cool. but as you can see in the video we’re coming along just fine. I’m not pushing for a super fast fermentation.
So let’s talk about inoculation a bit. I mentioned above I tend to use dry yeast. I also mentioned, I like things easy. This is a hobby after all. I will geek out at times and get complicated, and I’ve got some procedures that are arguably “the hard way” when I know a couple hundred bucks could make it a lot easier, but generally easy is right. Begin right and you are easy. Continue easy and you are right. The right way to go easy is to forget the right way and forget that the going is easy. Got it? Good!
So, my easy method. I buy a single pack of dry yeast for a few bucks and put it in the refrigerator when I get home. Yeast doesn’t like to freeze, and it doesn’t like to be warm and dry, but it does just fine in stable, cool/cold conditions for a pretty long time. I learned this from making bread. Active dry bread yeast can live for years in the back of my fridge, so I put it in the fridge. Easy.
On my brew day, I do all the normal stuff. Heat up water, set my temperature, wander off until it’s hot enough, add grains, walk away and do other stuff. Come back one and a half hours later, pull the grains up, circulate through the grains until I stop seeing particulate, set my temperature up to boiling, walk away for a while and do other things. Twenty or so minutes later check the volume on my wort, pour through the grain bed to pick up any residual sugars and reach my boil volume. Wander off for another 20-30 minutes, check the alpha acid content of the yeast, use BeerSmith to work out the hop timings that will land near my desired IBUs. Yes, really, I do that on brew day usually after the mash. I’m not kidding. You should try it. Anyway, come back and pull the grain tower off the kettle and set it aside. Spoon away anything un-tasty-looking that’s collecting on top of the liquid. You don’t want that stuff. Trust me. Or don’t trust me. Spoon some of that thick foamy stuff on your wort into a glass and taste it. I’m betting you’ll keep spooning it off and throwing it away like I do. Do that a few times while coming up to a boil. Wander off and do other stuff at random intervals, but check in on temperature and remove nasty stuff off the top every now and then.
Reach a boil, let it boil a while, lay in a mesh bag across part of the kettle. This will contain the pellet-hop mess while giving it plenty of room to infuse in the wort. The bag is nylon. The heat is electric so I’m not worried about melting nylon on the outside of the pot. Used to have that problem over propane fire, not anymore. Easy. Drop in the first hop addition, do some math, set a timer on my watch for second hop addition, walk away until the timer goes off. Clean and sanitize the fermenter bucket in the meantime, clean and sanitize the lid, filter media (another spare mesh nylon bag, maybe two), filter frame (a big metal colander, like you use for pasta, large enough to just cross the bucket), the siphon, the airlock, am I forgetting anything? Conclude I’m not forgetting anything. Go back for second hop addition, set the timer again, then remember to clean and sanitize the drop-in hydrometer and leave it floating in the sanitizer bucket because why not, it won’t get into trouble there. Timer ding, go back for third hop addition. Before twenty minutes from flame-out remember to clean up the wort chiller. It needs cleaned and 15 minutes at least in the boil to be sanitary, but really doesn’t need to be in for the whole boil. Maybe there’s a fourth hop addition, maybe a fifth. Maybe not. Probably the last hop addition is at 5 minutes, because I really like dry-hopped flavor but I hate dry hopping. I haven’t made dry-hopping easy yet so I just late-hop instead. Results are good but definitely not equal.
At ten minutes from flame-out, tip in about 1 teaspoon of Irish moss. Is that too little? Too much? Ehh, it seem to usually be enough. Note this isn’t at flame-out. Irish moss needs about ten minutes to work, but at fifteen minutes in a boil it really starts to degrade, so aim for just ten. If you have to choose between early, late, or none, choose late. Even at flame-out it helps, just not as much.
At flame out, cut the heat and start the wort chiller. Mine is a big copper coil that I drop into the kettle. It works fine if my tap is running fairly cold. Water runs in cold, comes out hot, then warm, then nearly cool. Pull the hop bag, give it a spin and tie the end to a kettle handle so it’s above the liquid. Let it drain. Stir occasionally with a sanitized ladle or spoon. Wander off occasionally and enjoy life, but not too long. Check temperature and stir it sometimes. Wait for ~80 F. Don’t let stuff fall into the kettle. The boil is over, this all needs to remain sanitary now. Only sanitized things can enter the wort, and yeast.
Set up for filtration. Clean and sanitized bucket on the floor (preferably air-dried), colander on the bucket, filter fabric lays across the colander, kettle goes somewhere up higher. Put the raking cane end of the sanitized siphon into the wort, get the siphon going. The other end of the siphon should just reach the top of the colander and filter cloth so that the finished beer runs down the side and then filters/drips down into the bucket.
I said I was going to talk about inoculation, right? That’s now. At this point I head to the fridge, fetch my still-cold pack of dry yeast. Yes. Seriously. Look, I own a stir plate. I made it myself with a computer fan, hard drive magnet, epoxy, a small wooden crate, and the dimmer switch from a 1984 Volkswagen rabbit. It works great. I use it when I make something super-high-gravity like an RIS. The thing is that is NOT today. Today I fetch my cold, dry yeast from the refrigerator just after I start siphoning for filtration. I cut the pack with a clean knife and sprinkle it into the wort that’s collected in my filter set-up. This is the key.
The yeast is soaking in ~80F wort, waking up in a nicely agitating solution of deliciousness. Those grains of dry yeast soak in some liquid and start breaking up into many, many little yeast cells, they slip past my filter and fall like rain to the bottom of the bucket. This rain action oxygenates the wort and the yeast is right there in the middle, tossed around with all this warm tasty oxygenated liquid. As far as I can tell, it happily gets right to work.
That’s it. I cut open the yeast sachet and sprinkle it on at the start of filtration. If it clumps a bunch I chase it around with the output end of the siphon and it breaks up nicely and filters down. That’s all. For a simple 5% ABV pale ale like I described here, that’s all I do.
I joined my local homebrew club. I like the club and all the ideas they throw around and all the geeking out over controlling this or that variable. I get into that stuff, sometimes. It’s fun.
Most of the time though? I like it easy. This was easy. This was fun for me. It was a good brew day. I took my kid to a farm stand and got ice cream while waiting for the boil. I played with the dog. I went for a walk with my wife. I made a good beer. Probably. Like, I haven’t tasted it and I’ve never made this recipe before but I’m really, really sure it’ll be good. I’ve been doing this a long time and the club guys really like what I bring, like a lot. I always want constructive feedback but it’s not often I get any. Mostly they just ask if there’s any left after the bottles make the rounds.
Anyway, I do like to geek out on stuff, so please feel free to tell me what you’d do differently.
Final note, much like my hop timings, I create recipes on the fly. Often pretty good ones. I used to look for clone this and award-winning that and brew other people’s beer, but I guess I grew out of that. Half the time the brew store is out of at least one specialty grain, so these days I wing it, write it up after I bought it, and set the hop timings on brew day. I like it this way. It’s fun for me. I might write about that process some time. Maybe.
