entirely safe and fun

Sanitation is next to sanity.

Today’s project: a kind of hybrid wheat beer, using the spices of a Belgian wit but an all-German malt bill and yeast culture. I decided to make my first beer in nearly four years a simple one, with no addition of grains; here, I’ll just use dry malt extract (DME) as my source of fermentable sugars.

The recipe I’ll be following is this: Sanitize a five-gallon fermenter bucket, its lid, an airlock, etc (see the first picture). Boil 3.25 gallons of water in a big pot. Add 6 lbs Bavarian wheat DME, which is 60% pale barley and 40% wheat. Also, throw in about half an ounce of your favorite bittering hops (it’s not going to be an important flavor component, so you might as well pick something cheap). Return to boiling, and hold it there for forty minutes, stirring frequently. Then, add .5oz bitter orange peel, dried. Keep stirring for another fifteen minutes. Then, add 1oz crushed coriander. Stir for another five minutes. Turn off the heat. Siphon off the wort (for so this sweet solution of malt sugar is called) into a food-grade plastic bucket with a little less than 16lbs of ice in it, straining out any solids. Thoroughly aerate the wort and ensure that all the ice is melted, then check the temperature. If it’s between 60°F and 80°, add water to bring the level of the whole mixture up to 5gal. If it’s too cold (unlikely), add warm water; too warm, add ice. Pitch in one dose, calculated according to the directions on the package, of German-type wheatbeer yeast (I used Wyeast 3638). Check gravity, put on the lid, and wait. Pictures below…

This is a simple beer and the equipment required to make it is simple too. Here’s pretty much the whole team, soaking in a sink full of B-Brite foodsafe sanitizer. There’s a length of food-grade tube for siphoning, a handy lab thermometer, the airlock, a long spoon, and a brass doohickey - that’s the high-pressure bottle washer. I love that thing. Not using it today though, and it doesn’t need to be sanitized anyway. Not shown: tongs, my digital probe thermometer (a thousand uses!), a silicone spatula, a hydrometer and its close-fitting vial.

Ideally, you can find a bucket that’s already graduated. I couldn’t, so I graduated it myself by pouring in quarts of water and marking their levels.

This is pretty much the easiest possible beer. The ingredients: Six pounds of dry malt extract, half an ounce of Northern Brewer hops (cheap and bitter), an ounce of crushed coriander, and a half-ounce of dried bitter orange peel. I got all of this at the local bricks-and-mortar outlet of Beer Beer & More Beer.

Ian demonstrates two critical pieces of brewing equipment — sandwiches and beer. You need beer to make beer!

Herbs and spices in the wort. This picture was taken 55 minutes in, as the coriander was being added. As mentioned, I introduced the hops at the beginning of the boil, the bitter orange peel 40 minutes into the boil, the coriander 5 minutes in. Note the hops clinging to the rim — I used a sanitized silicone scraper to push them back in after the boil went too high.

The boil being complete, I’m using a whisk to incorporate air into the wort while Ian stirs. This is critical to early yeast growth. Commercial brewers actually bubble oxygen into the wort using specialized equipment, but I don’t have none that fancy stuff. Note that this was just for illustration; you’re really only supposed to aerate in earnest once the wort is cooled.

Ian and I siphoning the wort from the brew kettle into the fermenter, into which I’ve placed about fourteen pounds of ice. I’m running the wort through a strainer to aerate it and keep most of the hops and spices out of the fermenter.

Aerating the wort, and also homogenizing the temperature (by melting the ice and mixing). My goal is to rapidly reduce the temperature below 80°F so I can safely pitch the yeast before the wort has a chance to get contaminated.

An important but often overlooked step is to sanitize the outside of the yeast container. Sanitation is the key to successful brewing - we’ve been washing our hands thoroughly every time we handle equipment, too.

Punam pitches the yeast from the smack pack into the wort, starting it on the road to becoming beer. The yeast culture was started about sixteen hours earlier, and the little monsters are going very strong by now.

After the pitch, I put the lid and airlock onto the fermenter bucket. You can check airtightness by pushing down on the lid gently and seeing if there’s a bubble.

If you want to have control of your beer, and you want to bottle it without explosions, you need to measure its specific gravity from time to time using a hydrometer. Here, I’m measuring the gravity of the cooled wort — the original gravity, or OG. OG is basically a measure of how much sugar is in the wort, and thus an indicator of how much alcohol will be in the beer. The wheat beer came out at 1.054 - pretty low. My yeast has a listed attenuation (efficiency of converting sugar to alcohol) of about 70-76%; I’m looking at a lighter beer, around 4.5% alcohol by volume assuming 75% attenuation.