Intro

I’m going to ease into what will be a series of beer brewing related posts slowly, starting at the top, showing you the basic steps required. I’ll try to give you my personal take on a few things to maybe bring a more human element to the process, instead of only talking about it methodically. I’d like to show you that you can look at brewing beer like you can look at cooking food. I’m no chef, but I do cook a lot, and there are a ton of similarities. Hear me out.

Clean Equipment

You don’t eat food with dirty silverware and plates, nor does a chef cook food with dirty pans. Step one is to clean what you’re going to use. Practically speaking, this means a brewer mixes a bucket full of Star San and starts going to town cleaning the boil kettle (a giant metal pot like what you’d make a graduation party sized soup in), the carboys (a 5-6 gallon clear container, think of it as a giant bucket, typically clear, you put the soup in), tubing and transfer equipment (stuff to safely move 5-6 gallons of hot soup), and anything else that will, at some point, touch the wort (soup).

Create Mash

The next step is to get water up to a temperature within a range that the enzymes in the malt (think of malt as flour in the bread making process) best break down sugars. It’s a lot like cooking a pizza at 400° for 14-18 minutes, or boiling an egg for 10 minutes. There’s a known desired effect that takes place; you may not know the science behind it, but it’s repeatable, so you know it worked last time, and it’ll likely work again. Put simply, this step is where you make malt soup. A general rule of thumb I can probably tell you is that if the malt is light in color (pale), you typically want the water to be around 150°, as there are quite a bit more simple sugars (like your table sugar) in pale malt. If it’s dark, you’ll probably want it a bit higher than that, maybe 155°-160°, as these usually contain more complex chains (more like whole grain pasta, or oatmeal). Lastly, once you add your malt to the water, you let it sit for 60 minutes at that temperature, and try your best to keep that temperature constant that entire 60 minutes. Yes, there’s lots of science behind this, and no, I’m not going to explain it…just keep your soup set to the right temperature in the crock pot (or your dough at the right temperature in the proofing oven) and you’ll be good to go.

Boil

After 60 minutes, drain off all the liquid, called wort, out of the mash and into the boil kettle. I’d highly recommend you drink some at this point, it’s excellent. It tastes a lot like a really sweet full bodied tea. Get that liquid all the way up to boil and hold it there for 60 minutes. Yes, more science. Throughout this 60 minutes, brewers add stuff to their wort. This is where they add that magical flower called hops, and other fancy things like cocoa nibs, chocolate, coffee grounds, orange peels, etc… to really make their soup wort taste like the final product. One rule of thumb with hops; if you put them in the boil right away, this gives your final beer that bitter taste. If you add them in later, it’ll provide more of the aroma and less bitterness.

Fermentation Time!

At this point you’re done with the making process and on to the waiting process, so take the cooled down (room temperature) wort and put it in the carboy. This next part is just like bread making, where you take flour, water, and yeast, and mix it together. As with bread making, you want your yeast to be happy and ready to do their eating thing, so you’d typically add the yeast to some warm water with maybe a little table sugar to activate it. Same thing with beer; often times we’ll mix a “starter” which is some DME (dry malt extract (basically the table sugar)) and let the yeast wake up and start eating and reproducing so we’re sure they’ll do their job when it’s time. Now mix the yeast into the wort, and wait. This part varies depending on the beer type; it can go as quick as 2-3 days, to as long as several months. As with the boil, brewers can add more hops and other ingredients during this process to change the flavor and aroma.

Bottle/Keg

The conversion of wort to beer is now done, and you have your final soup beer. I’m a bottling guy, because I like giving out my beer to friends and family, but kegging is quicker and easier. I’ll discuss bottling. This is where the brewer typically uses what’s called an auto siphon (equivalent of a soup ladle) to move the beer into individual bottles. I, personally, use sugar tablets in my bottles, the purpose of this is to provide the yeast (yes, yeast is still in your beer bottle when you drink it) with something to eat so they can pressurize and carbonate the bottle. That’s it. When bottling I usually wait at least 2 weeks before serving, giving the yeast a chance to carbonate the beer and letting the flavors mellow out a bit.

More Cleaning

Yes, now you must clean all your equipment, again. I can’t stress enough that brewers clean more than anything else.

Conclusion

I know this overview has been rather simplistic, and there’s a lot more knowledge that goes into making this work, like details on equipment, recipes, beer styles, yeast strains, temperatures, etc… but largely this is how I view beer brewing. It’s a slightly more complicated version of making a food/consumable, just like you would in your kitchen. There’s equipment, science, human preference/taste, and lots of cleaning involved. In later posts I’ll start to dive deeper into various aspects of this process, giving you a better understanding of beer brewing and its intricacies.