Salvagebeer Homebrew Beer Blog

One of the motivations I have for putting this blog together is to help make brewing more accessible to folks. Sometimes, that means including a whole lot of details about my process that experienced brewers may find boring or redundant. It may be wishful thinking, but I like to imagine that I’ll one day have some regular readers. I also imagine that as a regular reader, I would be frustrated to wade through the same descriptions of regular processes with every post. In the interest of brevity, here’s my current standard all-grain brewing process. From now on, I’ll just link here for folks looking for more details. You can get much better and more detailed explanations of all of this here.

Step #1 - The Mash

I built a pretty standard mash-tun from a picnic cooler. Instructions for this process can be found just about anywhere online. Mine ran me about $30, including all of the bits and pieces.

Isn’t it pretty?

Yeast eats sugar and creates wonderful alcohol. Grains are full of starch, and we need to convert the starch to sugar which the yeast can process. We do this through “mashing.” Basically, you pour hot water on the grains, making something that looks and smells a lot like porridge. Leave this at a warm tempurature (btween 150 and 160 degrees Farenheit) for about an hour, and enzymes naturally present in the grains convert the starches into sugars, which yeast can eat. The cooler keeps our porridge at the appropriate temperature for long enough for this process to complete.

Yum!

Step #2 - The Sparge:

Once the mash is done, it’s time to “sparge” the grains. That’s really just a fancy brewer’s word for “rinse.” Like many hobbies and professions, brewing uses a lot of fancy words to make them seem smarter than everyone else. Sparge = rinse, now you know. Many modern brewers do something called “fly-sparging,” a process that rinses the grains very efficiently and extracts as much of the sugar as possible. I think it’s a fussy process, and prefer the easier method called “batch-sparging.” Bottom-line: you may see it done differently elsewhere.

I quickly drain all of the water out of my porridge, using the drain in the bottom of my cooler. I don’t have a picture of this right now, but I’m working on it. The water is now darker, because all of the sugar from the grain is in solution. There’s still more sugar in the grain, though, and we want it to make our beer. Imagine that you dropped a towel in the mud. If you pick up the towel and wring it out, a whole lot of the mud is going to come out, but to get the rest of the mud out, you need to soak the towel in water and wring it out again. Same thing with the sparge. We’re adding more water to the grains to get out more of the sugar.

Sparging “rinsing the grain”

Going back to the towel metaphor, if you continued to soak and wring the towel, you’d keep getting out some mud, but less every time until the towel was clean. You could keep rinsing your grain, but after one or two times, it’s not worth the effort. I leave the rinse-water on the grain for 10 minutes or so to allow the sugars to disolve into the water, then drain it off to join the first batch. After that, I’m done with the cooler and the grain - off to the compost with it.

Step #3 - The Boil

From here on out, the process is just like brewing from a kit. Boil the wort (sugar-water) down to the right volume, add your hops at the right time, cool the whole works off, and put it in a fermenter.

The description was quick and dirty, but the process takes me about five hours. Feel free to ask if you have questions - you can get specific instructions for most of these processes using a simple google search.