How I Brew Beer

I have had quite a few people ask me how do I brew beer. So when I brewed last night ( a delicious wheat ale ), I decided to take some pictures of process and post them online. There are many ways to do this ( and I’m probably doing it very wrong to other people ) but this is how I do it.

Equipment:

  • 30 Liter Pot
  • 12 Liter Pot
  • 3 Liter Measuring Cup
  • 2 Coolers
  • 1 Filter for the bottom of a cooler
  • 1 hose
  • 1 hose clamp
  • 30 Liter Fermenter
  • 1 Plastic Spoon
  • 1 Strainer
  • 1 Funnel
  • 1 Keg

Step 1: Clean the crap out of everything. If your equipment is dirty, it will screw up the flavor of the beer. I usually soak everything in a sanitizing liquid.

Clean

Step 2: I then have heat up enough water to do the mash ( a mixture of mashed malt grains and hot water ). Here I heated up 18 liters of water to 71 C.

Heating water

Step 3: Setup the cooler for the mash. Here I built my own device. Most people build things like this but I could never find a cooler with a bottom spout here in Switzerland so I had to get creative. I found a stiff metal sheet with lots of holes to work as a filter and then just ran a hose under it.

Step 4: Add the water and grains into the cooler. Close the lid and then wait for an hour. I also heated up another 17 liters of water to be used when this hour is up.

Step 5: After the hour is up, you need to siphon off the water from the bottom of the cooler. I needed to get about 23 liters of wort.


You need to slowly pour some of this extra hot water that was heated up on top of the grains. So that there is always a little water on top of the grains.

Step 6: Filter out the wort and keep it warm.

Step 7: Put all of the wort back into the 30 liter pot and heat it up to a light boil. You then add the hops according the schedule for the recipe. For this recipe, I boiled the wort for 60 minutes. I added hops at the beginning, 40 minutes later and after 60 minutes.

Step 8: Cool the wort down to 22 C. I do this by filling the bath tub with cold water and letting it sit for about 30 minutes.

Step 9: Filter out the hops and add the wort to the fermenter.

Step 10: Add the yeast to the fermenter.

Step 11: Let the beer ferment for about a week.

Step 11: Move the beer from the fermenter to the keg.

Step 12: Let the beer sit for a while. The amount of time depends on the beer. It can be as little as a week or as long as several months.

Step 13: Get loaded.

Step 14: Recover

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  1. Pingback from Brewing Beer » Swiss Monkey
    November 25th, 2007 at 7:01 am

    [...] I brewed a beer for a party that is coming up in January and decided to document how I do it.  Here it is.   « Beautiful Weekend | [...]