1-2 days before brew day: Yeast start er (optional, but recommended)
Pitch Wyeast into a starter. A wine bottle or 22 oz beer bottle fitted with an airlock and #2 stopper works perfect. Use 1/4 cup malt extract in 8 oz of water for a starter wort. Boil 5 minutes, cool and pitch yeast.
Brew day:
Put your volume of water on to boil, usually 2-2.5 gallons, unless you have a wort cooling device. When water temperature reaches 150, add the adjunct malt grains in grain steeping bag. Hold temperature at 150-160 for 30 minutes. Stir the grains occasionally. After 30 minutes resume heat. When temperature reaches 170 remove or strain the grain out. Now add the extract.
You can let some hot water mix with the extract to help loosen it up and pour smoothly. Proceed on to full boil, and stir to prevent the extract from scorching on the bottom of the pot.
At full boil, 60 minute countdown:
At full boil, add the 2 oz of bittering hops and gypsum, and begin an hour countdown. As always, stir occasionally.
At 10 minutes:Add the 1 oz of hops.
At 5 mins:Add the 1 oz of hops
At 0 mins:Add the 1 oz of finishing hops
End of boil:
Shut off heat and begin to cool your wort as soon as possible. When wort is about 75 degrees, or when wort is cool enough to mix with water to reach about 75 degrees, pour and strain the wort into your primary fermenter. When pouring the wort into the primary, aerate as much as possible. You can accomplish this by dipping a sanitized container, such as a measuring cup into the wort and pouring back into the wort. Create as much foam and bubbles as you can for about ten minutes. Double check your temperature to be sure it is not above 80 degrees and take a hydrometer reading. Now pitch the contents of the yeast pack into the primary fermenter, cover, set-up the sanitized airlock and stopper assembly, and place the primary where it will remain around 68 degrees during fermentation.
Next 4 days:Your fermentation should begin after about 12 hours. From then on fermentation will peak then subside. After high krausen, you may opt to rack to glass secondary carboy.
Next 3 days: After 5 and 6 days take hydrometer readings. If no perceptible change in gravity occurs, you are ready to bottle. If the gravity keeps reducing, wait. If you are unsure wait one more day.
Bottling day: Be especially careful about sanitizing and racking at this stage! Thoroughly clean and sanitize bottles and caps. Preheat 3/4 cup corn sugar (dextrose) in a saucepan with 3-4 cup of water and bring to a quick boil. Carefully rack beer to a bottling bucket and swirl in corn sugar mixture. Be careful not to slosh around the beer, you don’t want to oxidize.
Bottle and cap. Store at room temperate to ensure good bottle fermentation.
10 days after bottling: Sample a beer. Be patient, you can try a bottle after about a week, but most beers, especially hoppy medium and high gravity beers, benefit from some aging. Enjoy!
Tips and fine-tuning:
-Try to boil and cool the largest possible volume you can manage.
-Varying the fermentation temperature will result in different flavors. Fermenting warm (up to 72 degrees)
will produce fruity, estery qualities. An LCD stick-on thermometer will allow you to monitor fermentation temperatures.
-Always be sure to sanitize every piece of brewing equipment, after you are finished with the boil. A 5 gallon utility bucket half filled with an iodine based “no rinse” sanitizer is convenient for this.
-Secondary fermentation in glass is recommended.
-If you boil a full wort volume, your hop efficiency will improve.
