Objectives
This week will introduce you to the fundamentals of fermentation, common equipment and kits to make beer and cider and will take you through the hands-on portion of starting beer and cider fermentations. We’ll talk about and sample different beer categories and styles.
By the end of this class, you will be able to:
- Describe what fermentation is and how it occurs in beer & cider
- Visit a homebrew shop to buy equipment and ingredients for making kit beer and cider
- Apply principles of cleaning and sanitizing to equipment used for making kit beer
- Ferment a kit beer at home
- Describe differences between ales and lagers and identify some styles that fall into each category
Introduction
Brewing your first batch with a kit
This week we’ll be making our first beer using a kit.
As you’ll come to learn, the most critical (and most tedious) part of brewing, is making sure everything that touches the beer is clean and sanitized. We’ll start today’s session by reviewing the equipment we’ll be using, the contents of the kit we’ll be brewing, then cleaning and sanitizing our equipment and finally putting the kit together and getting the beer fermenting.
Throughout the day, we’ll discuss the raw ingredients that make up beer and how that relates to what’s in the kit. We’ll also talk about
Equipment
- Starter homebrew kit (available from local homebrew shops (LHBS))
- Cleaning brushes
- Carboy (a 23 litre plastic or glass bottle)
- Funnel
Materials
- Cleaning
- PBW detergent
- StarSan Sanitizer
- Beer kit – The Brew House Pale Ale
- 15 litres of concentrated wort
- Bicarbonate additive
- Yeast package
- Dextrose package (for priming the beer before bottling)
Process
- Cleaning & sanitizing
- Sanitation is the number one influencer on the quality of homebrew. Wild yeast or bacteria on anything that touches the beer will impart off-flavours in the finished product. Some can be relatively mild, causing something to just not taste right, but some can be very intense and foul. After putting the time (and anticipation) into making and bottling the beer, it’s a terrible disappointment to have poor cleaning to result in an awful beer. There are two steps to sanitizing equipment:
- Cleaning – removing all dirt, dust and schmutz from everything that’s going to touch our beer.
- Sanitizing – killing any unseen wild yeast and bacteria left on the surfaces of the equipment
- PBW is a detergent that will clean all soils off of brewing equipment. Add roughly one ounce (28ml) of powdered PBW to one gallon (4 litres) water. Wash carboy and funnel as you would doing the dishes.
- Sanitation is the number one influencer on the quality of homebrew. Wild yeast or bacteria on anything that touches the beer will impart off-flavours in the finished product. Some can be relatively mild, causing something to just not taste right, but some can be very intense and foul. After putting the time (and anticipation) into making and bottling the beer, it’s a terrible disappointment to have poor cleaning to result in an awful beer. There are two steps to sanitizing equipment:
- Fermentation
- Fermentation is the biological process that transforms wort (the syrupy, sweet malt tea) into beer.
- Yeast
- Yeast are a single-celled fungus. Yeast metabolize (i.e., eat) the sugars in wort and produce two major bi-products:
- Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
- Alcohol
- Different varieties of yeast produce different levels and types of other bi-products. Bi-products like esters and sulfur compounds, though produced in minute levels, can result in very different tasting beers. It’s these differences that often distinguish one beer style from another.
- Lager beers use lager yeast, the species Saccharomyces pastorianus
- Ales use the ale species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae
- Yeast are a single-celled fungus. Yeast metabolize (i.e., eat) the sugars in wort and produce two major bi-products:
Resources