HOME BREWING with Melissa B

Although Chili and Beer go great together, this is not the same Melissa featured in my Chili Cook Off Contest post. I met this Melissa at a Media Beer Ladies event at Yards Brewing Company. The Media Beer Ladies (facebook page) run by Brooke Penders is a club which combines two beloved traditions: girls night out and drinking great beer!

With our Yards tour and tasting complete, we each selected a full glass of our favorite beer (mine the dark, chocolaty Love Stout) and sat down to get to know each other. Melissa revealed that she recently began brewing her own beer at home. Something she figured as a Microbiologist, she should be able to tackle.

I asked her if she’d be willing to share her home brewing experience on Tinsel & Tine and she readily agreed:

T&T: In the pictures you sent me there’s a little ball of fur watching over the homebrewing procedure, let’s start with him.

MB: His name is Sammy Saccharomyces.
(Saccharomyces cerevisiae (click for audio pronunciation) is the type of yeast used for many
beers, so that’s where part of his name comes from. I also
featured Sammy in my tweets about brewing.

T&T: How and why did you get started?

MB: I enjoy craft beer. I thought it
would be a fun hobby. I felt confident that my skills as a
microbiologist would allow me to jump in to homebrewing pretty
easily. (So far, so good.)

My first step in brewing was to read
“How to Brew” by John Palmer. It starts with an
overview of homebrewing but quickly dives into some hardcore
information about the process. The book has lots of photos of
equipment as well as lots of equations. Knowing algebra will
help you a lot when using this book to brew. I read this book
until I felt familiar enough with the brewing process to buy
equipment.

T&T: Note to parents – if your kid says algebra doesn’t matter in the real world, so who cares if I get a D. You can now retort, but you’ll need it to brew your own beer!

Melissa explained to me there are two methods of home brewing – “extract brewing”
and “all-grain brewing”. Extract brewing takes less time, and
requires less equipment because it uses an extract that contains
sugars and flavors from the grains, in a syrup.

Melissa went hardcore and chose the all-grain method which requires extracting the sugars from the grain
yourself.

MB: I went to Keystone Homebrew in
Montgomeryville and bought all of the equipment and supplies I needed
to get started. It was a huge pile of stuff.

Mash
tun (actually an Igloo cooler with a spout),
10 gallon brew pot
Propane burner,
Wort chiller,
Fermenter bucket
and lots of
accessories for cleaning, stirring, and measuring things. I
also got an ingredient kit to make a Belgian White beer.

I had to do lots of preparations before
brewing. There was a lot of cleaning to do to get the equipment
ready. I also had to make a device to measure the amount of
liquid in the brew pot. I used a wooden yardstick that I then
graduated based on having 1 through 9 gallons of water in the pot. I
thought through the process as a “dry run” to make sure I
wasn’t missing anything, and also so I felt pretty comfortable with
the process. I decided that, as a scientist, I was going to
need a digital thermometer (not a meat thermometer) because I needed
the measurements to be as accurate as possible. Since my
calculations said I needed water at 166 degrees F, I knew I was going
to want to have a thermometer that would be able to give me pretty
accurate numbers.

So, then it was time to brew using the
all-grain method.(I followed the recipe provided with the
beer, but I filled in the details by referring to How to Brew):

I heated water on the stove, then
added the water to my mash tun (a cooler that contained my crushed
grains).

The water and grain were mashed for an hour, with
stirring every 15 minutes.

After that, the lauter and sparge
process was started. Basically, these steps include draining
the sugar water (wort) from the mash tun and recirculating it before
collecting it in the brew pot. Sparging adds some fresh hot
water to get more sugar out.

After the wort was in the big pot, it was taken outside to the propane burner.

{It’s possible to do this step on the stove, but you have to have a lot of space for the pot, and your burners have to be powerful. On the propane burner, you have lots of heat. So, the wort is brought to a boil. Takes about 20-30 minutes on my burner}.

5. Then, the bittering hops were added.

Belgian White Beer requires a small amount of hops. After boiling for 50 minutes, I added crushed coriander and bitter curacao (orange peel) for flavor. The wort was boiled for one hour total.

6. Chilling The Wort – This needs to be done as quickly as possible. I did this using a wort chiller. This runs cold water through copper
tubing to transfer the heat out of the wort. It needs to be
chilled to below 80 degrees F, because the next step is to add yeast,
and they will be killed if it’s too hot.

7. Fermentation -Once the wort was chilled, it was
transferred to the fermenter (which was sanitized to reduce the
chance of any other microorganisms growing in the beer). After
the boiling, it’s always important to use sanitized or sterilized
tools and containers.

Once the wort was moved into the fermenter
bucket, the
yeast were added Some of the liquid is moved back and forth between the
bucket and pot to add air. The yeast needs air to do the
fermentation. The yeast I used for the Belgian White
were provided in the kit, in a nutrient pack called a smackpack. It
gets them happily growing before being added to the bucket.

Then,
the bucket was sealed, the airlock inserted (allows gas to escape)
and set aside. Fermentation can take just a few days
or two weeks.

8. Waiting and Carbonation – I watched for bubbling in the
airlock. Once there was no bubbling for a few days, I figured
it was about done. I tested the beer with my hydrometer
(measures the gravity of the beer) and it looked right. I also
tasted the sample of the beer from when I tested it – it tasted like
beer! Success! This first batch was ready on a weeknight,
and I wanted to package it in a simple way, so I used mini-kegs
instead of bottles. I added some fresh sugar to the beer and
put it in the mini-kegs. The fresh sugar is used by the yeast
to make more carbon dioxide and that carbonates the beer. That
takes about two weeks. So, my Belgian White had another week or
so until it was ready to drink.

9. Becoming a Home Brewing Expert – Since brewing the Belgian White I’ve brewed two more batches! I made
a raspberry wheat, and an oatmeal stout (since I too love stouts).
The raspberry wheat is already bottled. It had a lot
of floating material, probably from the raspberry puree added. The
oatmeal stout brewing went smoothly, and it started bubbling nicely
in the fermenter. Next on the schedule is a pumpkin ale! Not
in season, but I love a good pumpkin beer.

T&T: Wow Melissa! You’ve explained the process wonderfully, but obviously this is not a hobby to jump into lightly. For anyone thinking of starting to homebrew their own beer, what would you say was a rookie mistake you can warn other newbies about?

MB: Well, I didn’t realize how much volume would
be lost in the boil (which is an hour), so my first batch had very
little volume after the boil. I had to add water to get it
close to 5 gallons before adding the yeast and starting the
fermentation.

Another mistake – make sure you check
to make sure you know where all of your components are before
starting. (Same as what you’d do with cooking or baking.) I
thought I was missing the hops for my second batch, which I didn’t
check for until it was almost time to use them. But, it turns
out I didn’t see them in my kit of supplies, so I ended up having to
add them to the boil late.

After I get the hang of brewing with
the all-grain kits, I plan on developing my own recipes. I’ll
start with the styles of beer that my friends and I like (which seems
to be anything but the really hoppy beers). I think I’ll be
working on some wheat beers and stouts or porters first. Sammy
is looking forward to making more appearances as we continue to brew!

Melissa B is not only a microbiologist and a microbrewer, but she’s into
microsprint racing. Her three favorite movies in 2012 were: Skyfall, Batman: The Dark Night
Rises and The Muppets. Her favorite Foods with beer – I love Iron Hill’s nachos with beer, or a really
good burger and fries.