Jakoberfest - A Brew How-To

Our move to Syracuse has given me the chance to play at quasi-homesteading. We've been having fun taking on some culinary experiments, including:

Quick pickles (quickles!?)

Bread made from spent grains leftover from home-brewing

Roasting our own coffee beans

New pizza dough recipe (revolutionized our pizza nights!)

Creative uses for our newly-started CSA from Early Morning Farms, including kohlrabi coleslaw (eh), biscuits with dill, and lots of salsa, omelets, and salads.

Since moving to Syracuse, Jacob has gotten back to one of his favorite hobbies: home brewing. So far, we (I use 'we' loosely - I help, but he is the brewmeister!) have made an American Pale Ale, a Saison, and a Gingerbeer. We also had the pleasure of touring a brewery in Utica and doing some beer tasting around the Finger Lakes with Siri & Ben Baker. I've been learning a lot about how beer is made and how you can get different flavors, and thought it'd be fun to show you how we're brewing it up in Syracuse.

Last Saturday we brewed our next batch of beer - an Octoberfest-style Ale, dubbed DaLager's Jakoberfest.

Here is a basic how-to brew:
Probably one of the most important brewing rules is that you have to keep things clean. Yeast is what makes beer beer, but there are all kinds of bacteria that would also enjoy growing in warm, sugary water - you want to make sure only the yeast you add survive! Most steps involve sterilizing buckets and utensils - so assume that was happening too!

The process actually began Thursday, when we boiled and froze about 2 gallons of water. Saturday afternoon, the brewing began in earnest.

We heated about 2.5 gallons of water to 170 degrees, then let it cool to about 150. 

We then added several pounds of barley grain (different types and roasts of malt can be used to achieve various flavors) and soaked the grains for about 45 minutes. This draws the sugars out of the grains. This process is called the 'mash', and it produces a brown malty liquid called 'wort.' We kept the wort warm in the oven, since our stove is too hot for the job. 

 

Next, we dumped the wort and grains through a mesh bag into our very classy brewing buckets - basically just 5- or 6-gallon plastic buckets with spigots.

Once we drained as much wort out as we could, we 'sparged' the grains (now called 'spent grains') with clean warm water to get out any remaining sugars. Then the wort went back into the rinsed out brewing pot and onto the stove, where we brought it to a boil.

Traditionally, the three basic beer ingredients are barley, yeast, and hops. Hops are a cone shaped flower that give beers some of their distinctive aromas and bitterness. If you've ever had an IPA, that bitterness is from hops. We buy pressed hops, so they just look like pellets. Once the wort was boiling, we added some of the hops - we also added more later, which has a slightly different effect on the flavor. 

We then added malt extract. This is basically the powder form of what we got from mashing the grain. You don't need to use malt, but then you need to mash more than twice as much grain and we just don't have a big enough pot! You could also use only malt, but the flavor is much better when you use actual grain too.
You can also use other sugars - honey, cane sugar, etc. - as well as other flavorings. When we made ginger beer, we added honey, ginger, lemons, and cinnamon.
Jakoberfest didn't need anything fancy though.

Adding the hops momentarily turns the wort green, but it goes away.

 

We also used some products to make the beer clearer (I don't know how they work). Because home brewing uses live yeast through the whole process, including carbonation, the yeast can make beer a bit cloudy. Commercial brewing usually pasteurizes the beer, killing the yeast, and then carbonates it more like soda.

But we didn't add the yeast yet - adding yeast to boiling water would kill them!

After the wort boiled enough (maybe around an hour? I lost track), we needed to cool it off. We have a copper coil device that can connect to a faucet and run cold water through the coils, then empty out another tube. In addition the the coils, we got out the giant ice cubes we'd made and put them in the bucket as well.

Then we poured in the wort - and tried not to spill too much! The ice melted fairly quickly, and we hooked up the copper coil cooler and let it run for awhile until the beer temperature fell to around 70 (or a bit below). At that point, we 'pitched' the yeast, put on the cover, and waited. 

The yeast starts to go nuts eating the grain sugars, producing gases, and turning the sugars into alcohol. The airlock, shown in this picture, has water in the two little tubes, which allows air to bubble out but keeps anything from going in.

So then you wait.

And wait.

Until the water in the airlock starts bubbling, and then you know that the yeast are doing their job.

We will let the beer ferment for a week or two, then transfer it to a secondary fermentation bucket. This transfer allows us to remove some of the sludgy solids that sink to the bottom during fermentation. (Kind of gross, so good to get them out of the beer!)

After another couple weeks, we'll prime the beer with a little more sugar (the yeast will have eaten most of the sugars available, so this will get them going again) and bottle the beers. Another week or so and the beer will be carbonated and ready to drink! 

In the meantime, we'll enjoy the bread I made using the spent grains from the mashing process - healthy recycling! (Well, sort of healthy...until you eat 5 slices in a sitting...)

Caveat: this is not a recipe. I wrote this from my memory, and I'm not the one who really knows how to make beer. If you want to home brew, look up real instructions - or talk to Jacob! OR come visit and join us for a drink!