So I know a lot of people who do extract brewing but I have to say doing all grain brewing isn't much difficult or harder to do, so if you have the equipment and know how I highly suggest getting into all grain brewing. Here today I'm going to go over the very easy and simple steps on how to do a GREAT all grain brew.
Im going to be making a Raspberry Wheat Beer. Now normally I'm opposed to fruit beers but I thought "what the hay could be something good for the summer thats going to be quickly approaching". So first of all you need your ingredients I have here a 2 gallon mix of malt which contains
2lbs- Rahr 2-row
24 oz- Rahr wheat malt
8 oz- Caravienne
1 oz cascade hop pellets
half a tablet of whirl (they help clear the beer of sediment)
No for all grain brewing there is an extra step added, you got to steep the grain to extract the sugars from the grain and malt that will later become alcohol and if beer has no alcohol content to it then whats really the point of beer? So for this process you need a 5 gallon pot or larger if doing a 5 gallon batch of beer, a steeping bag, a thermometer and your grains. Temperature is extremely important in the steeping process. The highest extract is achieved between 149 and 155 degrees F. So I usually shoot for 150 F, so to start you need to add water to boil, Im adding in around 23 cups of water for a 2 gallon mix. Start heating your water till you reach around 150F once there, you can add your steeping bag and grain, if you can see from my picture my steeping bag wraps around the top of my pot so I can still stir inside the grain while its sitting in the water.
Its important to note that you need to keep the steep water at 150 F for one full hour! So most likely you will have to shut the heat off and turn it back on multiple times I believe I had to roughly 5-9 times throughout the whole hour just to make sure the temperature did not leave the area I wanted. At about 30 min start heating up another pot of around 1 gallon of water to 180F, this is what we call your sparge water, Its used to rinse the remaining sugars off the grains when you pull the steep sack out of your water carefully dump the sparge water through your sack of grains to let it drain into your now wort mix (be careful you can burn yourself easily doing this, I always get an extra pair of hands to help with this step). Now you should have something that looks similar to this.
Now your going to boil this for an hour while adding your hops, hop schedule and amounts are important since this is what adds that nice flavor and aroma to your beer, my hop schedule is
1/4oz 60min
1/4oz 30min
add whirlflock tablet 15min
1/2oz 1 min
When your hop additions are finished you must rapidly cool the wort so there's no infection or contamination, I place my large hot pot of wort in the sink filled with ice water because we need to get the temperature bellowe 140 degrees within the first 10 minutes, ultimately we want the beer to cool to around 70-80 degrees before we add the yeast, to hot or cold and we risk ruining the yeast. This is also a perfect time to start pitching the yeast.
In a small pot boil up about a cup of water then transfer the water to a cup and wait for the temperature to drop to about 90-100 degrees then add your dry yeast and cover with a hand towel (I use aluminum foil just because I think it's more sanitary) let the yeast sit for about 30 min to pitch and usually by the time your wort cools to the target temperature you can pitch your yeast into your now cooled wort inside the fermenter, give the wort a nice vigorous stir to get some air in the wort for the yeast and place airlock so that air can get out but not in as you don't want your fermenter to blow off and you don't want nasty air to get in and possibly ruin your batch.
Now the hard part waiting...
I typically wait around 3 weeks before I chose to bottle my beer for a few reasons, I want to make sure the yeast is done doing its thing, even though there may not be any foam on the top of the wort the yeast is still active and working its magic in the wort, once most action has completed though I move the wort to a secondary fermenter this is a preference it typically makes the beer clearer and allowes some flavors to develop nicely in the beer also for you IPA folks a secondary is the prime time to do a dry hop addition. After about 3 weeks we're getting ready to bottle.
When bottling its important all your bottles and caps are sanitized this takes some time but don't let that small step ruin your brew. When everything is sanitized we need to prepare the process to carbonate the beer in the bottles now what I do is I go on northernbrewer.com, they have a sugar calculator you can use to figure out the perfect carbonation level you're looking for in your beer and how much sugar you'll need to add. When you figure out how much sugar you need heat the sugar with about a cup of water till all the sugar desolves then cool the mixture down to about 70 degrees (freezer works well) then add the sugar water to the beer mixture you have and let it sit for about 20 minutes to evenly distribute within the beer. Once the time is up start siphoning your beer into bottles and capping them up. Give them a slight turn upside down just to get everything working and place them in a dark place for another 3 weeks or so, it's tough to tell with glass bottles when the beer is ready to drink so I usually test one out right around 3 weeks if it's still flat let it sit about a week longer then try another one sometimes it just takes a little extra time.
The most important part of home brewing is never get discouraged, a messed up batch is never a reason to stop brewing, and always tweak a recipe when you can something you made once that was good could maybe even be better by just tweaking the recipe by a small amount. With that get out there and brew!!!!
