I haven’t been brewing for that long but I thought I’d share my process and the reasons behind its peculiarities. Caveats: much busier and be-childed people than I use more complicated, all-grain brewing methods and get a lot out of them.
During the summer of 2015 we had a baby and I co-founded InReach Ventures. I also wanted to brew beer but this seemed like a waste of time we didn’t have. Selfishly I persisted and had my brother help me with a brewing setup designed around some hard restrictions:
- Brewing must fit into an evening. I need to be able to put the baby down, get everything brewed and cleaned in the 3–4hrs before bed.
- All the equipment needs to fit under the stairs.
- I’ll be brewing in the kitchen (no garage).
This kind of turn-around means extract brewing is the only realistic option. Extract brewing uses concentrated malt sugars that have already been extracted from the grain, so you can avoid the mashing process. This can be looked down on by seasoned home-brewers — the loss of variety and control compared to all-grain methods makes for a lot of very standard, boring beers characterised by all-in-one brew kits.
The trick is then to find ways to build interesting, flavourful beers built from this uniform base. Creativity born of restriction. Basically this means hops. Loads o’ hops (and using a partial mash to build up malt characteristics on-top of the extract).
Small Brews
Experiment more frequently. Reduce the cost of mistakes. Increase variety. Less to bottle. Be able to lift the equipment on my own.
There are a lot of reasons to keep the volume down. The downside is that you end up with less beer, but 10L of wort produces 7L of beer, so that’s not really a problem unless you’re giving a lot away, or really hate your liver.
Partial Mash
I heat 2 — 3L of water in a saucepan for my partial to steep my ‘speciality’ grains. These add little in the way of fermentable sugars but are where you really create the malt flavour / aroma.
While I carefully control the temperature of the steeped grains, I heat the rest of the water in the main boiler (which is basically a modified tea-urn). This means I don’t take up too much time with the partial mash.
Once that’s done, I add it and the extract to the tea-urn and crank it up to a lovely rolling boil.
After the Brew
Once the fun (the boiling) stops there’s a lot left to do, and a lot of things to sanitise.
Cooling the wort as quickly as possible is key, both for my getting to bed on time and to reduce the chances of infection. I use a coiled metal tube (pretty standard) and add it into the boil beforehand so it’s doubly sanitised.
Once the temperature’s down and it’s been transferred to the fermenter (a fancy bucket with a tap), the yeast is pitched (US-05 on the reg — super reliable and can handle me messing up the temp) and gets left for weeks. It was common for people to transfer to a secondary fermenter once the yeast craps out. I was happy to find out this was no longer advised on the whole (to reduce chances of infection) because I’ve never bothered.
Bottling
People seem to hate bottling. I’m pretty ambivalent. It is fairly tedious but it doesn’t take me long because:
- Small batches
- Big bottles
With only 7L of beer and 500ml bottles I only need to fill 14 of them. By the time I’ve tested the alcohol level a few time and spilt a load, I usually end up with 12 = 1 box.
LTP from The Evening Brews: Bottle over an open dishwasher. There will be spills.
The Results
Have been positively surprising so far. I’ve placed well in one competition and am entering more. I need to deviate from my very strong, very hoppy norm and attempt more styles, but nothing has been a disaster.
If you have any time saving tips then let me know.
