My Brewing: Medieval single vessel, boil, no sparge, no chill, ferment in the brew pot.
For about 4 months, I made ‘kit’ beers in the kitchen with my daughter. We would just decide what style of beer we wanted (IPA, Porter, Ale, Lager, whatever) and buy a kit. In a large pot on the stove, we followed the directions. Easiest thing in the world: if you can make soup- you can make beer. Pour it all into the fermenter and when it cools, just add yeast and wait a week. It’s beer now so bottle it up. Wait a week, then refrigerate and drink. Repeat as needed.
Now we brew ‘all grain’ and skip the kits. Recipes for different styles of beer are all over the internet, so we have even greater variety than with kits alone. All grain brewing requires mashing, kit brewing uses malt extract. But you can’t bump up ‘beer kits’. So with all grain brewing, if you make 5 gallon batches, it is a small thing to bump up to 10/15 gallons. It takes about the same amount of time to mash 10/15 gallons, as it does to mash 5 gallons of beer.
The mash is the water and grains that are brought up through a series of ‘rests’:
Acid Rest 90*-115*-30 min
Protein Rest 115*-138*-30 min
Saccarification Rest 138*-162*-60 min
Light Body/ High Alcohol- 138*-150*
Heavy Body/ Low Alcohol- 150*-162*
Because my daughter is busier now, my oldest son is my beer partner. Some lifting is involved (and I have a bad back), so he helps me. Or maybe I’m just helping him. I probably should stay out of his way more.
We use a 25 gallon brew pot to make 10/15 gallons of beer. The 25 gallon brew pot fits inside a 55 gallon steel barrel and is held up by a couple of 1/2” steel rods at the 25” level. This allows us to siphon straight into the keg. The heat source for the brew barrel is a turkey cooker burner. Getting 10/15 gallons to the first rest (90F) with a turkey cooker takes about ½ an hour. The brew barrel keeps all the heat on the brew pot.
For awhile, we had trouble lautering (separating the spent grains from the sweet wort). We tried dipping the wort out and putting it through strainers. This worked but was time consuming and labor intensive. I went on the internet and found diagrams of lautering manifolds. These were designed to go into a separate pot or cooler and I wanted to keep our operation single vessel. So I made a lautering manifold to fit the brew pot and it is dropped into the brew pot at the end of the last rest.
Now we use BIAB. We ferment in the brew pot.
So it takes us about 4 hours to set-up, brew and clean up. We make a total of 10/15 gallons (4/6 cases) of beer for about $30-$45 and usually call for a couple of pizzas. So it’s basically Brew in a Bag (BIAB)! |
