Jeff Parker from The Dudes’ Brewery (http://www.thedudesbrew.com) and Andy Black from MacLeod Ale Brewing Co. (http://www.macleodale.com) talk to us about getting started home brewing beer.
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Figuring out the ABV in a beer, you start with your wort which is your fermentable sugars, potential fermentable sugar. You have your straining yeast which has a range of how much they’re gonna ferment the beer out. Attenuation is the term of how much the yeast will knock down the fermentable sugar.
[Attenuation: Attenuation is the percentage that measures the conversion of sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide by the fermentation process. The percentage is calcualted by comparing weight or specific gravity of the extract before and after fermentation.]
65 to 75% on some strains, 70 to 75 on others, 75 – 80 plus on other strains. It’s like you’re buying your champagne. You got your dry, your extra dry and your brew. And that’s all how much sweetness you wanna have in that beverage. Picking your strain and deciding how much alcohol you want in your beer. You factor those two in and you measure the density of the beer. You just have water which is the density on a scale of density is 1.000. You add sugar to that, the density goes up. And specific gravity or playdough, bricks, whatever scale you wanna use to measure sugar. So in specific gravuty, there’s the fermentable sugar you had, you might start with a 1.050 and that’s how much sugar you’ve put on top of the water. When the yeast goes in, they eat that sugar, and you get alcohol which is lighter than water and the sugar depletes. So that 1.050 drops, drops, and drops to the point where you might hit 1.009. You can check it each day with your hydrometer and you can see how much sugars are dropping. And you know when you’re done fermenting because you’re gonna hit that number day after day after day after day so you know your beer is done. You take what you started with, you take what you finish with, you subtract the two and then you get a alcohol calculator online and you just plug these two number in and hit enter. It spits out what your alcohol weight is and it converts alcohol by volume.
Measuring alcohol content, (oh I wish I can remember when they started doing it). The mid-1800’s I wanna say where hydrometer started to be widely used. And the hydrometer is the means of measuring the gravity of the fluid, the density of the fluid. And high-sugar content increases the density of the fluid. And when you have alcohol which is less densed than water, as the sugars turn alcohol, the density is decreased. So you use a hydrometer which measures your initial starting sugar content and then as you progress to fermentation you’re able to use the decreasing density as measurement to the hydrometer to the alcohol calculator content. So what you do is take your starting gravity so the initial wort sugar content and subtract the final gravity and then multiply the results in factor. I’ve been researching to know where exactly these factor come from but it’s a spreadsheet that everyone uses that as far as I know, put out by the British Taxing Bureau. It helps you factor the target alcohol content.
My personal preference is for a lower alcohol beer because I like drinking beer and you can’t really drink a lot of really strong beer. People can brag about their alcohol tolerance or what not but that’s just early onset of alocholism. Lower alcohol beer is the only way you can drink beer in reasonable quantity and not be doing yourself a permanent damage.