First let’s start by heating a gallon of water. We’ll want to bring this to a little over our mashing temperature of 150 degrees Fahrenheit or 65 degrees Celsius. The temperature will drop when we add the grains so we need to overshoot just a little bit.
While I’m waiting for the water to heat up I’ll activate the yeast. I’m using a “smack pack” from Wyeast. Smack packs are just packages of yeast with an internal nutrient bladder that needs to be broken several hours before pitching. This gives the yeast time to activate and will cause the package to swell up.
Smack packs are a convenient way for the home brewer to work with yeast because there really isn’t anything to do other than break the damn internal bladder open, which can be a little tricky sometimes since it tends to slide around inside the package…. Sounds like I got it there. Now to set that aside for the time being.
Let’s start the mash. This is where we steep the grains to convert their starches into fermentable sugars…. mmm…. fermentable sugars. I’m not going to go into the science of mashing right now. That’s for another video.
By the way, the giant tea bag you see here makes extracting the spent grains super easy. You can find one online or at your local homebrew supply store. You could even make one from a clean pillow case. Just don’t use anything that has dyes or anything else that you don’t want in your brew.
We just need to make sure all the grains not only get in the pot but that there aren’t any dry spots so we’ll need to stir as we’re adding the grains as well as periodically throughout the mash.
Now we’ll let it steep, or mash, for an hour. This part is really boring, b ut thanks to the miracle of editing we can skip right to the end.
The mash is done. Now we just need to extract the spent grains. Now this is only a two gallon pot and I’m intending to make a 1.5 gallon batch. To fit the grains in, I started with just one gallon of water. Of course, a lot of the water is now be trapped in the grains so before I set them aside, I’ll drain them as best as I can then add more water. However, instead of just adding the water directly to the pot, I’ll run it over the grains and try to wash some fermentable sugars back into the pot. You can think of this as a “poor man’s” sparge. There are several ways to sparge grains and this certainly is not the best, but it’ll do.
Now let’s crank the heat up, put the lid on, and get this liquid up to a boil. Once it gets to a low boil, we’ll let it simmer for an hour – keeping an eye on it at all times as I don’t have a lot of headroom in this pot and I really don’t want it to boil over on me.
As it boils, we’ll make the hop additions, according to the recipe. Since I’m making a pale ale, this is going to be quite hoppy and I will be making several hop additions at various times during the boil. Not that I have a hop bag. I’ll add the hops to the bag and then add the bag to the boil that makes it easier to retrieve the hops when it comes time to throw them out.
Since I’m going to need access to the hop bag at several other times during the boil – for extra hop additions, I like to secure it by clipping it to the pot handle using a binder clip.
Once the boil is done, we’ll want to cool the liquid as quickly as possible. Since this is a small batch, that won’t take very long and it can be even be done by making an ice bath in the kitchen sink. We need to get the liquid close to ambient room temperature before we can pitch the yeast, otherwise we’ll have a yeast massacre on our hands. We could let the pot cool down on it’s own, but then we’d risk having undesirable elements, such as the yeast and bacterial that are in the air, move into the pot and impart their own, undesirable flavors.
At this point we’ll also want to remove the hop bag. We can clean that out and reuse the bag the next time we brew.
Here I’m just trying to cool the liquid, or wort, as it’s now called. I’m keeping a close eye on the thermometer and once it’s close to room temperature I’ll transfer it to my fermentor.
My fermentor is a 3 gallon glass carboy as it’s the smallest container I have. I’m using a stainless steel funnel with a small sieve inside it – just in case there’s a hop leaf or something else in the pot that I don’t want going into the carboy.
Finally to add the yeast. As you can see, the smack pack has swollen up. This is indicates that we have many billions and billions of live yeast cells who are all ready to jump into this carboy full of sugar water.
I hope you found this video useful. If you did, please Like it. If you didn’t, you don’t have to do anything. I’ll try to make more home brewing videos in the future, probably keeping the emphasis on small batch brewing.