All Grain, All The Time

File under: To Really Make Chicken Soup from Scratch, First Create the Universe.

So now we're some kind of big shots because we brew 'all grain' as opposed to 'extract'!  I write that with subtle sarcasm, but also with a certain amount of pride.  It is a right of passage for most brewers; the beer-making equivalent of taking off the training wheels.  And now, with training wheels off, we meander quite wobbly down the sidewalks of Brewsville.



Transferring from Primary to Secondary.



Extract brewing is like making chicken soup with canned broth, frozen veggies and some cutlets.  All grain is like going to the farm and buying a live chicken, removing the bad parts and throwing it in a pot with some water and salt, cutting your own fresh veggies and so on.  Both can be considered homemade, but only one is from scratch.  That designation - from scratch - essentially means that we control everything.  It complicates matters, and now, while we were once the masters of the extract-brewing universe, much like modern-day brewing He-Men, we are now reduced to He-man's much weaker alter ego in the all grain universe.

First on the list of things to improve: making enough beer.  In a perfect world, after we finish all our stirring and boiling and adding of strange looking ingredients, we should have eleven gallons of beer.  Eleven is the magic number.  Five and one half gallons go to one fermenter and five and one half gallons to the other.  This way, when we move the beer to secondary fermentation we can fill the 5 gallon carboys (large jugs) with enough liquid to displace all the air in the carboy, thus preventing oxidation, while at the same time leaving behind the nasty crap that settles to the bottom of the fermenter.  Confused?  In more simple terms, we need to fill to 5 gallon vessels to the tippy top while leaving behind the nasty stuff.

Empty Space is filled with air.  Air is filled with Oxygen

Last night, as we transferred the beer from primary fermentation into secondary fermentation, we noticed that instead of having our desired eleven gallons, we had more like nine.  That is bad.  About two inches of oxygen-rich empty space remained at the top of both carboys.  The oxygen can then bind to proteins in the beer and basically make it go stale over time.  Stale beer is gross.  I think if the brewery had a mission statement, somewhere within the bylaws or whatever would be the quite obvious, but apparently often overlooked, statement STALE BEER IS GROSS.

Luckily, lately our beer hasn't stuck around long enough to carbonate, much less go stale, before it's been metabolized and, how you say, returned to the earth?  So there has been little concern about staling.  Oxygenation, however, is a major concern of ours and our first time out we blew it.

There are plenty of other things on our improvement list - too many to list at this time - but it is safe to say that we are on our way.  As we improve, slight differences in water temps, grain types and amounts, hops types and amounts and so on will make huge differences in the final product.  I promise not to bore you with the majority of those details. 




Nice!  The Inside of the fermenter, post fermentation.

 Otherwise, we did pretty well.  The beer was dark amber, smelled of malt and hops (not feet and skunks) and was relatively free of floating particles of proteins and yeasts.  Two weeks from now we can bottle it (or keg it depending on our mood) and then fight the urge to drink it before it reaches maturity.  That is always the hardest part.

This Sunday we try again with our eighth iteration of our wheat beer.  We did a little prep last night by grinding twenty-one pounds of grain.  Last time we turned the grinder by hand.  This time we used an electric drill and it was simply awesome.  What once took over a half hour now took five minutes.

The wheat beer is a medium bodied, moderately alcoholic American Hefeweizen, brewed with Northern Brewer, Centennial and Hallertua hops and fermented with fresh pears.  Adding the pears to primary fermentation leaves a crisp, dry finish with only a hint of pear flavor, as most of the pear essence is carried away on the backs of little carbon dioxide bubbles as fermentation finishes.  Cloudy and yeasty, with pear, banana and clove notes, we're hoping that as we make the jump from extract to all grain the integirty of this fine brew remains.

(An Aside:  This is Wheat #8.  Wheat #6 made two and one half cases of twelve ounce bottles.  They never made it out of my kitchen, as Doug and I drank every last one of them, mostly before they were fully carbonated.  Calling it good would be an understatement.  Wheat #7 was kegged and served this Fourth of July at Doug's annual party and it kicked in forty-five minutes.  All this to say, Wheat #8 has some big shoes to fill.)

Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about branding.  Branding is important, but that remains for another time.

mb