I just brewed up a batch of Oktoberfest beer. I know many of you are asking how you brew beer while running around in a trailer. The easy answer to that is that I skip all the hard brewing techniques and stick with the easiest recipes.
Step 1, Malting grains
Authentic brewing starts with getting grain and malting it to the desired color. This involves soaking the grains and heating them slowly until they almost start to germinate and then roasting them to the desired darkness. I have never had the facilities to do this step so I sometimes start at the next step.
Step 2, Steeping Malted Grains
The next step is to take your malted grains and soak them in warm (not hot) water for about an hour. You have to keep the temperature at around 160 degrees (plus or minus 5 degrees). This takes a lot of staring at water not boiling. I have purchased malted grains and started at this step, but until I have a setup where I can control the temperature of everything better, I will start at a later step.
Step 3, Making Wort
This step involves taking the grain water from Step 2 and boiling it to reduce it. This usually takes about an hour. You also add hops at this step to get the bitterness out of them. The longer the hops boil, the more bitterness you get, but the less aroma and other hops flavors. This step sets the bitterness level of your finished beer, but not the end flavor or aroma. I have done all this before and it does end up with a better beer, but it's 100 degrees outside right now and I don't want to boil water for an hour in the trailer. The air conditioning is already working too hard. Fortunately, Mr. Beer sells ingredients that let you skip this step. You can buy LME (liquid malt extract) or HME (hopped liquid malt extract). LME is the grain water boiled down to a syrup. You can pour that into a pot with some water and boil it with hops for an hour and make the wort. The HME option is even easier. The hops are already boiled in so all you have to do is pour the HME into some water and bring it up to boiling and you are done. You have your wort. This is the method is the easiest so that is what I chose to do for trailer brewing. I did this with my last batch of Golden Ale and it turned out great.
Step 4, Making Beer
Once you have your hot wort, you are almost done. You can add hops to your hot wort and this will give your beer more hops flavor and aroma with very little bitterness. You can also add other things like lemon rind, lime rind, oak chips, or anything else you want to flavor your beer. So, anyway, you now have your hot wort (flavored or not). You first add cold water to your fermenter, then you pour your hot wort into your fermenter. Then you add more water to get your batch up the the right amount of liquid. I brew in 2.5 gallon batches. The final step is to add the yeast. I won't go into all the different kinds of yeast that exist and how each one changes the flavor of beer, you can try that on your own.
Step 5, Optional - Dry Hopping
While your beer is fermenting, you can add more hops to get more flavor and aroma. At this point in the process, the hops will not add any more bitterness. This step is where you get the citrus, fruity, or herby flavors of beer (mostly IPAs). I like and dislike this step. I love it because you get a lot of great flavors. I hate it because as a small batch brewer, I have to use dried hops, which are dried and compressed into pellets. The flavors and aromas are fine, but the pellets tend to leave stuff floating in the beer. I don't filter my beer so I have opened bottles with large layers of hops sediment (looks like dirt and doesn't taste good).
Step 6, Fermenting
This is the easiest and most frustrating step. You just let your beer sit for 14 to 21 days. The catch is that the yeast likes the temperature to be about 70 degrees. If it gets too cold, then the yeast goes dormant and does nothing. If it gets too hot, then the yeast gets stressed out and starts to die. Both situations lead to no alcohol and very sweet water. When I lived in a house, this was not problem. I put the fermenter in the pantry where the temperature ranged from 70 in the winter to 78 in the summer. Temperatures in the trailer swing a lot more. Here in Texas, the trailer ranges from 80 to 88 degrees. Much too hot for yeast. I bought an electric ice chest that the ferment fits in. I also bought a temperature control unit to go with it. I set the control unit to 70. This is my first run with it so I will monitor it and see how it works.
Step 7, Bottling
This part is a lot of work. I first have to clean and sanitize all my plastic bottles and the growler if I use it. I use up to 12 plastic 20oz bottles per batch. I have a 1 gallon pressurized growler that I can carbonate part of a batch. When I use the growler, I can have drinkable beer in about 4 days from bottling. The bottled beer needs to sit for 2 to 3 weeks. I usually do a combination with part of the batch in the growler and 6 or 7 bottles.
I skipped all the sanitizing steps. Beer is basically sugar water sitting at room temperature for weeks. This is a perfect situation for bacteria, mold, and mildew. None of which is good for beer. To prevent infection, you need to sanitize everything that touches the beer before you drink it. On bottling day, I spend a lot more time on sanitizing bottles and caps than I do putting beer into the bottles.
One of my big problems is that a trailer moves. The beer sloshes around in the fermenter when we travel. I have played around with transporting water in the fermenter to see what will end up with the least amount of beer spilled. My best results have been with taking some plastic wrap and rolling it up into a long tube and using that as a gasket between the fermenter and it's lid. Then I take some painters blue tape and loosely seal the lid to the body of the fermenter. Some beer will end up on the plastic wrap, but I didn't see any water outside of the fermenter. With the batch I just brewed, I will have 2 driving days. I hope this works.
I have some Mr. Beer refills so when we get to another place where we will not be traveling, I can brew again. I have an American Porter (one of my favorites), an American Lager (kind of like Sam Adams), a weissbier, and I have a recipe for the Canadian Breakfast stout (this takes maple syrup, oak ships, and bourbon). The stout also takes 3 weeks to ferment and 2 months of bottle conditioning. It is one of the slowest beers I have made.
Because I have not been brewing, I resorted to buying beer. I bought six packs of craft brews at various stops along the way. I am down to 6 bottles of my own beer left so I bought a Sierra Nevada variety case from Costco to tide me over until I have my home brew again.
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