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Henry Carless – Brewing-Tips.com Administrator

Beer Kit Instructions – How to brew beer from a kit

Two can or all malt beer kits are the pinnacle of beer kit brewing, these kits are available in a wide range of beer styles and are the best that can be experienced in home brewing before taking up extract or grain brewing.

This kit is Bardon bitter from Matchless Homebrew.

Brewing beer from a kit

The kit contains two cans of hopped malt extract, comprehensive instructions and a sachet of yeast.

Brewing Beer kits

Recommended equipment is two 30l fermentation buckets with lids and taps, your choice of sanitising solution, a kettle, thermometer, hydrometer and trial jar and campden tablets or campden powder.
The first stage of the process is to clean and sanitise the fermentation buckets.
My recommendation before doing anything further is to dechlorinate your brewing water. Using 1/2 a crushed campden tablet or the equivalent of campden powder stirred into 25L of tap water will immediately remove all chlorine and chloramines which can give your finished beer a chemical or medicine taste.
Adding the campden powder to the tap water

Adding Campden to brewing water

Take the water required to be heated from the treated water and boil it in your kettle.

Making beer from a kit

Standing the two cans in hot water for 5 minutes prior to opening will soften the contents and make them easier to work with. Make sure to use a clean can opener.

Cans of hopped malt extract

Empty the can contents into the fermenting vessel.

Pouring malt extract

Use some of the boiled treated water to rinse out all of the can contents.

Get the malt extract out of the can

Empty the dissolved contents of the cans into the fermenting vessel.
Warning the can will be very hot, use oven gloves or similar to protect your hands!
Stir to dissolve the bulk of the malt extract in the hot water added from the can.

Stir to disolve the Malt Extract

Using the tap on the bucket containing your treated water, drop your treated water into the dissolved kit contents. This will ensure thorough mixing and also aerate your wort to give the yeast the best possible start.

brewing with a beer kit

Check that the temperature of your wort is between 20 and 28 Celsius.

The right temperature for fermentation

If the temperature is correct add the yeast.

Adding yeast to a beer kit

Take a gravity reading. In this case 1.040. If you plan to return the sample to the fermenter make sure that the hydrometer and trial jar were sanitised.

Taking a hydrometer reading

22.5 Litres of Bardon bitter waiting for the yeasties to do their thing.

Yeast pitched

18 hours later at 20C and the yeast crop is beginning to form nicely

Yeast krausen appears

28 hours in and the yeast head looks like this.

Full yeast head

7 days later and fermentation is finished
This is how it looks after a week, after another 3 days, it’ll clear down considerably and be ready for kegging.

Fermentation complete

OK so it’s been 8 days, gravity is 1.012, but now it’s time to keg.
I will be using a plastic home brew keg for this how to.
The keg was cleaned with Oxyclean, then sanitised with a solution of cheap, thin, unscented bleach. Then rinsed well with cold tap water and finally swilled out with a kettle of boiling water. (Be careful)
50g of sugar (I used demerera, but use what you prefer) was weighed out.

Sugar for carbonating beer

The sugar was added to the keg.
Using a length of hose from the tap on the fermenter, the beer was run into the keg which mixed in the sugar.

Racking beer to keg

Once all the beer was in the keg a burst of gas from an S30 cylinder was added.

S30 co2 cylinder

After 5 minutes to allow the CO2 to settle, the lid was cracked to vent the air in the keg and leave a protective blanket of CO2.
This keg has a mechanical pressure relief valve, a further squirt of gas and the indicator can be seen to be OK (Green showing)

Kit beer brewing

40 Pints of Bardon bitter conditioning.

Beer conditioning

Give it a couple of weeks before checking for clarity.

Mashing is part of the all-grain brewing process. Put simply, it is the act of mixing malted grains with hot water to convert their starch into sugar, it is this sugar which the yeast convert into alcohol giving us beer. Mashing is half science, half art; there are many different ways of mashing grains, and everyone does things slightly differently to eachother. When you are starting all-grain brewing for the first time, it is best to stick to the tried-and-tested methods of mashing, and find one that’s good for you. In this post I will be summarising the four basic mash types, and with a little help from various online sources will try to explain what makes each one different.

Mashing Grains

The Four Basic Types of Mashing

1. Single Infusion Mash

The Single Infusion Mash is the the most simple, and arguably the most popular mashing method for homebrewers to use. In an infusion mash, room temperature crushed grains are combined with a premeasured amount of hot water at an exact temperature. By taking the temperature of the grain, amount of water needed, and the mash tun’s properties the homebrewer can determine the exact water temperature needed, to ensure that combined with the grains they will achieve a mash in the 148 to 158 F temperature range. Infusion is typically done at a water to grain ratio of around 1.25 quarts per pound of grain. The easiest way to calculate the proper infusion volume and temperature is with an infusion calculator or brewing software such as BeerSmith or Rackers.org. The mash is then held at that temperature, usually by keeping the mash in an insulated cooler for 45-90 minutes. At this temperature, the mash will readily convert starches into sugars. You can test for conversion of sugars using an iodine test. Simply draw a small quantity of mashed grains out, add a few drops of iodine to it. If the iodine does not turn blue, then the conversion is complete.

Types of Mashing

2. Temperature Mash

The Temperature Mash is an alternative to the Infusion Mash. Rather than adding a known quantity of hot water, the mixed water and grains are simply raised to the target mashing temperature and held at that temperature until the starch conversion is complete. While this is quite practical for a commercial brewer, temperature mashing presents challenges to home brewers. Most homebrewers use simple pots over a stove or propane burner, and it is difficult to hold a precise mashing temperature for an extended period using just a stove and pot. A popular homebrewing method for acheiving a stable temperature mash is the use of a HERMS (Heat Exchanged recirculating Mash System), or RIMS (Recirculating Infusion Mash System). These systems are expensive, complex, and are usually used by more experienced home brewers. You can find more information about HERMS and RIMS brewing here.

Commercial Copper Mash Tun

3. Decoction Mash

Dcoction mashing is a traditional German mashing method. In a decoction mash, some of the mash including both grains and water is moved to a second container where it is brought to a boil. The boiling mixture is then added back to the original mash to raise the temperature of the overall mash. Again, a calculator or brewing software is needed to accurately calculate the correct volume to decoct. Traditional decoctions were typically done at higher water to grain ratios of 2.0 qt/lb or more (a thinner mash). More modern techniques often use water to grain ratios closer to the 1.25-1.5 qt/lb range.

Big Mash Tun

4. Multiple Step Mashes

Multiple step mashes are very complex, and are not suitable for novice brewers. Although a single infusion mash is suitable in 95% of cases where modern well modified malts are used, some precooked adjuncts and undermodified malts require protein rests at lower temperature before the main saccrification (sugar conversion) step. These protein rests help to break down complex starches in preparation for saccrification. Infusion, temperature and decoction steps may be combined to achieve multiple step mashes. For example a complex three step decoction mash might start with an initial infusion step to an acid rest at 105 F, followed by a protein rest at 122 F, and a saccrification step at 155 F. In many mash profiles, a mash out step is used to raise the temperature of the entire grain bed in preparation for sparging. The mash out step helps to halt saccirifcation, and also helps ensure an efficient sparge by extracting sugars at a higher temperature.

Thanks for reading!
- Brewing-Tips.com Staff
Source: http://www.brewwiki.com/index.php/Mashing

This guide was written by The Homebrew Forum member, ‘Oblivious’. It’s a superbly simple ‘how to’ guide which tells you how to harvest yeast for brewing.
You can find the original thread here.

How to harvest yeast for brewing

This is my method of yeast harvesting, this was done for my last brew a Saison with WLP550

After racking the beer to the keg pour the remaining liquid, trub and yeast into a sterilized container. I find one around 2 liters to be a good size. Place the full container in the fridge for a few hours.

Harvesting yeast

The trub being heavier, will settle out faster than the live yeast. It is the liquid part we are interested in as this will have a greater concentration of viable yeast. Pour this liquid off into a new sterilized container, this can be of a smaller than the first and place in the fridge over night.

Reusing yeast

As the liquid we placed in the container is yeast rich, we want to harvest the sediment in this container. Decant of the majority of the liquid and transfer the rest includin the sediment to your storage vessel, I use sterilized 50ml tubes.

Yeast Sediment

Yeast harvesting

Decant off the majority of the liquid and pour the yeast in to your selected container. I find there is enough yeast  in each of these tubes to pitch into a starter for a month or so. Over that it I would add two of the tubes to a starter.

Yeast Vials

What do we do in these situations? Panic.

“Is it ruined?! What if it’s infected? I must tip it all away down the sink because I messed up and ruined my beer! ”

What should we do in these situations?

RDWHAHB!

RDWHAHB!

Or in laymans terms: Relax, Don’t Worry, Have A Home-Brew!

There’s very little you can do to completely ruin a batch of beer. I once heard a veteran brewer give a panicking newbie the sound advice, “Unless you actually defacated into the fermentation vessel, your beer is going to be just fine.”

Whatever you do, do NOT dump a batch of beer. See how it turns out, and if it’s undrinkable after the full brewing process (after 3 weeks in the bottle!) you are then still not permitted to dump the batch. Beer gets better in time, and the yeast know what they’re doing. Besides, even if you do have an infected batch, it won’t do you any harm! No pathogens can survive in beer, due to the PH level. Even if your beer tastes like a small animal died in it, all it will do is give you an ‘icky tummy’.

So before you tip away that beer you ‘ruined’, give the yeast a chance to do their thing and clean up after your mistakes!

RDWHAHB!
- Brewingtips.com Staff

The answer is a lot simpler than you might think: Use a sanitised metal ruler!

Before you brew, fill your boil kettle up in small increments. Each time you add another litre of water (or whatever your unit of measurement is) – dip the ruler into the boil kettle and take a reading of the measurement. Then when you need to know how much liquid is in your kettle during brewing, simply dip the ruler in and check what volume was recorded at that measurement!

You could also do the same thing but using a wooden spoon – score a line for each litre and a thicker line for every 5 litres to make it easy to read.

Thanks for reading,
- Brewing-tips.com Staff

An airlock is a water-barrier that allows co2 to escape during fermentation, without allowing airborne particles, bacteria or insects to enter the fermentation vessel.

A U-bend Style Airlock

A blow-off tube replaces the airlock in a fermentation vessel. One end attaches to the top of the fermentation vessel and the other end is submersed in a container full of water.

A Blow-off Tube

Which one should I use?

For most brews, an airlock is fine. The advantage of an airlock is that it is relatively small compared to the blow-off tube, and is much easier to maintain. The problem with airlocks is that a very aggressive fermentation can clog the airlock with Krausen, causing a build up of pressure in the fermentation vessel. When that pressure gets too much, either the airlock or the lid of the fermentation vessel will pop off with great force, causing a big mess. A blow-off tube is much less likely to clog up than an airlock.

A Clogged Airlock

If you are brewing a beer using a top-fermenting yeast (most wheat-beers are brewed using this type of yeast), then you should always use a blow-off tube. This is because top-fermenting yeast produce a much higher, thicker krausen than regular ale yeasts and are much more likely to cause problems when using an airlock.

How to make a blow-off tube.

1. Attach a piece of sanitised tubing to the opening of your demijohn (or lid of your fermentation bucket) using a sanitised stopper with a hole in it.
2. Half-fill a small container such as a measuring jug or pint glass with water, and place the other end of the tube inside, below the level of the water. You do NOT need to use bleach or sanitising solution for this!

For an in-depth tutorial on how to build a blow-off tube, check out this article at examiner.com.

Thanks for reading,
Brewing-tips.com Staff

Thanks to www.rooftopbrew.net for this fantastic ABV Calculator.
- Brewing-tips.com

Examples of commercial Irish Red ales include Murphy’s Irish Red, Caffreys Irish Ale, and Smithwick’s. Despite the name, Irish Red Ale is not widely drunk in Ireland, where Stouts and Ordinary Bitters have become the ale of choice.

Irish Red Ale

Original Gravity Range: 1.044-1.060 SG

Final Gravity Range: 1.010-1.014 SG

Color Range: 9.0-18.0 SRM

Bitterness Range: 17.0-28.0 IBU

Alcohol by Volume Range: 4.0-6.0 %

Carbonation Range: 2.1-2.6 vols

Source: http://brewwiki.com/index.php/Irish_Red_Ale

Irish Red Recommended Homebrew Recipe

Here’s a recipe for homebrewing Irish Red ale – You can find the original recipe at www.homebrewtalk.com/f65/st-fuads-irish-red-22821/

Brew Name: St Fuad’s Irish Red
Brewer: St Fuad AKA Pumbaa

Recipe Type: All Grain
Yeast: see below
Batch Size (Gallons): 5.5
Original Gravity: 1.057
Final Gravity: 1.014
IBU: 18.7
Boiling Time (Minutes): 60
Color: 15.9
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): Until FG is reached
Secondary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp): Optional

Thanks for Reading,
Brewing-Tips.com Staff

Note: Gelatin is not vegetarian. If you plan to serve your beer to vegetarian friends, do not use Gelatin finings!

Across the Internet on the various brewing forums there is a massive amount of conflicting opinion on the correct way to use gelatin finings. One of the main things that people get wrong, is they boil the gelatin before adding it to the beer. Boiling gelatin will render it useless; do NOT boil the gelatin finings before adding them to the beer! I hope to clear things up here with a definitive method to using gelatin finings to clear a 5 gallon batch of beer. This is a tried and tested method which I have used for many brews with great success.

Gelatin Finings

How To Use Gelatin Finings

1. Ferment your beer as usual. If you have dry hopped the beer with loose hops, rack the beer from under the hops into a sanitised fermentation vessel in order to remove any hop matter.

2. Boil a kettle.

3. Weigh out 1.5 grams of Gelatin for every 5 Gallons of beer.

4. Pour the hot boiled water into a heatproof measuring jug or other heatproof bowl. Add the gelatin powder and stir until dissolved.

5. Cover and cool until it reaches close to the same temperature as the beer.

6. Add to the beer, stirring SLOWLY so as not to introduce oxygen to the beer.

7. Leave for 5 days or until clear.

8. Rack to bottling bucket or keg as usual, being careful not to suck up the layer of yeast sediment.

I hope this helps you get a clearer beer.
Thanks for reading,
Brewing-tips.com staff.